Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works’ echo of “Lost Cause” romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

    Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth.This new book from renowned expert John Garth takes us to the places that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to create his fictional locations in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and other classic works. Featuring more than 100 images, it includes Tolkien’s own illustrations, contributions from other artists, archive images, maps and spectacular present-day photographs.Inspirational locations range across Great Britain – particularly Tolkien’s beloved West Midlands and Oxford – but also overseas to all points of the compass. Sources are located for Hobbiton, the elven valley of Rivendell, the Glittering Caves of Helm’s Deep, and many other key spots in Middle-earth, as well as for its mountain scenery, forests, rivers, lakes and shorelands.A rich interplay is revealed between Tolkien’s personal travels, his wide reading and his deep scholarship as an Oxford professor. Garth uses his own profound knowledge of Tolkien’s life and work to uncover the extraordinary processes of invention, to debunk popular misconceptions about the inspirations for Middle-earth, and to put forward strong new claims of his own.

    A poignant and comic literary coming-of-age memoir. "This is a jewel of a book." --Ian McEwanIn 1971 Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a "visiting Latin American writer" while he attended to business in London. He agreed--and that "writer" turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Jorge Luis Borges. About whom Jay Parini knew precisely nothing. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must "see," all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini's eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate.

    Among essays like "Radiantly Indefensible," "Notes on the Danger of Notebooks," and "The Abrasion of Loneliness," are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan's distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.

    How did Cheryl Strayed turn a solo hike into an inspirational memoir, beloved by millions? Memoirist and professor Alden Jones sets out to explore why. But when a sudden personal crisis occurs while she is writing, Jones realizes she must confront some difficult truths, both in her life and on the page. THE WANTING WAS A WILDERNESS is a profoundly original work that blends criticism, craft analysis, and a memoir of Jones's own time in the wilderness. The result is a celebration of WILD and a map of our long path to self-discovery.Alden Jones intended to write a reckoning with a contemporary literary classic--but she has written far more than that. To carefully dissect Wild, she finds she must consider her own quests: her own time in the wild; her self-discoveries as a queer woman; and how she can both live and tell an authentic story. This is a beautiful, lyric, unexpected book about the power of memoir and how desire both leads us into the wilderness and makes for us a map. THE WANTING WAS A WILDERNESS is book for readers, true readers, to treasure.--Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

    From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor’s grandparent’s hometown in Iowa; from the history of the mapping of the Mississippi River to the mythologies of the image of “the lean;” from studies of soffits and hidden spaces to the freedom found at the top of an island birch tree, these essays reach beyond the classically confined trajectories of literary nonfiction. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in Bright Archive delight in challenging the reader’s habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities.Sarah Minor is the author of The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated, a digital chapbook from Essay Press. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Mid-American Review, and was selected for the 2018 Barthelme Prize and featured in Gulf Coast. She serves as the video editor at TriQuarterly Review, a contributing editor at Essay Daily, and as Assistant Director of the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival. Sarah holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Ohio University. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art.PRAISE FOR BRIGHT ARCHIVESarah Minor’s sense of what an essay is, what it can look like, and what it can contain is way beyond what almost anyone else is even attempting. Open to any page in this book and you’re going to encounter something new. Every essay’s an invention, a new possession, and I for one am down with being possessed if the spirit that possesses me is like Minor’s, comprised of wonder, wit, and intelligence. Prepare to read differently: Bright Archive is a miracle. —Ander MonsonIn Bright Archive, Sarah Minor’s inventive, surprising, and moving collection of visual essays, short prose pieces nestle in the soffits of an old family home, sentences wind themselves into knots, passages draft alongside the banks of the Mississippi River—as a way of interrogating the relationships between and among literal, figurative, and symbolic spaces. Minor is preoccupied with interiors and exteriors, bodies and imaginations, myths and secrets, with how places are entered and marked by their inhabitants, and how people, too are shaped. “All I’m saying is that belief might design a body and not always the other way around. All I’m saying is that a living container could bear signs of the life it contains.” In this thrilling debut, Minor guides us deftly through the underground tunnels of a new age commune, to the branches of a birch tree to build a nest. This collection traverses continents and moves through time, insistent in its curiosity and dazzling in its innovation. —Mary-Kim ArnoldMy favorite books are somehow architectural, and I’ve never encountered one built quite like this. Minor’s prose has underground temples, a shadow self, it becomes the thing it describes. Prose morphing into pearls, rivers down the page, a diagram directs the eye, cupping an essay’s threads. This is a book that, through both story and design, reminds us what wonder feels like. —Aisha Sabatini Sloan

    How does illness travel through us? What do we do with the parts of ourselves we feel but cannot grasp? Where are the ghosts in our lives, and what are their names? In diagrams of ghosts, readings of Clarice Lispector, photographs, interviews, and lyric prose, Ghost/Home extends these questions into uncharted territory. Like its cover—an early Anna Atkins cyanotype, which transforms an image of algae into a ghostly figure—Ghost/Home transforms the experience of living with Crohn's disease into an incalculable, invisible, but pervasive entity.

    Since its inception, its titles have adopted names, themes and stories from across global mythology, including the beliefs of the Vikings.This book embarks on a detailed exploration of how Norse lore in particular influenced the writing and design of Final Fantasy VII – arguably the most critically-acclaimed of the franchise – and its wider compilation.Why is Midgar the political centre of the Planet, and Nibelheim the home of Cloud Strife?How are the Odin Materia, the Rune Blade and Vincent Valentine connected?What are the parallels between Ragnarok and the fall of the Shinra Corporation?These questions and many more will be examined and answered by award-winning community author M. J. Gallagher. Suitable for newcomers and enthusiasts alike.This book has not been approved, licensed, or sponsored by any entity or person involved in creating or producing Final Fantasy®, the videogames, films, or publications.

    Inspired by Ferrante's intense depiction of female friendship and women's intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together.In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante's work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors' lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.

    Howard know that with the 1929 publication of “The Shadow Kingdom” in the pulp magazine 'Weird Tales', he had given birth to a new and vibrant subgenre of fantasy fiction.Sword-and-sorcery went from pulp obscurity to mass-market paperback popularity before suffering a spectacular publishing collapse in the 1980s. But it lives on in the broader culture and today enjoys a second life in popular role-playing games, music, and films, and helped give birth to a new literary subgenre known as grimdark, popularized by the likes of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series.Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery provides much-needed definitions and critical rigor to this misunderstood fantasy subgenre. It traces its origins in the likes of historical fiction, to its birth in the pages of Weird Tales, to its flowering in the Frank Frazetta-illustrated Lancer Conan Saga series in the 1960s. It covers its “barbarian bust” beneath a heap of second-rate pastiche, a pack of colorful and wildly entertaining and awful sword-and-sorcery films, and popular culture second life in the likes of 'Dungeons & Dragons' and the bombast of heavy metal music.

    1951, in North Hammond, Indiana) has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1978. A vital contributor to the Bay Area's avant-garde literary scene, Bellamy is a novelist and poet whose work has focused on sexuality, politics, feminism, narrative experimentation, and all things queer. In her words, she champions "the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the fucked-up."Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind is the first major publication to address Bellamy's prolific career as a genre-bending writer. Megan Milks made several trips to San Francisco in order to spend time with Bellamy and craft a provocative and fascinating profile of the writer. Originally delivered as a lecture at the Wattis Institute, Andrew Durbin's text takes the form of a personal essay, expertly weaving anecdotes of his own encounters with Bellamy's writing with insights into broader themes in her work. Academic Kaye Mitchell takes a close look at the role of shame and its relationship to femininity in particular texts by Bellamy. And Bellamy and her late husband Kevin Killian offer deeply personal, emotionally wrenching ruminations on topics from the mundane (drawing) to the profound (mortality). These texts, alongside archival photos and a complete bibliography make, this book an important compendium on Bellamy.

    For thirty years Melva Graham has lived and worked in neighborhoods that are predominantly white and wealthy. Just to be clear, she is neither. The only thing that makes her more uncomfortable than talking about herself is talking about race—and she has decided to do both. In this bold and brutally honest memoir Melva answers back to the bias and bigotry she has experienced from childhood to adulthood, as she attends private school in a Pittsburgh suburb, studies acting at NYU, works as a nanny for the one percent, and balances a social life in between. This narrative depicts one woman’s journey to own her truth, find her voice, and take back her power.

    Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution.He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."

     From Pickwick to Scrooge, Copperfield to Twist, how did Dickens find the perfect names for his characters?What was Dickens's favourite way of killing his characters?When is a Dickens character most likely to see a ghost?Why is Dickens's trickery only fully realised when his novels are read aloud? In thirteen entertaining and wonderfully insightful essays, John Mullan explores the literary machinations of Dickens's eccentric genius, from from his delight in clichés to his rendering of smells and his outrageous use of coincidences. A treat for all lovers of Dickens, this essential companion puts his audacity, originality and brilliance on full display.

    Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Edited by Mayra Rodr�guez Castro. Preface by Dagmar Schultz. AUDRE LORDE: DREAM OF EUROPE elucidates Lorde's methodology as a poet, mentor, and activist during the last decade of her life. This volume compiles a series of seminars, interviews, and conversations held by the author and collaborators across Berlin, Western Europe, and The Caribbean between 1984-1992. While Lorde stood at the intersection of various historical and literary movements in The United States--the uprising of black social life after the Harlem Renaissance, poetry of the AIDS epidemic, and the unfolding of the Civil Rights Movement--this selection of texts reveals Lorde as a catalyst for the first movement of Black Germans in West Berlin. The legacy of this Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet has been well preserved by her colleagues in Germany. These selected writings lay bare struggles, bonds, and hopes shared among Black women in a transnational political context, as well as offering sometimes surprising reflections on the US American counter culture with which Lorde is associated. Many of the poems that were important to Lorde's development are excerpted in full within these pages, serving as a sort of critical anthology.

    Only now is she gaining recognition as a great writer in her own right, and her novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall deserve to stand alongside those of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.Crave the Rose: Anne Brontë At 200 takes a fresh look at Anne Brontë, revealing a woman whose work was more radical than that of her sisters, and which is therefore as relevant today as it has ever been. Alongside a biography of Anne's remarkable, but tragically short, life it contains a comprehensive selection of first-person encounters with the Brontës from 19th century newspapers and archives, giving a fresh insight into the real character of Anne and her family. Also contained exclusively within this landmark book is a newly discovered essay by Anne Brontë – never before seen in print, they are probably the last words that she ever wrote.

    Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people's history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

    But her literary and personal reputations have changed drastically since she was first published in 1846. ‘Agnes Grey’, with its governess protagonist, was assumed by some to be a first novel by Currer Bell. Reviews were mixed, some critical of ‘crudeness’ and ‘vulgarity’, yet the book sold well during Anne’s lifetime. Her second and most famous work, ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, was groundbreaking in its choice of subject matter: marital abuse (physical and emotional); gender equality; education; alcohol abuse; and its effect on family life; and married women’s rights – married women were then viewed as the property of their husband. Anne’s reputation changed from coarse and vulgar to strident, moralising, pious, reserved and, eventually, just plain boring. Who, then, was the real Anne, how was her reputation destroyed, and why has she been so overlooked?

    Each chapter in Hobbit Virtues consists of a wide-ranging discussion of a single virtue, exemplified by a character in Middle-earth, explaining its philosophical or theological roots and how the virtue is still relevant in a modern democracy. It will also include appendices where readers can find passages in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works that discuss virtue ethics, and a glossary of virtues from ancient to modern, East to West.Tolkien’s readers come from many different religious and secular backgrounds and the pleasure and profundity of Hobbit Virtues is that mutual respect for public virtues is, especially now, necessary for a well-functioning pluralistic society.

    In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy.In this Very Short Introduction, Brian Nelson examines Zola's major themes and narrative art. He illuminates the social and political contexts of Zola's work, and provides readings of five individual novels (The Belly of Paris, L'Assommoir, The Ladies' Paradise, Germinal, and Earth). Zola's naturalist theories, which attempted to align literature with science, helped to generate the stereotypical notion that his fiction was somehow nonfictional. Nelson, however, reveals how the most distinctive elements of Zola's writing go far beyond his theoretical naturalism, giving his novels their unique force. Throughout, he sets Zola's work in context, considering his relations with contemporary painters, his role in the Dreyfus Affair, and his eventual murder. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

    Russell’s collected essays range from a discussion of authors from Arthur Machen to Donna Tartt, from Robert Aickman to Alain-Fournier, and from Denton Welch to Katherine Burdekin, taking in classic supernatural fiction, erotic decadence, biographical and dystopian fiction, though to poetry, bibliography and reference books.Russell also deals with books themselves—as physical objects to be collected and whose individual histories may be speculated upon. There are essays on book collecting, book-shops, bookdealers and bibliographers, through to the tiny booksellers’ labels that can often be found stuck in the front of older books.Past Lives of Old Books is an evocative exploration of books and book collecting, with occasional forays into authors and characters who may not exist, music and films.Contains: ‘Introduction: Less Frequented Paths’, ‘Rolfe’s Revolver: The Baron Corvo Archive at the Brotherton Library’, ‘In the “Virtual” Footsteps of Arthur Machen’, ‘ “Find the Happiness They had Never Noticed”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, ‘Correspondence, or Otherwise: Aickman and L.T.C. Rolt’, ‘Brocard Sewell: A Black Swan’, ‘Alastair’, ‘Pierre Louÿs: Pagan Sensuality’, ‘Bibliography of Pierre Louÿs’, ‘Robert Aickman’s “Holiday Photographs”’, ‘Alternative Lives: Arthur Machen’s “A Fragment of Life” and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes’, ‘Roman Polanski’s The Tenant’, ‘The Connoisseurship of Count Stenbock and Phyllis Paul’, Count Stenbock Bibliography’, ‘Phyllis Paul Bibliography’, ‘Booksellers’ Labels’, ‘Walter J.C. Murray and Copsford’, ‘Immortal Creations: The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s’, ‘Chapman Winston Blubberhouse, and How He Returned to Haunt Me’, ‘The Moon and the Sledgehammer’, ‘Fragile Ivory Towers: The Critics and Donna Tartt’, ‘Denton Welch and Jocelyn Brooke: Kindred Spirits’, ‘Denton Welch Bibliography’, ‘Jocelyn Brooke Bibliography’, ‘George Locke: The Passing of a Legend’, ‘Collecting Arthur Machen Rarities’, ‘Visiting Chydyok’, ‘Past Lives of Old Books’, The Cocteau Twins’, ‘Christopher Millard: Posthumous Friend of Oscar Wilde’, ‘Bibliography of Stuart Mason/Christopher Millard’, ‘Frank Baker: Master of the Absurd’, ‘N.F. Brookes: International Man of Mystery’, ‘Addendum’, ‘Literary Revelations’, ‘The Dangers of Nostalgia’, ‘Pruning a Book Collection’, ‘Down the Literary Rabbit Hole’, ‘Asking About the Weather’, ‘Quentin Crisp Bibliography’, ‘Internal Narrators’, ‘Reference Books’, ‘Outsider Literature’, ‘The Most Frightening Book, Ever’, ‘Katherine Burdekin Bibliography’, ‘Memento Amori: The Poetry of John Sewell’, ‘John Sewell Bibliography’

    The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.

    He could often be found sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking lager and smoking Gauloises while flicking through the pages of the Kent Evening Post. ''Charles'' was the name he offered to his new acquaintances.But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he mean by detecting a ''moral utopia'' in a town that others, including his concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to ''deindustrialisation'' and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded bombs?Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months before Johnson arrived, returns to the ''island that is all the world'' to uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own ''island stories , the book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens out to provide an alternative version of modern British history: a history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.

    

    Featuring dozens of authors born into or adopted by the region over the past two centuries, Writing Appalachia showcases for the first time the nuances and contradictions that place Appalachia at the heart of American history.This comprehensive anthology covers an exceedingly diverse range of subjects, genres, and time periods, beginning with early Native American oral traditions and concluding with twenty-first-century writers such as Wendell Berry, bell hooks, Silas House, Barbara Kingsolver, and Frank X Walker. Slave narratives, local color writing, folklore, work songs, modernist prose -- each piece explores unique Appalachian struggles, questions, and values. The collection also celebrates the significant contributions of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community to the region's history and culture. Alongside Southern and Central Appalachian voices, the anthology features northern authors and selections that reflect the urban characteristics of the region. As one text gives way to the next, a more complete picture of Appalachia emerges -- a landscape of contrasting visions and possibilities.

    

    Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement.So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

    But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh--entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes--that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's Balzac's Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

    Margaret Drabble swims with The Water Babies.Clive Unger Hamilton develops a taste for Paris.Annabel Walker changes her mind about Cornwall.Antony Wood falls for an unapologetic old rogue.Kate Young feels the heat at Hanging Rock.Ursula Buchan remembers a ground-breaking gardener.Mick Herron sees life on Cannery Row.Dan Worsley meets a shrewd medieval merchant,Jon Woolcott finds romance in ruins.Kate Morgan delivers a missing letter.

     It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball’s record collection and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place.  There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and the carefree from Mormonism’s best-known scholar of musical life.

    Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless life in the cities, neighborhoods, and rooms where he lived and worked, exploring how each new place left its enduring mark on the writer and his craft.Poe wrote short stories, poems, journalism, and editorials with urban readers in mind. He witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond and among enslaved workers in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, he saw an expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. At a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, he tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later in what is now the Bronx. Poe's urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experiences living among the soldiers, slaves, and immigrants of the American city.Featuring evocative photographs by Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd challenges the popular conception of Poe as an isolated artist living in a world of his own imagination, detached from his physical surroundings. The Poe who emerges here is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by the cities where he lived, longing for a stable home.

    It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O'Connor's thoughts on the subject. O'Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O'Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: "I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral." Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O'Connor's fiction.

    R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien—to our culture’s perennial reassessment of the meanings of time, death and eternity. It traces the poetic, philosophical and theological roots of the striking preoccupation with mortality and temporality that defines the imagined worlds of early fantasy fiction, and gives both the form of such fiction and its ideas the attention they deserve. Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien raise some of the oldest questions in existence: about the limits of nature, human and divine; cosmic creation and destruction; the immortality conferred by art and memory; and the paradoxes and uncertainties generated by the universal experience of transience, the fear of annihilation and the desire for transcendence. But they respond to those questions by means of thought experiments that have no precedent in modern literary history.

    That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world.   Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.

    Her novels have received numerous major awards, including the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and she frequently appears in the pages of publications such as the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2015, Enright was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction by the president of Ireland. No Authority—the first book in University College Dublin Press’s series of the uncollected writings of the Laureates for Irish Fiction—turns the spotlight toward Enright’s short stories and nonfiction. The pieces in this book explore a range of topics—many touching on the idea of authority, and who truly possesses it—ranging from Enright’s relationship with Irish literature, how she coped with the loss of her father and the ascent of Trump in the same year, and the groundswell to lift the Irish constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. No Authority reveals the breadth of interest and expertise, as well as the urgent concern for the role of women in contemporary Irish society, that characterizes the work of this literary luminary in any genre.

    The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a fight for Southern independence; as a fratricide that divided the national family; and as a dark, cruel conflict defined by its brutality. What do these stories, myths, and rumors have in common, and what do they teach us about modern America?In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs reveals how these narratives evolved over time and why they acquired such lasting power. Marrs addresses an eclectic range of texts, traditions, and creators, from Walt Whitman, Abram Ryan, and Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also identifies several basic plots about the Civil War that anchor public memory and continually compete for cultural primacy. In other words, from the perspective of American cultural memory, there is no single Civil War.Whether they fill us with elation or terror; whether they side with the North or the South; whether they come from the 1860s, the 1960s, or today, these stories all make one thing vividly clear: the Civil War is an ongoing conflict, persisting not merely as a cultural touchstone but as an unresolved struggle through which Americans inevitably define themselves. A timely, evocative, and beautifully written book, Not Even Past is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War and its role in American history.

    The idea of the forest as deep, dark, and dangerous has an extensive history and continues to resonate throughout contemporary popular culture. The Forest and the EcoGothic examines both why we fear the forest and how exactly these fears manifest in our stories. It draws on and furthers the nascent field of the ecoGothic, which seeks to explore the intersections between ecocriticism and Gothic studies. In the age of the Anthropocene, this work importantly interrogates our relationship to and understandings of the more-than-human world. This work introduces the trope of the Gothic forest, as well as important critical contexts for its discussion, and examines the three main ways in which this trope manifests: as a living, animated threat; as a traditional habitat for monsters; and as a dangerous site for human settlement. This book will appeal to students and scholars with interests in horror and the Gothic, ecohorror and the ecoGothic, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and popular culture more broadly. The accessibility of the subject of 'The Deep Dark Woods', coupled with increasingly mainstream interests in interactions between humanity and nature, means this work will also be of keen interest to the general public.

    Historical context proves itself to be key in the chronologically ordered chapters, while the thematically arranged ones provide a place to discuss islands, reality, doubles, and the arts. This duality provides an excellent space for Kincaid to use his incisive powers of critical thinking to capture the evanescence and ambivalence of Priest's writing.

    Just as the birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of sentimental feeling, modernist literary innovation has been understood to reject sentimental aesthetics. Modern Sentimentalism reframes these perceptions of cultural evolution. Taking up icons such as the New Woman, the flapper, the free lover, the New Negro woman, and the divorcee, this book argues that these figures embody aspects of a traditional sentimentality while also recognizing sentiment as incompatible with ideals of modern selfhood. These double binds equally beleaguer the protagonists and shape the styles of writers like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, and Jessie Fauset. 'Modern sentimentalism' thus translates nineteenth-century conventions of sincerity and emotional fulfillment into the skeptical, self-conscious modes of interwar cultural production.Reading canonical and under-examined novels in concert with legal briefs, scientific treatises, and other transatlantic period discourse, and combining traditional and quantitative methods of archival research, Modern Sentimentalism demonstrates that feminine feeling, far from being peripheral to twentieth-century modernism, animates its central principles and preoccupations.

    

    As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist literature and theory as both recalling and extending the tropes and politics of the past. In Cautiously Hopeful Marie Carrière brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women authors under the banner of metafeminism. Familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought, including intersectionality, affect theory, and care ethics, Carrière shows how literary works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine, Larissa Lai, Tracey Lindberg, and Rachel Zolf, among others, tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Meanwhile tenable alliances among Indigenous women, women of colour, and settler feminist practitioners emerge. Carrière's tone is personal and accessible throughout - in itself a metafeminist gesture that both encompasses and surpasses a familiar feminist form of writing. Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash across media platforms and in various spheres of political and social life, a hopefulness animates this timely work that, like metafeminism, stands alert to the challenges that feminism faces in its capacity to effect social change in the twenty-first century.

    Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation, but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World War II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era.