Hervé, the friend with AIDS; his lover, Hervé, also afflicted; Hervé the hairdresser; Hervé next door who has defenestrated himself: in A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning the narrator confronts the deaths of so many friends, all named Hervé. But the dead cannot be buried so easily; they live on, spectres haunting her, as the cumulative effect of all her Hervés becomes a multifaced Death that simultaneously angers, saddens, cheers and confuses her. In this unfolding series of encounters between the living and the dead, Mavrikakis draws on Deleuze, Freud, Foucault and novelist Hervé Guibert to make of herself and of this visceral, compelling novel a kind of living mausoleu where those unable to speak may still be heard.

Puts forward a new, provocative history of queer cinema in Brazil.

Translating Montreal follows the trajectories of adventurous cultural translators such as Malcolm Reid, F.R. Scott, and A.M. Klein - pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s - Pierre Anctil, whose translations from Yiddish to French are emblematic of the dramatic reroutings now occurring across the Montreal landscape, and contemporary writer-translators such as Gail Scott, Erin Mouré, Jacques Brault, Michel Garneau, Nicole Brossard, and Emile Ollivier. Simon argues that translation is a dynamic and subtle tool for analysing cultural contact. An original take on cultural relations in the city, Translating Montreal explores the emergence of the "new" Montrealer. No longer "Franco-Québécois," "Anglo-Québécois," "immigrant," or "ethnic," the new Montrealer is a citizen of a mixed and cosmopolitan city.

Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.

By exploring cannibalism in the work of Herman Melville, Sanborn argues that Melville produced a postcolonial perspective even as nations were building colonial empires.

Spoiling the Cannibals' Fun? is not a volume about Captain Cook, unless one thinks the story of his having been eaten in the Polynesian tropics is not so much about the nourishing of the barbarians with a white man's flesh, as one which raises a number of questions relating to, broadly understood, cultural encounters in which some sort of cannibalisation is always at stake. For example, an encounter with the other is inevitably also an encounter of what Penelope Deutscher sees as «the cannibal or 'eating' subject who is always already the other 'in us'», an encounter which questions «the integrity of the subject's boundaries». This volume takes up such various metaphorical senses of cannibalism and cannibalisation, and explores the ways they function within diverse domains and niches of culture (and elsewhere).