In Transversal Ecocritical Praxis: Theoretical Arguments, Literary Analysis, and Cultural Critique, Patrick D. Murphy, Ph.D, utilizes ecocriticism and ecofeminism to develop his concept of transversal practice: an interdisciplinary combination of theory and applied criticism. He begins by explaining the necessity for cutting across disciplinary boundaries of all kinds in order to address the ecological dimensions of culture and literature. The dialogical foundation of this orientation is e...

In Ecocritical Explorations, Patrick D. Murphy explores environmental literature and environmental cultural issues through both theoretical and applied criticism. He engages with the concepts of referentiality, simplicity, the nation state, and virtual reality in the first section of the book, and then goes on to interrogate these issues in contemporary environmental literature, both American and international. He concludes his argument with a discussion of the larger frames of fa...

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses.The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination--and influences just who benefits. Murp...

This collection of ecocritical essays is focused on the work of Japan’s foremost writer on environment and culture, Ishimure Michiko. Ishimure is known for her pioneering trilogy that exposed the Minamata Disease incident and the nature of modern industrial pollution. She is also regarded by many critics as Japan’s most original and important literary writer. Ishimure has written over 50 volumes in a wide range of genres, including novels, Noh drama, poetry, children’s stories, essays, and...

The launch of the All for Ireland League in 1910 sent shock waves through Irish nationalism and led to widespread rioting and violence in Cork City and County. It represented the first breakaway from John Redmond’s Irish parliamentary party but, more importantly, challenged one of the central weaknesses of nationalism itself: the failure to build an inclusive vision of an independent nation and the belief that it could ignore the wishes of unionists.Drawing on a wide range of prima...

In the heart of Boston in the 1980's—a city engulfed in turmoil and racial tensions, an unlikely friendship develops between two students at Cathedral High School. Patrick is an Irish-Catholic born leader. His friends follow him with blind allegiance. Nate is a young, disciplined, black athlete—focused on finding his way out of the neighborhood alive. The two young men find themselves on hectic school grounds, in a culture that shuns friendships like theirs. Through a tragic turn of events...

In the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict,...

In Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979), Syd Field first popularized the Three-Act Paradigm of Setup, Confrontation and Resolution for conceptualizing and creating the Hollywood screenplay. For Field, the budding screenwriter needs a clear screenplay structure, one which includes two well-crafted plot points, the first at the end of Act I, the second at the end of Act II. By focusing on the importance of the four essentials of beginning and end, and the two pivotal ...

This book offers a detailed exploration of the plot genotype, the functional structure behind the plots of classical fairy tales. By understanding how plot genotypes are used, the reader or creative writer will obtain a much better understanding of many other types of fiction, including short stories, dramatic texts and Hollywood screenplays.

Focused on faith and woven with Christian, ecumenical, and patriotic themes, Our Immigrants' Son is an exploration and celebration of family.The genres of prose poetry and historical fiction very cleverly takes you through the author's rich Irish American history. It begins in misty Ireland and takes you through generations of the Murphy clan while also teaching you how to write your family story.The storyteller is US Navy Captain, John Francis Patrick Murphy, Retired, a di...

The premise of this book is that the Beatitudes are like a stairway, each one leading to the next as a logical consequence of the one that came before, and that the rest of Matthew chapter 5 is a commentary, a fleshing out of the consequences of what the Beatitudes are designed to accomplish in our lives. The first Beatitude is salvation, and each of the others depict the gradual process of sanctification in our lives. In the rest of Matthew 5 Jesus shows us the true nature of our brokenne...

A Divided Union delves deep into ten pressing political challenges that former US Representatives Patrick Murphy (D) and David Jolly (R) have identified over their multiple terms in Congress and that continue to plague the American electorate today. In an introduction describing their unique paths to Congress, Murphy and Jolly focus in detail on key institutional barriers they faced in Washington in attempting to do the job voters elected them to do. They introduce us to geographi...