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This chapter suggests that the self facing its extinction may make particularly concerted, wild, mad reactions to the impending nothingness of its identity, in late work of a new, unbound creativity. There have, over the ages, been artists in all sorts of media who have had the capacity for self-reinvention late in their careers—often involving a whole new manner, a “late style” that is often their principal claim to greatness in the eyes of posterity. The chapter then assesses the relation of self-reinvention to self-dissolution. In the limiting circumstances of self-dissolution come such phenomena as Beethoven's late quartets—which, in his by then total deafness, he could not hear—or Matisse's late cutouts—these being a return to the art and techne of childhood at a point where he could no longer wield the paintbrush, in which one can find the brilliant invention of a new “period” in his work in response to necessity.

This chapter studies Krupp in the postwar world, particularly in the company's attempts at reinventing itself in the modern age. It first discusses the extent of the postwar German industrial recovery, as German business began the new era with very limited financial resources, and considers the new management approaches undertaken by the company following the war. The chapter also examines the company's weathering through yet another financial crisis as the German steel industry fell in decline. Yet throughout all this the chapter shows how the company has attempted to recover and reinvent itself, becoming more globalized in the process and yet somehow returning to the roots of German industrial culture.

Early ‘Asiatic’ writers, seen as exotic and oriental outsiders, were also often expected to embody ‘foreignness’, and provide ‘alien’ perspectives on Britain, usually in prescribed terms. This chapter explores the contrasting modes of ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignising’ self-translation reproduced respectively in the writings of the self-Westernised Nirad Chaudhuri and M. J. Tambimuttu. After coming to Britain in 1938, the equally anglicised Tambimuttu adopted a self-consciously ‘Asian’ cultural identity that embodied ideas about the East produced in the West. Such assertions of cultural difference, pre-shaped in orientalist terms for Western consumption, do not transform the centre, and offer a marked contrast to Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao's politicised efforts to nativise Standard English and to ‘Indianise’ the European novel. Unlike Anand who moved in radical political circles, on arrival in Britain Tambimuttu gravitated towards counter-cultural aesthetic movements. Tracing Chaudhuri's and Tambimuttu's varied development from the 1940s and 1950s onwards, this chapter shows that ironically Tambimuttu's self-reinvention as an ‘Asian’ allowed him to engage and be absorbed into his new environments to a far greater extent than the self-colonised Chaudhuri.

This chapter presents the approach of discourse analysis and outlines a glocalization perspective in researching contemporary Cultural China as discourses. Two notions “discursive appropriation” and “discursive reinvention” particularly, are presented and postulated as important notions and directions for future research and further attention in the attempt to understand and explain the discursive hybridizations, i.e., the dialectical process as well as the diverse outcomes of glocalization in the discourses of contemporary Cultural China.

This chapter studies the different ways Scott simultaneously looks back to his eighteenth-century predecessors in his early fiction. It shows how he reinvents the novel form during his search for a way to locate his stories of Scotland's past and personal identity in language. The discussion reveals that Scott's early fiction suggests that he was simultaneously creating the template for the historical novel and problematising a straightforward version of it. Scott suggests that any similar acts of ‘simultaneous translation’ are compromised, thus leaving much unsaid.

This chapter proposes a bridging of the immigration and gender and sexuality fields in order to carefully study the fluid sexual reinventions that are created by mexicanas in the United States. It proposes an idea that is based on recent scholarship on the interrelated dynamics of migration, gender, and sexuality. The discussion studies the things Mexican immigrant women teach their daughters about sexuality, most especially about premarital virginity. It uses data from in-depth interviews with Mexican immigrant women located in Los Angeles, and tries to determine how Mexican women give sex education for their daughters. The chapter also suggests that the moral standards of Catholicism are only part influencing the ideas of the mexicanas on virginity.

This chapter describes how political and administrative reforms have changed the basic accountability system of the European Commission over the last decade. It is shown how the vision and values, the organizational DNA, on which the EU Commission was built became incongruent with internal and external challenges. There was a strategic reorientation, after the Commission’s crisis in 1999. Ex ante constraints and ex post incentives combined to provide a system for more control in and accountability over the Commission. There was a strengthening of accountability mechanisms and a shift in the salience of different types of accountability. In addition to legal and professional accountability systems, an elaborate structure was created that stressed political and bureaucratic mechanisms and has created new expectations of accountability from commissioners and their senior officials.

This chapter takes a look at the novel that gave Carey his second Booker Prize, the True History of the Kelly Gang. It observes that this novel and Jack Maggs—both historical novels—explore what Carey has called the ‘patterns of abandonment, orphans’ in his work. This novel narrates the stories of marginalised characters, outlaws and outsiders, and presents several elements of the Jerilderie Letter. This chapter also seeks to explain the purpose of Carey's reinvention of Ned Kelly.

Thomas Hoccleve emerged in the 1380s and early 1390s as a public bureaucrat exposed to the literary oeuvres of both Chaucer and Gower as they composed their reengagements with and reinventions of prosimetrum. This spirit of revision of prosimetrum and protrepsis reaches its apogee in the late works of Hoccleve. His two poems, “The Complaint” and “The Dialogue”, are often read “straight” by critics, as a means through which Hoccleve desired to justify and vindicate his mental health before his peers and imagined detractors. This chapter suggests that together the two poems enact a literary meditation whose formal execution is anything but “straight.” Both these poems constitute a practice of mixed-form protreptic writing, and also engage literary theory in a supple and comical manner. The chapter then goes through the process of finding and expounding on the protreptic form that each poem seemingly possesses.

This chapter starts from the iconic 1960 Stanley Kubrick film version of Spartacus and it compares it with the other version to demonstrate how in the Kubrick version the political and ideological nature of the Spartacus figure re-emerges in the twenty-first century, reinvented and far more sexualized than its predecessor. STARZ Spartacus, the chapter argues, has an altogether different set of objectives, placing special emphasis on the glorified and eroticized image of mostly male—but also female—bodies. This chapter concludes that Kubrick's Spartacus is transformed from a political icon, representing freedom, equality, and independence, into a new Spartacus who also becomes the image of a hypersexualized masculinity.

This book focuses on the Renaissance reinvention of epic divine action. This reinvention involved the adapting of an originally polytheistic literary genre to a European culture that was officially monotheistic. This book also argues that the Mosaic distinction constitutes the single most important difference between classical and Renaissance epic. In the epic poetry of the Renaissance, the Mosaic distinction operates in conjunction with a range of political differences that combine in as many ways as there are poems. The syncretism of classical artistic models and Christian religious norms is addressed. The chapters in this book evaluate the classical polytheistic model and then five Renaissance epics, each of which illustrates a different approach to the problem of monotheistic divine action: Francesco Petrarch's Africa, Marco Girolamo Vida's Christiad, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Finally, an overview of each chapter is provided.

Francophone intellectuals writing at the time of decolonisation testify to the anxieties, for the colonised, of the moment of political transition, as well as to the demands that the epoch makes of them as potential spokesmen, mediators, mobilisers, and critics. In response to these anxieties, Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun, and Kateb all denounce the atrocious dehumanising practices of colonialism before setting about the more intellectually complex project of reimagining a shared humanity, and proposing alternative forms of human relationality, in tune with the process of political liberation. It is perhaps significant, moreover, that this fascination with our shared humanity and its association with freedom has continued long after the period of decolonisation, and despite repeated denunications of humanism, still preoccupies some of the major theoretical writers and critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The conclusion reviews some more recent redeployments of humanism, and shows how these were anticipated in the thinkers discussed in the main body of the book.

Chapter 1 considers the ideologies surrounding the Negro Renaissance, and establishes the historical question that structures the project: how does an artist construct a “New” Negro detached from the authority of past constructions? The chapter introduces the reader to Motley’s background and history, while addressing key paintings that establish the foundation of the concerns elaborated in the manuscript. The chapter further frames the book’s approach to Motley’s work by sifting through art historical discourses regarding the evolution of African American art history and the treatment of the black artist within this history. It posits that the difficulties of devising a New Negro stems not just from the task of revising black identity but rather from the suggestion that black identity can somehow be reduced or codified into a coherent idea or form of representation. Furthermore, there were as many perspectives on how to represent the New Negro as there were artists and writers seeking to redefine this figure.

This chapter looks at the life of Robinson Crusoe and how he made things around him for his convenience and comfort. To Derrida, Robinson's situation brings up questions of autobiography and the world that would result from an analysis of Crusoe's creations or inventions. An autobiography is compared to the figure of a wheel where the self takes a detour but eventually returns to himself in the process of self-discovery. The main theme of Derrida in these terms is the impossibility of returning home, or the point of one's departure, or even the preoccupation of deconstruction. Deconstruction is even considered as the beginning of the reinvention of the wheel, the end of the circle of thinking to start and take on a new journey and new self-identity. He questions the importance of returning, circularity, and homecoming in “Violence and Metaphysics.” In the end, Derrida speaks that in returning, there is always iteration, original difference, and supplementarity because for every one turn of the wheel, there is always added another point of departure where one can start from.

Himiko was a third-century ruler described only briefly by Chinese historians. In contemporary culture, she is cast as an elderly priestess, an adorable shrine attendant, or a vain sorceress. She morphs from ancient shaman in manga to ditzy gal in video games and anime. She is commodified and objectified in communities as a touchstone for local commerce and community character. Himiko is a rich resource for regional groups in need of a city mascot, beauty-contest theme, or touristic motif. She also appears in divination products and advertising to denote female power and ethnic spirituality. Himiko replaces the high priestess in tarot cards and is channeled by divination providers. This chapter explores these many reinventions of Himiko in order to track how her varied iconography encodes assumptions about gender and power.

This chapter covers the late 1940s and 1950s, a period in which her international fame soared but her health began to decline. She sought to reinvent herself by assembling and directing a new creative team and by departing from the realist song, which she now saw as restrictive, though this latter attempt ultimately proved unsuccessful. She was by now in complete charge of her career and of the public image she aimed to project. She wrote many of her own songs but also intervened creatively in the realisation of those written by others, which, increasingly, were composed specifically for her invented persona. Significantly, her work during this period is often characterised by an awareness of la chanson française as an aesthetic and a value. In this respect, her songs became more self-referential.

This book examines the everyday lives of Japanese migrants who have reinvented themselves as artists in contemporary New York City. Drawing on research carried out between 2005 and 2006 in New York City and between 2003 and 2007 in Tokyo, the book explores the tension between optimistic self-reinvention and material and logistical constraints on self-realization, as well as the more ephemeral and intangible qualities in NYC that migrants value so highly. Focusing on the bohemian, artistic class of Japanese migrants—visual artists, graphic designers, fashion designers and stylists, dancers, musicians, and writers—the book approaches migration as well as the narrative and representational practices surrounding it as forms of aspirational self-making. It shows that the story of Japanese migrant artists in NYC offers important insights about Japan beyond its borders. This introduction uses everyday life as a framing device rather than an explicit theoretical concept, drawing from Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday as the mundane moments where the “ordinary man” or “common hero” subverts and resists hegemonic power in creative ways.