The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever.In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery.This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

    Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding is impossible. In her wide-ranging discussion, Caruth engages Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative of the dream of the burning child.

    WHO WAS THOMAS PAINE?Thomas Paine is known as one of the Fathers of the American Revolution. His landmark work, ‘Common Sense’, is known as the major inspiration for the ‘Declaration of Independence’, and his ‘Crisis’ pamphlet series was a favourite of George Washington to read out loud to inspire his troops at Valley Forge.Paine’s work is passionate, radical, yet accessible; covering his strong beliefs in Independence, Personal Liberty, Politics, Religion and Government. Hugely successful and inspiring strong polarisation in their times, they are still must-reads today, still highly debated and revered.THE 'MUST-HAVE' COMPLETE COLLECTIONIn this irresistible collection you get a full set of this amazing work.YOU GET:*COMMON SENSE - the famous work that inspired the American colonists with a demand and call for freedom from British rule. Also notable, that when adjusted for the population size of 1776, ‘Common Sense’ has the largest sales and circulation of any book in American history.*THE AMERICAN CRISIS - a series of pamphlets published from 1776 to 1783 written to motivate the Troops during the revolution, to spur them to victory. The language is powerful and emotional, and reflects Paine's liberal philosophies. The first lines are the famous: “These are times that try men’s souls.”*THE RIGHTS OF MAN (PART I and PART II) – a radical set of books that argues that political revolution is required when a government does not safeguard its people.*THE AGE OF REASON (PART I and PART II) - a deistic work, about institutionalized religion, and Paine’s strong views concerning it.*LETTERS and MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS – A FULL SET of Paine’s must-read letters and assorted short works from Paine, Including his famous ‘LETTER TO GEORGE WASHINGTON’ and his last work ‘AGRAGIAN JUSTICE’YOUR FREE BONUSESIn addition, you get Free Special Bonuses:*THOMAS PAINE, BIOGRAPHY – A fascinating 10 page biography, detailing Paine’s unbelievable, often sad, and often controversial life. *Works presented as far as possible in original publication date order so you can follow Paine’s growth as a writer and philosopher*Easy TABLE OF CONTENTS so you can easily jump to any book, chapter or letter in the collection.YOUR NEW WINDOW INTO THOMAS PAINEImagine the wonder of having this fantastic, enviable collection, that rivals many libraries, right at your fingertips. Imagine the pleasure of discovering more about Paine’s one of a kind works.DON’T MISS OUT!As you read this, you understand why you want this edition, because it is the best, most complete Thomas Paine collection you can get. You want the most complete collection so don’t deny yourself! And don't accept other collections that are lacking. And available on the Kindle, this big collection is yours for next to nothing.

    The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. Making use of contemporary fiction by such writers as Fowles, Borges, Spark, Barthelme, Brautigan, Vonnegut and Barth, and drawing on Russian Formalist theories of literary evolution, the book argues that metafiction uses parody along with popular genres and non-literary forms as a way not only of exposing the inadequate and obsolescent conventions of the classic novel, but of stuggesting the lines along which fiction might develop in the future.

    John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious passion for books and reading has defined his own life. Now he guides young readers and the grown-ups in their lives on an entertaining journey 'through the wardrobe' to a greater awareness of how literature from across the world can transport us and help us to make sense of what it means to be human. Sutherland introduces great classics in his own irresistible way, enlivening his offerings with humor as well as learning: Beowulf, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the Romantics, Dickens, Moby Dick, The Waste Land, Woolf, 1984, and dozens of others. He adds to these a less-expected, personal selection of authors and works, including literature usually considered well below 'serious attention' - from the rude jests of Anglo-Saxon runes to The Da Vinci Code. With masterful digressions into various themes - censorship, narrative tricks, self-publishing, taste, creativity, and madness - Sutherland demonstrates the full depth and intrigue of reading. For younger readers, he offers a proper introduction to literature, promising to interest as much as instruct. For more experienced readers, he promises just the same.

    It was along the James that British and Native American cultures collided and, in a twisted paradox, the seeds of democracy and slavery were sown side by side. The culture crafted by Virginia's learned aristocrats, merchants, farmers, and frontiersmen gave voice to the cause of the American Revolution and provided a vision for the fledgling independent nation's future. Over the course of the United States' first century, the James River bore witness to the irreconcilable contradiction of a slave-holding nation dedicated to liberty and equality for all. When that intractable conflict ignited civil war, the James River served as a critical backdrop for the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. As he guides readers through this exciting historical narrative, Deans gives life to a dynamic cast of characters including the familiar Powhatan, John Smith, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, and Robert E. Lee, as well as those who have largely escaped historical notoriety. The River Where America Began takes readers on a journey along the James River from the earliest days of civilization nearly 15,000 years ago through the troubled English settlement at Jamestown and finishes with Lincoln's tour of the defeated capital of Richmond in 1865. Deans traces the historical course of a river whose contributions to American life are both immeasurable and unique. This innovative history invites us all to look into these restless waters in a way that connects us to our past and reminds us of who we are as Americans.

    Narratology is a systematic account of narrative techniques, methods, their transmission, and reception, in which Bal distills years of study of the ways in which we understand both literary and non-literary works.In this third edition, Bal updates the book to include more analysis of film narratives while also sharpening and tightening her language to make it the most readable and student-friendly edition to date. Bal also introduces new sections that treat and clarify several modernist texts that pose narratological challenges. With changes prompted by ten years of feedback from scholars and teachers, Narratology remains the most important contribution to the study of the way narratives work, are formed, and are received.

    Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

    Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman-farmer--in such varied nineteenth-century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizes the imaginative expression of Western myths and symbols in literature with their role in contemporary politics, economics, and society, embodied in such forms as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conflict in the American mind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progress and civilization on the other, the Homestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War.The myths of the American West that found their expression in nineteenth-century words and deeds remain a part of every American's heritage, and Smith, with his insight into their power and significance, makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage.

    Assuming no prior knowledge of poststructuralism, Critical Practice guides the reader confidently through the maze of contemporary theory. It simply and lucidly explains the views of key figures such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, and shows their theories at work in readings of familiar literary texts.Critical Practice argues that theory matters, because it makes a difference to what we do when we read, opening up new possibilities for literary and cultural analysis. Poststructuralism, in conjunction with psychoanalysis and deconstruction, makes radical change to the way we read both a priority and a possibility.With a new chapter, updated guidance on further reading and revisions throughout, this second edition of Critical Practice is the ideal guide to the present and future of literary studies.

    - NY Post In the fall of 1966, Eduardo Tirella, close confidant of billionaire Doris Duke, informed the possessive and vindictive heiress that he was leaving her employ as chief designer and art curator to return to Hollywood where his career as a set designer was just catching fire.Minutes later, she crushed him to death under the wheels of a two-ton station wagon as they were leaving Rough Point, her Bellevue Avenue estate in Newport, RI, the storied resort.In a murderous quid-pro-quo, the local police quickly ruled the incident "an unfortunate accident" and Doris began giving a fortune to Newport, restoring 70 colonial-era homes that quickly turned it into a tourist Mecca. In 2018, Lance, who started his career as a cub reporter for The Newport Daily News eight months after Tirella's death, began a re-examination of the case and proved that the mercurial tobacco heiress got away with murder.In a riveting, doggedly researched book with 105 illustrations -- including never-before seen forensic files -- Lance, a five-time Emmy winner, rewrites history and finally restores the reputation of Eduardo Tirella, a gay Renaissance man and war hero whom Duke went to great lengths to erase from the history of her troubled life.Praise for HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT: "In his meticulous new tome, Lance tells the untold story of how Doris Duke, the richest woman in America got away with murdering a gay man, her designer and art curator Eduardo Tirella." - Diane Anderson-Minshall, CEO Pride Media in The Advocate."This book has rocked the world of publishing, it's rocked the world of journalism and true crime junkies are talking about it from Coast to Coast." - Frank Morano WABC RADIO"A page turning look into the world of elite influence, true crime and a systemic coverup that has rocked a New England summer resort city" - Bartholomewtown Podcast"Homicide at Rough Point is a page-turning epic for our time. Proof that when a narcissistic billionaire assumes, they can get away with murder, there's a reporter out there willing and able to expose them." - Nicholas Pileggi, author of Goodfellas and Casino"HOMICIDE is the best true crime book I've read in years; solving the horrific cold case murder of Eddie Tirella, a gifted Italian-American war hero who didn't deserve to die. Peter Lance is the most tenacious reporter I know. A must read!" - John A. "Junior" GottiPraise for Peter Lance's HarperCollins Mafia bio DEAL WITH THE DEVIL :"The perfect mix of thorough research and gripping storytelling." (NPR)"[A] thrilling account. . . This scrupulously investigated tale. . . will have true crime fans on the edge of their seats (Publishers Weekly, starred review)"A meticulously researched and frightening account of the long term relationship between the FBI and vicious Mafia thug Gregory Scarpa Sr. . . Stunning revelations." (Booklist)

    Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature." - from HeroinesOn the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor" and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.

    Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of identity with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Bront�s, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

    In a preface, written for this edition, Rose considers some of Peter Pan's new guises and their implications. From Spielberg's Hook, to the lesbian production of the play at the London Drill Hall in 1991, to debates in the English House of Lords, to a newly claimed status as the icon of transvestite culture, Peter Pan continues to demonstrate its bizarre renewability as a cultural fetish of our times.

    Eliot to be the most important and influential poet of the 20th century, and Four Quartets to be his finest poem and greatest literary achievement. Dove Descending is a journey into the beauties and depths of Eliot's masterpiece written by Thomas Howard, bestselling author, professor and critic. In this line-by-line commentary, Howard unravels the complexities of the sublime poem with such adept adroitness that even its most difficult passages spring to life. During his many years as a professor of English and Literature, Howard taught this poem often, and developed what he calls "a reading" approach to its concepts that render their meaning more lucid for the reader. Dove Descending reunites the brilliant insights of a master teacher whose understanding and love of Eliot's writings are shared here for the great benefit of the reader.Dove Descending is:The first in-depth exposition of Eliot's masterwork ever publishedThe fruit of Howard's many years of teaching Eliot and his unique understanding of the complexities of the great poemA must-have book for fans of T. S Eliot, and anyone who wants to understand his greatest work.