S. Lewis’s famed Chronicles of Narnia, but why? What is it about these seven books that makes them so appealing? For more than half a century, scholars have attempted to find the organizing key—the “secret code”—to the beloved series, but it has remained a mystery. Until now. In The Narnia Code, Michael Ward takes the reader through each of the seven Narnia books and reveals how each story embodies and expresses the characteristics of one of the seven planets of medieval cosmology—Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus and Saturn—planets which Lewis described as “spiritual symbols of permanent value.” How does medieval cosmology relate to the Christian underpinnings of the series? How did it impact Lewis’s depiction of Aslan, the Christlike character at the heart of the books? And why did Lewis keep this planetary inspiration a secret? Originally a ground-breaking scholarly work called Planet Narnia, this more accessible adaptation will answer all the questions.

    Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, "from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath." Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler's selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called "the history and science of feeling."In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, "the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes." All of Dickinson's preoccupations--death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought--are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as "a master" of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

    How can recklessness guide the poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? "Poetry is not a discipline," Young writes. "It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . ."

    Openly discussing his family background for the first time, Keret brings to life the confused experience of growing up as an Israeli child of Holocaust survivors. One of Israel’s leading voices in literature and cinema, Keret mixes wry humor, keen intelligence, and subtle tenderness to create some of the most provocative and entertaining stories of his generation.

    As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot.  Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

    Taking as its starting-point American Psycho's seismic impact on contemporary literature and culture, the volume establishes Ellis' centrality to the scholarship and teaching of contemporary American literature in the U.S. and in Europe. Contributors examine the alchemy of acclaim and disdain that accrues to this controversial writer, provide an overview of growing critical material on Ellis and review the literary and artistic significance of his recent work. Exploring key issues including violence, literature, reality, reading, identity, genre, and gender, the contributors together provide a critical re-evaluation of Ellis, exploring how he has impacted, challenged, and transformed contemporary literature in the U.S. and abroad.

    Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past.These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.

    Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, "The Novel: An Alternative History" is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the premodern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these premodern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining - "The Novel: An Alternative History" is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.

    This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader, the greatest and perhaps the last in the line of great introductions to Shakespeare written by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare s deployment of complex words in his plays.Although these prefaces are written for a general audience, there is much value for the scholar as well. Tanner introduces some of the most significant recent and historical scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way. This scholarly generosity permits Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Pater, and many others to enter into conversation. "The Independent" said of the project, All of Tanner s life and education had prepared him for this task and the results are magnificent both accessible and erudite. "

    K. Rowling's Harry Potter series topped the best-seller charts, inspired the highest-grossing film series of all time, and has now become a $250 million Universal Studio theme park. What is it about this story that has ignited such fandom and struck such a chord with people around the world? As English professor, culture critic, and Potter devotee Greg Garrett explains, these novels not only entertain but teach deeply held truths about ourselves, others, and the world around us. Unlocking the textual intricacies behind the Harry Potter narrative, Garrett reveals Rowling's magical formula--one that, he contends, earns her a place right next to the literary giants of old.--Craig Detwiler, Director, Center for Entertainment, Media, and Culture, Pepperdine University

    They showed that “the modern”need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

    Franklin argues that the memory-obsessedculture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of anyliterary work, including the memoir.Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as anequally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

    Lamb locates Hemingway's art in literary historical contexts and explains what he learned from earlier artists, including Edgar Allan Poe, Paul C�zanne, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. Examining how Hemingway developed this inheritance, Lamb insightfully charts the evolution of the unique style and innovative techniques that would forever change the nature of short fiction.Art Matters opens with an analysis of the authorial effacement Hemingway learned from Maupassant and Chekhov, followed by fresh perspectives on the author's famous use of concision and omission. Redefining literary impressionism and expressionism as alternative modes for depicting modern consciousness, Lamb demonstrates how Hemingway and Willa Cather learned these techniques from Crane and made them the foundation of their respective aesthetics. After examining the development of Hemingway's art of focalization, he clarifies what Hemingway really learned from Stein and delineates their different uses of repetition. Turning from techniques to formal elements, Art Matters anatomizes Hemingway's story openings and endings, analyzes how he created an entirely unprecedented role for fictional dialogue, explores his methods of characterization, and categorizes his settings in the fifty-three stories that comprise his most important work in the genre.A major contribution to Hemingway scholarship and to the study of modernist fiction, Art Matters shows exactly how Hemingway's craft functions and argues persuasively for the importance of studies of articulated technique to any meaningful understanding of fiction and literary history. The book also develops vital new ways of understanding the short story genre as Lamb constructs a critical apparatus for analyzing the short story, introduces to a larger audience ideas taken from practicing storywriters, theorists, and critics, and coins new terms and concepts that enrich our understanding of the field.

    In this stunning new edition of the work, Don Paterson, an award-winning sonneteer and lyric poet in his own right, offers an illuminating and accessible guide to these unforgettable verses. In a series of mesmerising and highly-entertaining short commentaries, placed alongside the sonnets themselves, Don Paterson explains the inner workings of the poems: their hidden structures and techniques, their narratives and their brilliance. An approachable handbook to the sonnets and the sonnet form, packed with reading tips and advice on the craft, this new edition offers an enjoyable and indispensable insight into our greatest Elizabethan writer by one of the leading poets of our own day.

    Distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach, it describes and analyzes the different aspects of literary reading, texts, and contexts to illuminate how the book is transformed within and across different academic figurations of reading and interpreting children's literature.Part one considers perspectives on readers and reading literature in home, school, library, and community settings.Part two introduces analytic frames for studying young adult novels, picturebooks, indigenous literature, graphic novels, and other genres. Chapters include commentary on literary experiences and creative production from renowned authors and illustrators.Part three focuses on the social contexts of literary study, with chapters on censorship, awards, marketing, and literary museums. The singular contribution of this Handbook is to lay the groundwork for colleagues across disciplines to redraw the map of their separately figured worlds, thus to enlarge the scope of scholarship and dialogue as well as push ahead into uncharted territory.

    Here the popular and provocative author digs into the plays, which were written and first performed during the English crown's persecution of Catholics. English history and literature were taught for generations through the prism of English Protestantism. Of late both of these fields have been dominated in universities and academic presses by modern scholars with filters and interpretations of their own. Though the evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism has been studied before now, thanks, in part, to the unique contribution of Joseph Pearce, the Bard's genius is being analyzed in the open air of the public arena, the very place where Shakespeare intended his dramas to entertain and edify.

    Vandiver argues that classics was a crucial source for writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from working-class poets to those educated in public schools, and for a wide variety of political positions and viewpoints. Poets used references to classics both to support and to oppose the war from its beginning all the way to the Armistice and after. By exploring the importance of classics in the poetry of the First World War, Vandiver offers a new perspective on that poetry and on the history of classics in British culture.

    K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt WhitmanIn this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it--to explore why Whitman's epic continues to inspire and sometimes daunt him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

    With keen insight into her subject material, Professor Elkins discusses the attributes that made classics of such works as Balzac's Human Comedy, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and Camus' The Stranger. Literary immortals all, these four French authors produced works that reflected their times and exerted a continuing and lasting influence on all the generations that followed.

    In this remarkable book, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays. Among the doubters have been such writers and thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Helen Keller. It is a fascinating story, replete with forgeries, deception, false claimants, ciphers and codes, conspiracy theories—and a stunning failure to grasp the power of the imagination. As Contested Will makes clear, much more than proper attribution of Shakespeare’s plays is at stake in this authorship controversy. Underlying the arguments over whether Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays are fundamental questions about literary genius, specifically about the relationship of life and art. Are the plays (and poems) of Shakespeare a sort of hidden autobiography? Do Hamlet, Macbeth, and the other great plays somehow reveal who wrote them?Shapiro is the first Shakespeare scholar to examine the authorship controversy and its history in this way, explaining what it means, why it matters, and how it has persisted despite abundant evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays attributed to him. This is a brilliant historical investigation that will delight anyone interested in Shakespeare and the literary imagination.

    Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term -Beat Generation- to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother Souls is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes.From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac's wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes's manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes's final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951 he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road.Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes's journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.

    In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists-from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy-have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road, Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture. At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.

    This work is a bridge between literary studies and analytic aesthetics, drawing on a diverse range of texts, from Scheherazade and Raymond Chandler to graphic novels and Woody Allen films.

    Discover late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth centurystories of love, war, kings and queens, fellow playwrights and actors, explorers and life in London.

    In this penetrating analysis and comprehensive refutation of three recently-published biographies of Leon Trotsky by well-known British historians -- Professors Robert Service, Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain -- David North raises troubling questions about the state of contemporary historical scholarship.In the June 2011 edition of the prestigious American Historical Review historian Bertrand Patenaude gives North's book high praise: "A careful examination of North's book shows his criticism of Service to be exactly what Trotsky scholar Baruch Knei-Paz, in a blurb on the back cover, says it is: 'detailed, meticulous, well-argued and devastating.'"Scott McClemee, a columnist for Inside Higher Education, writes, "I can only suggest that any research library that has added Service's book to its collection should consider acquiring David North's as well."Exposing recent efforts to denigrate Trotsky's historical role by falsifying history, North insists that their aim is to forestall a resurgence of interest in the great revolutionist at a time when millions of people are becoming disenchanted with capitalism. North reviews the decisive and often overlooked impact of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution on the events of October 1917. He challenges today's historians to once again turn serious and honest attention to Trotsky's life and ideas.

    Innovative, creative, and provocative."---Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity CollegeIn 1901, George Ward, a lynching victim, was attacked, murdered, and dismembered by a mob of white men, women, and children. As his lifeless body burned in a fire, enterprising white youth cut off his toes and, later, his fingers and sold them as souvenirs. In Embodying Black Experience, Harvey Young masterfully blends biography, archival history, performance theory, and phenomenology to relay the experiences of black men and women who, like Ward, were profoundly affected by the spectacular intrusion of racial violence within their lives. Looking back over the past two hundred years---from the exhibition of boxer Tom Molineaux and Saartjie Baartman (the "Hottentot Venus") in 1810 to twenty-first century experiences of racial profiling and incarceration---Young chronicles a set of black experiences, or what he calls, "phenomenal blackness," that developed not only from the experience of abuse but also from a variety of performances of resistance that were devised to respond to the highly predictable and anticipated arrival of racial violence within a person's lifetime.Embodying Black Experience pinpoints selected artistic and athletic performances---photography, boxing, theater/performance art, and museum display---as portals through which to gain access to the lived experiences of a variety of individuals. The photographs of Joseph Zealy, Richard Roberts, and Walker Evans; the boxing performances of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali; the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and Dael Orlandersmith; and the tragic performances of Bootjack McDaniels and James Cameron offer insight into the lives of black folk across two centuries and the ways that black artists, performers, and athletes challenged the racist (and racializing) assumptions of the societies in which they lived.Blending humanistic and social science perspectives, Embodying Black Experience explains the ways in which societal ideas of "the black body," an imagined myth of blackness, get projected across the bodies of actual black folk and, in turn, render them targets of abuse. However, the emphasis on the performances of select artists and athletes also spotlights moments of resistance and, indeed, strength within these most harrowing settings.Harvey Young is Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies, and Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University.A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

    Drawing on history, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, and parody, editor Laurence Senelick presents writers with the special knack “to distill both the immediate experience and the recollected impression, to draw the reader into the charmed circle and conjure up what has already vanished.” Through the words of playwrights and critics, actors and directors, and others behind the footlights, the entertainments and high artistic strivings of successive eras come vividly, sometimes tumultuously, to life.Observers from Washington Irving and Fanny Trollope to Walt Whitman and Mark Twain evoke the world of the nineteenth-century playhouse in all its raucous vitality. Henry James confesses his early enthusiasm for playgoing; Willa Cather reviews provincial productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Antony and Cleopatra. The increasing diversity and ambition of the American theater is reflected in Hutchins Hapgood’s account of New York’s Yiddish theaters at the turn of the century, Carl Van Vechten’s review of the Sicilian actress Mimi Aguglia, Alain Locke’s comments on the emerging African-American theater in the 1920s, and Ezra Pound’s response to James Joyce’s play Exiles and theatrical modernism. Enthusiasts for the New Stagecraft, such as Lee Simonson and Djuna Barnes, are matched by champions of pop culture such as Gilbert Seldes and Fred Allen. S. J. Perelman lampoons Clifford Odets; Edmund Wilson acclaims Minsky’s Burlesque; Harold Clurman explains Stanislavski’s Method; Gore Vidal dissects the compromises of commercial playwriting. A host of playwrights—among them Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner—are joined by such renowned critics as Stark Young, George Jean Nathan, Brooks Atkinson, and Eric Bentley.

    The years between these two indispensable epochs saw the communal rise of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works. With this commanding study, Lawrence Jackson recalls the lost history of a crucial era.Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II, Jackson restores the "indignant" quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, the growth of American communism, and an international wave of decolonization. He also reveals how artistic collectives in New York, Chicago, and Washington fostered a sense of destiny and belonging among diverse and disenchanted peoples. As Jackson shows through contemporary documents, the years that brought us "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "Native Son," and "Invisible Man" also saw the rise of African American literary criticism--by both black and white critics.Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation, The Indignant Generation paints a vivid portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century.

    Some poets intended merely to shock or entertain, but Gothic also liberated the creative imagination and inspired them to enter disturbing areas of the psyche and to portray extreme states of human consciousness. This anthology illustrates that journey.This is the first modern anthology of Gothic verse. It traces the rise of Gothic in the late eighteenth century and follows its footsteps through the nineteenth century. Gothic has never truly died as it constantly reinvents itself, and this lively, illustrated and annotated anthology offers students the atmospheric poetry that originally studded terror novels and inspired horror films. Alongside canonical verse by Coleridge, Keats and Poe, it introduces readers to lesser-known authors' excursions into the macabre and the grotesque. A wide range of poetic forms is included: as well as ballads, tales, lyrics, meditative odes and dramatic monologues, a medievalist romance by Scott and Gothic drama by Byron are also included in full.A substantial introduction by Caroline Franklin puts the rise of Gothic poetry into its historical context, relating it both to Romanticism and Enlightenment historicism. Although Gothic fiction has now been receiving serious critical attention for twenty years, Gothic verse has been largely overlooked. It is therefore hoped that this anthology will stimulate scholarly interest as well as readers' pleasure in these unearthly poems.

    By viewing Jesus as temple, Perrin reveals an enriched understanding of Jesus's self-knowledge, ministry, teachings, death, and resurrection and closes the gap between the historical Jesus and the proclamation of the early church.

    These 21 prose pieces reflect her inimitable ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, the aural and the visual, the analytic and the intuitive nature of her readers. Many of these are essays or talks written in response to invitations to discuss the works of writers and artists such as Hans Christian Andersen, Robin Blaser, Edmond Jabès, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Stanley Whitney, and Christa Wolf. Each offers Cole's unique appreciation of what it means to read, to interact with a work of art, to write, or to translate, and to perceive each activity as a way to attune oneself anew to the world that is both within and beyond our expected methods of understanding.

    This study looks at a wide range of medieval English romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas. The book opens with a survey of classical and biblical precedents, and of medieval attitudes to magic; subsequent chapters explore the ways that romances both reflect contemporary attitudes and ideas, and imaginatively transform them. In particular, the author explores the distinction between the white magic' of healing and protection, and the more dangerous arts of nigromancy', black magic. Also addressed is the wider supernatural, including the ways that ideas associated with human magic can be intensified and developed in depictions of otherworldly practitioners of magic. The ambiguous figures of the enchantress and the shapeshifter are a special focus, and the faery is contrasted with the Christian supernatural - miracles, ghosts, spirits, demons and incubi. Professor CORINNE SAUNDERS Saunders teaches in the Department of English, University of Durham.

    The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous. Together, the essays highlight the Gothic inclination to represent all ailments as visibly monstrous, even those, such as mental illness, which were invisible. Paradoxically, the Other also becomes a pitiful figure, often evoking empathy. This exploration of illness and disability represents a strong addition to Gothic studies.

    What is God's role in natural disasters and the human suffering they cause? This is one of the most vexing questions in Christian life and theology. Terence Fretheim offers fresh readings of familiar Old Testament passages--such as creation, the flood, and the suffering of Job--to give readers biblical resources for working through this topic. He shows the God of the Bible to be a compassionate, suffering, relational God, one we can turn to in prayer in times of disaster.

    It features a series of essays written by expert contributors who provide an illuminating examination of why children's literature is the way it is. Topics covered include:the history and development of children's literature various theoretical approaches used to explore the texts, including narratological methods questions of gender and sexuality along with issues of race and ethnicity realism and fantasy as two prevailing modes of story-telling picture books, comics and graphic novels as well as 'young adult' fiction and the 'crossover' novel media adaptations and neglected areas of children's literature.The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature contains suggestions for further reading throughout plus a helpful timeline and a substantial glossary of key terms and names, both established and more cutting-edge. This is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to an increasingly complex and popular discipline.

    F. Christian's editions of Tolstoy's Diaries and Letters, both in two volumes, are definitive. Volume 1 of the Diaries covers the years 1847-1894, and Volume 2 the years 1895-1910. Passages have been chosen to reflect Tolstoy's preoccupations as a writer - his views on his own work and that of others - and his development as a person and as a thinker. The passages also show his attitude to contemporary social problems, rural life, industrialisation, education, and later, to religious and spiritual questions.R. F. Christian has grouped the diary entries chronologically, introducing each period with a brief and informative summary of the main biographical details of Tolstoy's life. The result is something much more than source material for Tolstoy's life and thought, though it could hardly be richer in that respect, it is a unique, direct and unhindered portrait of a great man and a very great writer in the variegation of his everyday existence.'As a picture of the turbulent Russian world which Tolstoy inhabited these diaries are incomparable - the raw stuff not yet processed into art.' Anthony Burgess'Professor Christian's work, a fitting companion to his two-volume edition of the Letters, is an important and long-overdue contribution to our knowledge of Tolstoy.' D. M. Thomas, Sunday Times'What Professor R. F. Christian has done is to provide us with a huge two-volume digest, punctiliously edited and translated . . . It is a model of scholarship, one of the most important books to be published in recent years.' A. N. Wilson, The Spectator'R. F. Christian's engagement for some fifteen years with (Tolstoy's) letters and diaries has been a notable service to the English-speaking public.' Henry Gifford, Times Literary Supplement

    This book answers recent calls in criticism and theory to examine the influence of genre on contemporary Asian American literary production.  Drawing on cultural theories of representation, social theories of identity, and poststructuralist genre theory, this study shows how popular prose fictions have severely constrained the development of Asian American literary aesthetics.

    We know how rewarding it can be to engage students in complex works of thought provoking literature but we know how demanding the job can be, too. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literacy criticism a powerful tool for helping studnets tackle challenging literacy texts. TIm breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought&Mdash;reader response, biographical, historical, psychologival, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, fromalist postmodern.

    This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.

    They engender trauma that echoes through later generations, for those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships.Schwab's texts include memoirs (Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Marguerite Duras's La Douleur), second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors (Georges Perec's W, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Philippe Grimbert's Secret), and second-generation recollections by Germans (W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Sabine Reichel's What Did You Do in The War, Daddy?, and Ursula Duba's Tales from a Child of the Enemy). She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping networks of interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Her critical approach draws on theories from psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and trauma studies, and Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide.

    In Another Freedom, Svetlana Boym explores the rich cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, from its origins in ancient Greece through the present day, suggesting that our attempts to imagine freedom should occupy the space of not only "what is" but also "what if." Beginning with notions of sacrifice and the emergence of a public sphere for politics and art, Boym expands her account to include the relationships between freedom and liberation, modernity and terror, political dissent and creative estrangement, and love and freedom of the other. For Boym, "another freedom" is an adventure that tests the limits of uncertainty and responsibility, of individual imagination and public culture. While depicting a world of differences, she affirms lasting solidarities with the commitment to passionate thinking that reflection on freedom requires.Another Freedom is filled with stories that illuminate our own sense of what it means to be free, and it assembles a remarkable cast of characters: Aeschylus and Euripides, Pushkin and Tocqueville, Kafka and Osip Mandelshtam, Arendt and Heidegger, and a virtual encounter between Dostoevsky and Marx on the streets of Paris. What are the limits of freedom and how can freedom be imagined anew? Drawing upon her experience as a native of St. Petersburg, Russia transplanted to the United States, Boym dares to ask whether American freedom can be transported across national borders. With these questions in mind, Boym attempts to reinvent freedom as something "infinitely improbable"—yet nevertheless still possible.By offering a fresh look at the strange history of this idea, Another Freedom delivers a nuanced portrait of freedom’s unpredictable occurrences and unexplored plots, one whose repercussions will be felt well into the future.

    Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Derrida's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Derrida's writings and detailed synopses of his key works.The Dictionary also includes entries on Derrida's major philosophical influences and those he engaged with, such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan and Levinas. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Derrida's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Derrida Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Derrida, deconstruction or modern European philosophy more generally.

    Students, even those who appear indifferent, struggle with questions of right and wrong, good and evil, love and loss, self-interest and self-sacrifice. Using literature he has used with his students, MacLean insists that asking the right questions, discussing ideas that still matter, will show students that others have wrestled with the same issues, expressing that struggle in timeless stories. For the teacher of literature, the student of literature, the lover of literature, this book is a reminder of why, in the words of Maya Angelou, 'we stumble and fall, and how, miraculously, we can stand up.' What more important lesson is there?-- "CHOICE"

    Tolkien has a long history. What has been lacking is a forum for a civilized discussion about the topic, as well as a chronological overview of the major arguments and themes that have engaged scholars about the impact of Christianity on Tolkien's oeuvre, with particular reference to The Lord of the Rings. The Ring and the Cross addresses these two needs through an articulate and authoritative analyses of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism and the role it plays in understanding his writings. The volume's contributors deftly explain the kinds of interpretations put forward and evidence marshaled when arguing for or against religious influence. The Ring and the Cross invites readers to draw their own conclusions about a subject that has fascinated Tolkien enthusiasts since the publication of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings.

    Examining Dante's treatment of questions of language, personhood, and the body; his engagement with the theological tradition he inherited; and the implications of his work for contemporary theology, the contributors argue for the close intersection of theology and poetry in the text as well as the importance of theology for Dante studies. Through discussion of issues ranging from Dante's use of imagery of the Church to the significance of the smile for his poetic project, the essayists offer convincing evidence that his theology is not what underlies his narrative poem, nor what is contained within it: it is instead fully integrated with its poetic and narrative texture.As the essays demonstrate, the Commedia is firmly rooted in the medieval tradition of reflection on the nature of theological language, while simultaneously presenting its readers with unprecedented, sustained poetic experimentation. Understood in this way, Dante emerges as one of the most original theological voices of the Middle Ages."Long taken for granted in Dante studies, the nexus between theology and poetry in Dante's work, especially in the Commedia, has only really been subjected to searching critical analysis in the last few decades. The scholars represented in this interdisciplinary collection explore the poem's claims to function as a text embodying theological truth and, more particularly, as a poetic representation of the experience of the mystical. Their efforts comprise a landmark in modern Dante studies." --Steven Botterill, University of California, Berkeley"Moved by both intellectual curiosity and a palpable love of their subject, a group of both young and established scholars, both theologians and Dante specialists, from both sides of the Atlantic, collaborate in this book to search through the poet's volume and pose fresh questions about the relation of poetry and theology in Dante's work." --Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University

    But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us—they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances.Frank’s unique approach uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life good and when do they endanger it? Going beyond theory, he presents a thorough introduction to dialogical narrative analysis, analyzing modes of interpretation, providing specific questions to start analysis, and describing different forms analysis can take. Building on his renowned work exploring the relationship between narrative and illness, Letting Stories Breathe expands Frank’s horizons further, offering a compelling perspective on how stories affect human lives.

    Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

    Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

    Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse. She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them. Her multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and toward a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centered poetics of belonging in the region.

    The author demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is an unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature.

    Both a serial and series writer whose novels traversed Ireland, England, Australia and New Zealand, and genres from realism to science fiction, Trollope also published criticism, short fiction, travel writing and biography. The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope provides a state-of-the-field review of critical perspectives on his work, with the volume's sixteen essays addressing Trollope's biography, autobiography, canonical fiction, short stories and travel writing, as well as surveying diverse topics including gender, sexuality, vulgarity, and the law.

    The study is divided into two distinct parts: the first considers the Jonsonian career and output from biographical, critical, and performance-based angles; the second looks at cultural and historical contexts building on rich interdisciplinary work. Social historians work alongside literary critics to provide a diverse and varied account of Jonson. These are less standard surveys of the field than vibrant interventions into current critical debates. The short-essay format of the collection seeks less to harmonize and homogenize than to raise awareness of new avenues of research on Jonson, including studies informed by book history, cultural geography, the law and legal discourse, the history of science, and interests in material culture.

    It highlights the work of three well-known female fiction writers of this generation (Kono Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko) for their avant-garde literary challenges to dominant models of femininity. Focusing on four tropes persistently employed by these writers to protest oppressive gender stereotypes--the disciplinary masculine gaze, feminist misogyny, odd bodies, and female homoeroticism--Julia Bullock brings to the fore their previously unrecognized theoretical contributions to second-wave radical feminist discourse.In all of these narrative strategies, the female body is viewed as both the object and instrument of engendering. Severing the discursive connection between bodily sex and gender is thus a primary objective of the narratives and a necessary first step toward a less restrictive vision of female subjectivity in modern Japan. The Other Women's Lib further demonstrates that this gender trouble was historically embedded in the socioeconomic circumstances of the high-growth economy of the 1960s, when prosperity was underwritten by an increasingly conservative gendered division of labor that sought to confine women within feminine roles. Raised during the war to be good wives and wise mothers yet young enough to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by Occupation-era reforms, the authors who fueled the 1960s boom in women's literary publication staunchly resisted normative constructions of gender, crafting narratives that exposed or subverted hegemonic discourses of femininity that relegated women to the negative pole of a binary opposition to men. Their fictional heroines are unapologetically bad wives and even worse mothers; they are often wanton, excessive, or selfish and brazenly cynical with regard to traditional love, marriage, and motherhood.The Other Women's Lib affords a cogent and incisive analysis of these texts as feminist philosophy in fictional form, arguing persuasively for the inclusion of such literary feminist discourse in the broader history of Japanese feminist theoretical development. It will be accessible to undergraduate audiences and deeply stimulating to scholars and others interested in gender and culture in postwar Japan, Japanese women writers, or Japanese feminism.

    Brown traces the emergence of this new consciousness from its roots in the Black Aesthetic Movement through important milestones such as the anthology The Black Woman and Essence magazine to the writings of Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jayne Cortez.

    She is also remembered for her generosity in support of actions, world wide, to safeguard and to further Human Rights. This series of lectures on teaching poetry by distinguished poets was conceived of by her family as a contribution to the role poetry plays at Berkeley in occasions that bring the public and academic communities together.

    V. Olguín provides crucial insights into the central roles that incarceration and the incarcerated have played in the evolution of Chicana/o history, cultural paradigms, and oppositional political praxis. This is the first text on prisoners in general, and Chicana/o and Latina/o prisoners in particular, that provides a range of case studies from the nineteenth century to the present. Olguín places multiple approaches in dialogue through the pairing of representational figures in the history of Chicana/o incarceration with specific themes and topics. Case studies on the first nineteenth-century Chicana prisoner in San Quentin State Prison, Modesta Avila; renowned late-twentieth-century Chicano poets Raúl Salinas, Ricardo Sánchez, and Jimmy Santiago Baca; lesser-known Chicana pinta and author Judy Lucero; and infamous Chicano drug baron and social bandit Fred Gómez Carrasco are aligned with themes from popular culture such as prisoner tattoo art and handkerchief art, Hollywood Chicana/o gangxploitation and the prisoner film American Me, and prisoner education projects. Olguín provides a refreshing critical interrogation of Chicana/o subaltern agency, which too often is celebrated as unambiguously resistant and oppositional. As such, this study challenges long-held presumptions about Chicana/o cultures of resistance and proposes important explorations of the complex and contradictory relationship between Chicana/o agency and ideology.

    Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the “unspeakable subject,” examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long-obscured tradition of (inseparable) friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history.Donoghue writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed—or haven’t—over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire.She writes about the ever-present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the heroine’s love . . . about how—and why—same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James.Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman’s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, “comes out of the closet,” or is publicly “outed.”She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case-history-style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries-old literary tradition—brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

    Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia.These contributions represent both the diversity of today’s feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back—with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments—to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work.The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman’s impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book’s suppressed foremothers.In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women’s writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.

     Drawing on extensive research in the Rodgers and the Hammerstein papers, including Hammerstein's personal notes on James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, Jim Lovensheimer offers a fascinating reading of South Pacific that explores the show's complex messages and demonstrates how thepresentation of those messages changed throughout the creative process. Indeed, the author shows how Rodgers and especially Hammerstein continually refined and softened the theme of racial intolerance until it was more acceptable to mainstream Broadway audiences. Likewise, Lovensheimer describes thetreatment of gender and colonialism in the musical, tracing how it both reflected and challenged early Cold War Era American norms. The book also offers valuable background to the writing of South Pacific, exploring the earlier careers of both Rodgers and Hammerstein, showing how they frequentlyexplored serious social issues in their other works, and discussing their involvement in the political movements of their day, such as Hammerstein's founding membership in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Finally, the book features many wonderful appendices, including two that compare the originaldraft and final form of the classic songs I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair and I'm In Love With a Wonderful Guy. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, this superb book offers a rich, intriguing portrait of a Broadway masterpiece and the era in which it was created.

    She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust's effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.

    He enjoyed a highly successful career in American letters, publishing two collections of essays, teaching at several colleges and universities, and writing dozens of pieces for newspapers and magazines, yet Ellison never published the second novel he had been composing for more than forty years. A 1967 fire that destroyed some of his work accounts for only a small part of the novel’s fate; the rest is revealed in the thousands of pages he left behind after his death in 1994, many of them collected for the first time in the recently published Three Days Before the Shooting . . . .Ralph Ellison in Progress is the first book to survey the expansive geography of Ellison’s unfinished novel while re-imaging the more familiar, but often misunderstood, territory of Invisible Man. It works from the premise that understanding Ellison’s process of composition imparts important truths not only about the author himself but about race, writing, and American identity. Drawing on thousands of pages of Ellison’s journals, typescripts, computer drafts, and handwritten notes, many never before studied, Adam Bradley argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis that moves a greater share of the weight of Ellison’s literary legacy to the last forty years of his life and to the novel he left forever in progress.

    His work - including most notably Gargantua and Pantagruel - continues to enthral readers with its complex and delicately crafted humour. 'Rabelaisian' and 'Gargantuan' have entered the lexicon but are often misunderstood; this Companion explains the literary and historical reality behind these notions. It provides an accessible account of Rabelais' major works and the contextual information and conceptual tools needed to understand the author and his world. The most up-to-date book on Rabelais to be designed specifically for English-speaking audiences, the Companion is intended to enable a broad spectrum of readers both to appreciate and to enjoy Rabelais. With a detailed guide to further reading and a chronology, and with all quotations given in translation, this is an ideal guide for students and scholars of French and comparative literature.

    A collection of Kansas poems by William Stafford with additional commentary on the man and his work by current notable writers including Jonathan Holden, Denise Low, Thomas Fox Averill, Kirsten Bosnak, Robert Day, Steven Hind, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Al Ortolani, Linda Rodriguez, Ralph Salisbury, William Sheldon, Kim Stafford, Robert Stewart, Ingrid Wendt and Fred Whitehead, who have been inspired by William Stafford and by Kansas alike.

    But most of the major works of European modernism and postmodernism engage in very profound and central ways with questions about life-writing. Max Saunders explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction. He identifies a wave of new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century and uses the term 'autobiografication' - discovered in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 - to provide a fresh perspective on turn-of-the-century literature, and to propose a radically new literary history of Modernism.Saunders offers a taxonomy of the extraordinary variety of experiments with life-writing, demonstrating how they arose in the nineteenth century as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography, in works by authors such as Pater, Ruskin, Proust, 'Mark Rutherford', George Gissing, and A. C. Benson. He goes on to look at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as Impressionism turns into Modernism., juxtaposing detailed and vivacious readings of key Modernist texts by Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf, with explorations of the work of other authors - including H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis - whose experiments with life-writing forms are no less striking. The book concludes with a consideration of the afterlife of these fascinating experiments in the postmodern literature of Nabokov, Lessing, and Byatt.Self Impression sheds light on a number of significant but under-theorized issues; the meanings of 'autobiographical', the generic implications of literary autobiography, and the intriguing relation between autobiography and fiction in the period.

    . . . This collection of articles, carefully grouped around specific themes and the authors who invoke them, is an important contribution to the study of modern Arabic literature."—Professor Roger AllenArabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives introduces the work of twenty-nine pivotal authors from the Arab world writing in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew. Organized around the central themes of memory, place, and gender, each of which is discussed in an introductory essay, the volume provides a critical framework for Arab writing, locating it alongside contemporary world literature.The contributors maintain that Arabic literature reflects the Western postmodern condition without denying its own traditions. As such, Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives paves the way for an important cultural dialogue between East and West.Authors covered include Adonis, Rabih Alameddine, Hoda Barakat, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mahmoud Darwish, Assia Djebar, and Elias Khoury.Angelika Neuwirth is chair of Arabic studies at the Free University of Berlin.Andreas Pflitsch is a research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin and teaches Arabic studies at the University of Bamberg and the Free University of Berlin.Barbara Winckler is a research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin and teaches modern Arabic literature at the Free University of Berlin.

    It is also distinctive in that it addresses all of her published writing up to The Dew Breaker (2004), including her writing for children, her travel writing, her short fiction, and her novels.The book contains an exclusive interview with Danticat, in which she discusses her recent memoir Brother, I'm Dying (2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also includes an extensive bibliography.

    Lear's descent into madness, the central event of this play, illustrates the extent to which humanity can be degraded by its errors. Harold Bloom calls King Lear "the unique eminence in the world's literary world." This new edition is perfect for high school and college students doing in-depth study on this work of the Bard. Further resources such as a chronology of Shakespeare's life, a useful bibliography, and a handy index round out the title.

    Its ability to register fear, desire and anxiety has made it a popular genre with a wide audience. These new essays, written for students as well as readers of crime fiction, demonstrate the very best in contemporary scholarship and challenge long-established notions of the development of the detective novel. Each chapter covers a sub-genre, from 'true crime' to hard-boiled novels, illustrating the ways in which 'popular' and 'high' literary genres influence and shape each other. With a chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion is a helpful guide for students of American literature and readers of crime fiction.

    Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings—the personal files—as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

    Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.

    - Original essays and excerpts from published critical analyses that discuss the role of the title theme in various works- An index for easy reference- Two introductory essays by Harold Bloom.

    This is the first book to examine systematically the long history of the impact of ideas about ancient Greek and Roman dance on modern theatrical and choreographic practices. With contributions from eminent classical scholars, dance historians, theatre specialists, modern literary critics, and art historians, as well as from contemporary practitioners, it offers a very wide conspectus on an under-explored but central aspect of classical reception, dance and theatre history, and the history of ideas.

    This impressive collection provides many answers and is destined to become a staple in the library of African Studies, African Literary Studies, Women's Studies, Gender & Development, Sexuality and Human Rights Studies.

    Originally inspired by a minor conspiratorial episode of the late 1860s, well after Dostoevsky's death (1881) the work continued to earn both acclaim and contempt for its scathing caricature of revolutionists driven by destructive, anarchic aims. The text of Demons assumed new meaning in Russian literary culture following the Bolshevik triumph of 1917, when the reestablishment and expansion of centralized state power inevitably revived interest in the radical populist tendencies of Russia's past, in particular the anarchist thought of Dostoevsky's legendary contemporary, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). Confronting Dostoevsky's 'Demons' is the first book to explore the life of Dostoevsky's novel in light of disputes and controversies over Bakunin's troubling legacy in Russia. Contrary to the traditional view, which assumes the obsolescence of Demons throughout much of the Communist period (1917-1991), this book demonstrates that the potential resurgence of Bakuninist thought actually encouraged reassessments of Dostoevsky's novel. By exploring the different ideas and critical strategies that motivated opposing interpretations of the novel in post-revolutionary Russia, Confronting Dostoevsky's 'Demons' reveals how the potential resurrection of Bakunin's anti-authoritarian ethos fostered the return of a politically reactionary novel to the canon of Russian classics.

    Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.

    This anthology shows Spark to be a consummate artist as well as a proactive and persuasive thinker on social questions, including the welfare state, secularization, decolonization, and anti-psychiatry. The volume compares Spark alongside contemporaries including J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor, and it ends with a look at Spark's legacy in the twenty-first century.

    Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South.   Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.

    

    Although Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, his fiction served as both foil and mirror to America's conception of itself and its place in the world. Peter Mallios reveals the historical and political factors that made Conrad's work valuable to a range of prominent figures—including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Edith Roosevelt—and explores regional differences in Conrad's reception. He proves that foreign-authored writing can be as integral a part of United States culture as that of any native. Arguing that an individual writer's apparent (national, gendered, racial, political) identity is not always a good predictor of the diversity of voices and dialogues to which he gives rise, this exercise in transnational comparativism participates in post-Americanist efforts to render American Studies less insular and parochial.

    - A selection of the best criticism on the work through the centuries- Introductory essays on the development of criticism on the work in each century- A brief biography of Shakespeare- A plot synopsis, list of characters, and analysis of several key passages- An introduction by Harold Bloom.

    A truly multi-disciplinary study, it brings together essays by scholars of literature, theater, cinema, music, and law as well as by practicing lawyers and caretakers of modernist literary estates. Its contributors' methods are asdiverse as the works they discuss: Ezra Pound's copyright statute and Charlie Parker's bebop compositions feature here, as do early Chaplin films, EverQuest, and the Madison Avenue memo. As our portrait of modernism expands and fragments, Modernism and Copyright locates works such as these on one ofthe few landscapes they all clearly share: the uneven terrain of intellectual property law.

    Works of fan fiction are rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher; also, they are almost never professionally published. Fan fiction, therefore, is defined by being both related to its subject's canonical fictional universe and simultaneously existing outside the canon of that universe. Most fan fiction writers assume that their work is read primarily by other fans, and therefore tend to presume that their readers have knowledge of the canon universe (created by a professional writer) in which their works are based.

    SternOriginal watercolor illustrations from Jane Austen's novels accompany a splendid array of quotes in this companion book about the real life, memorable characters, and charming wit of Jane Austen. A great gift for any fan-new or lifelong-of this most beloved author.

    Entries clearly explain even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. There are biographies of important figures in the field, with feature entries for those who have heavily influenced areas of the discipline. Entries are fully cross-referenced and contain further reading where appropriate. To provide relevant extra information, this edition features recommended web links for many entries, accessible via the Dictionary of Critical Theory companion website, where they are checked regularly and kept up to date. Covering all aspects of the subject from globalization and race studies, to queer theory and feminism, this multidisciplinary A-Z is essential for students of literary and cultural studies and is useful for anyone studying a subject requiring a knowledge of theory.

    Each entry provides a book’s historic and cultural context, author background, and key information about the author, and a summary of its content.

    Edith Hall argues that the essential feature of the genre is that it always depicts terrible human suffering and death, but in a way that invites philosophical enquiry into their causes and effects, This enquiry was played out in the bright sunlight of open-air theatre, which became a key marker of the boundary between living and dead. The first half of the book is divided into four chapters which address the social and physical contexts in which the plays were performed, the contribution of the poets, actors, funders, and audiences, the poetic composition of the texts, their performance conventions, main themes, and focus on religion, politics, and the family. The second half consists of individual essays on each of the surviving thirty-three plays by the Greek tragedians, and an account of the recent performance of Greek tragic theatre and tragic fragments. An up-to-date 'Suggestions for further reading' is included.

    

    R. R. Tolkien. Clearly there is. Especially when the volume takes new directions, employs new approaches, focuses on different texts, or reviews and then challenges received wisdom. This volume intends to do all that. The entries on sources and analogues in The Lord of the Rings, a favorite topic, are still able to take new directions. The analyses of Tolkien's literary art, less common in Tolkien criticism, focus on character-especially that of Tom Bombadil-in which two different conclusions are reached. But characterization is also seen in the light of different literary techniques, motifs, and symbols. A unique contribution examines the place of linguistics in Tolkien's literary art, employing Gricean concepts in an analysis of The Lay of the Children of Hurin. And a quite timely essay presents a new interpretation of Tolkien's attitude toward the environment, especially in the character of Tom Bombadil. In sum, this volume covers new ground, and treads some well-worn paths; but here the well-worn path takes a new turn, taking not only scholars but general readers further into the complex and provocative world of Middle-earth, and beyond.

    S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound.“Opposition is true Friendship.” So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions—like other, wider forms of influence—are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.

    This study situates Robert Burton's complex work within three related contexts: religious, medical and literary/rhetorical. Analysing Burton's claim that his text should have curative effects on his melancholic readership, it examines the authorial construction of the reading process in the context of other early modern writing, both canonical and non-canonical, providing a new approach towards the emerging field of the history of reading. Lund responds to Burton's assertion that melancholy is an affliction of body and soul which requires both a spiritual and a corporal cure, exploring the theological complexion of Burton's writing in relation to English religious discourse of the early seventeenth century, and the status of his work as a medical text.

    The book pays close attention to the cultural context of stage playing, the critical language used about it, and the kinds of training and professional practice employed in the theatre at various times over the course of roughly one hundred years - 1558–1660. Perfect for courses, this 2010 survey takes into account recent discoveries about actors and their social networks, about apprenticeship and company affiliations, and about playing outside the major centre of theatre, London. Astington considers the educational tradition of playing, in schools, universities, legal inns, and choral communities, in comparison to the work of the professional players. A comprehensive biographical dictionary of all major professional players of the Shakespearean period is included as a handy reference guide.

    These historical changes created a new cultural and intellectual context for the understanding and representation of animal-kind, and the nonhuman animal has thus played a significant role in imaginative literature from that period to the present day.In Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, Laura Brown shows how the literary works of the eighteenth century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, affording a uniquely flexible perspective on difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence. Writers of this first age of the rise of the animal in the modern literary imagination used their nonhuman characters--from the lapdogs of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries to the ill-mannered monkey of Frances Burney's Evelina or the ape-like Yahoos of Jonathan Swift--to explore questions of human identity and self-definition, human love and the experience of intimacy, and human diversity and the boundaries of convention. Later literary works continued to use imaginary animals to question human conventions of form and thought.Brown pursues this engagement with animal-kind into the nineteenth century--through works by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and into the twentieth, with a concluding account of Paul Auster's dog-novel, Timbuktu. Auster's work suggests that--today as in the eighteenth century--imagining other animals opens up a potential for dissonance that creates distinctive opportunities for human creativity.

    Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as ‘Irish children’s literature’ (whatever the parameters) in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. This volume looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with all the major forms and genres. Topics include the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, poetry, post-colonial discourse, identity and ethnicity, and globalization. Modern Irish children’s literature is also contextualized in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. The contributors, who are leading experts in their fields, examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and also in relation to writing for adults, thereby inviting a consideration of how well writing for a young audience can compare with writing for an adult one. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for all interested in Irish literature, childhood, and children’s literature.

    The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, palaeontology, biography, science, film, popular culture, beliefs, gender, music, masculinity, tragedy, topography, psychology, metaphysics, illustration, bibliographical studies and contemporary response. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed especially for scholars and advanced graduate students. This companion is specially designed to aid original research on Hardy and serve as the critical basis for Hardy studies in the new millennium. Among the features are a comprehensive bibliography that includes not only works in English but, in acknowledgment of Hardy's explosion in popularity around the world, also works in languages other than English.

    It investigates their relation to the Greek poetic tradition and to the social and political structures of their original setting, aiming both to be attentive to the great variety of the corpus and to identify commonalities across it. In examining such topics as genre, structural strategies, the chorus, the gods, rhetoric, and the portrayal of women and men, this study highlights the ways in which audience responses are manipulated through the use of plot structures and the multiplicity of viewpoints expressed. It argues that the dramas of Euripides, through their dramatic technique, pose a strong challenge to simple formulations of norms, to the reading of consistent human character, and to the quest for certainty and closure.

    Roger A. Ladd skillfully explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity surrounding a single class/estate group and its characteristic sins in the context of literary texts influenced by estates satire. This book focuses in depth on both large works by well-known authors and lesser-studied works, including The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Mirour de l’Omme, The Book of Margery Kempe, The York Plays, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, “The Childe of Bristowe,” and the Pseudo-Chaucerian “Tale of Beryn.”

    Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War.

    Being the first critical work to bring together contemporary women's writing and the Scottish fantasy tradition, the volume pioneers in-depth investigation of some previously neglected texts such as Ali Smith's Hotel World; Alice Thompson's Justine; Margaret Elphinstone's longer fiction, as well as offering new readings of more popular texts including A.L. Kennedy's So I am glad, Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister and Two Women of London. Underlying the broad scope of this survey are the links--both explicit and implicit--established between the examined texts and the Scottish supernatural tradition. Having established a connection with a distinctively Scottish canon, Monica Germana points to the ways in which the selected texts simultaneously break from past traditions and reveal points of departure through their exploration of otherness as well as their engagement with feminist and postmodernist discourses in relation to the questions of identity and the interrogation of the real.

    While these stories of love and familial recognition bear elements of romantic conflict, Shakespeare integrated aspects of the comedic and tragic as well in these complex works. Renowned Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom introduces this volume of critical essays about the Bard and his romantic plays, and a chronology of his life, a bibliography, and an index will be helpful to researchers.

    Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1753. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... what stie believed it to be, there was also a Possibility of gaining Bertrand for a Husband. Her Father having discovered to her many valuable Secrets of his Art, she made a Powder of a certain Herb, which she had been taught by him was a Remedy for the Disease she imagined the King was afflicted with; and privately getting a Horse prepared for her, went immediately to Paris. Her first Care after her Arrival was to gain a Sight of her dear Bertrand; and then procuring an Audience of the King, she earnestly entreated him to let her look at the Swelling. The King seeing her so young and handsome, could not refuse her Request; as soon as she saw it, she immediately entertained Hopes of curing him, and said, "Sire, if you are willing, I trust in God I shall be able, without giving you much Pain or Fatigue, to cure you of this Distemper in eight Days." The King laughing at these solemn- Assurances, replied, " Since the greatest Physicians in the World have not been able to cure me, how is it possible a young Woman should perform what was too difficult for them; I give you thanks for your good Will, but I am determined never more to follow any Prescription whatever." ** Sire, replied Giletta, you despise my Art because I am young, and a Woman; I am not indeed a Physician; nor is it by my own Knowledge that 1 pretend to cure you; but by -the Help of God, and the Knowledge of Gerard de Narbonne, who was my Father, and when he was alive, a celebrated Physician." The King, being moved with these Words, began to reason with himself in this Manner: "This Woman, perhaps, is sent by Providence for my Relief; ought I not, at least, to try what she can do? especially since she says she will cure me in a little Time, and that too without much Pain: " Then having taken his Resolut...