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Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences
By Gerri Kimber, Janka Kascakova. 2015
This volume offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield's work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life…
and art in the context of Continental Europe. It features chapters on Mansfield's reception in several European countries together with her own translations of other European writers.The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present: Volume Ten (History of British Women's Writing)
By Mary Eagleton, Emma Parker. 2015
This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities…
in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.Graham Greene: Political Writer
By Michael G. Brennan. 2016
Graham Greene remarked that 'politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God' (The…
Other Man). This study is the first to provide a detailed consideration of the impact of his political thought and involvements on his writings both fictional and factual. It also offers the first detailed consideration of Greene's involvements in espionage and British intelligence from the 1920s until the late-1980s. It incorporates material not only from his major fictions but also from his prolific journalism, letters to the press, private correspondence, diaries and working manuscripts and typescripts, as well as consideration of the diverse political involvements and writings of his extended family network. It shows how the full range of Greene's writings was inspired and underpinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal.Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer
By Lykke Guanio-Uluru. 2015
Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer by Lykke Guanio-Uluru examines formal and ethical aspects of The…
Lord of the Rings , Harry Potter and the Twilight series in order to discover what best-selling fantasy texts can tell us about the values of contemporary Western culture.Dickens, Religion and Society
By Robert Butterworth. 2016
Dickens, Religion and Society examines the centrality of Dickens's religious attitudes to the social criticism he is famous for, shedding…
new light in the process on such matters as the presentation of Fagin as a villainous Jew, the hostile portrayal of trade unions in Hard Times and Dickens's sentimentality.D. H. Lawrence: Nature, Narrative, Art, Identity
By J. Beer. 2014
A full account of Lawrence, ranging from his talent as a young writer to the continuing genius of his later…
work, and concentrating on his exceptionally acute powers of observation, both human and natural.Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels
By Andrew Glazzard. 2016
Detectives, police informers, spies and spymasters, anarchists and terrorists, swindlers: these are the character types explored in Conrad's Popular Fictions.…
This book shows how Joseph Conrad experimented creatively with genres such as crime and espionage fiction, and sheds new light on the sources and contexts of his work.B S Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde
By M. Ryle, J. Jordan. 2014
A collection of essays on the 1960s experimental writer B.S. Johnson, this book draws together new research on all aspects…
of his work, and, in tracing his connections to a wider circle of continental, British and American avant-garde writers, offers exciting new approaches to reading 1960s experimental fiction.Frank Witzel: Perspektiven auf Autor und Werk (Kontemporär. Schriften zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur #4)
By Anke Detken, Gerhard Kaiser. 2019
Seit Frank Witzel 2015 den Deutschen Buchpreis für sein bisheriges opus magnum Die Erfindung der Roten Armee Fraktion durch einen…
manisch-depressiven Teenager im Sommer 1969 erhielt, rückt der 1955 geborene Autor, Zeichner und Musiker nachdrücklich in den Fokus der literaturkritischen Öffentlichkeit. Der vorliegende Band liefert die erste literaturwissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit Witzels Werk, die alle bisherigen Werkphasen berücksichtigt. Dargestellt und analysiert werden Poetologie, Erzähl- und Vertextungsverfahren des Autors und sein seit dem Ende der 1970er Jahre entstandenes Werk aus Gedichten, Essays, Gesprächen, Romanen und Hörspielen. Der Band wird von einem Essay des Autors eingeleitet und enthält außerdem ein mit ihm geführtes Werkstattgespräch sowie eine aktuelle Gesamtbibliographie.Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction
By Jessica Cox. 2019
This book represents the first full-length study of the relationship between neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. It examines the diverse…
and multiple legacies of Victorian popular fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, tracing their influence on a range of genres and works, including detective fiction, YA writing, Gothic literature, and stage and screen adaptations. In doing so, it forces a reappraisal of critical understandings of neo-Victorianism in terms of its origins and meanings, as well as offering an important critical intervention in popular fiction studies. The work traces the afterlife of Victorian sensation fiction, taking in the neo-Gothic writing of Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt, contemporary popular historical detective and YA fiction by authors including Elizabeth Peters and Philip Pullman, and the literary fiction of writers such as Joanne Harris and Charles Palliser. The work will appeal to scholars and students of Victorian fiction, neo-Victorianism, and popular culture alike.Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies)
By Julius Greve, Florian Zappe. 2019
This collection of essays discusses genre fiction and film within the discursive framework of the environmental humanities and analyses the…
convergent themes of spatiality, climate change, and related anxieties concerning the future of human affairs, as crucial for any understanding of current forms of “weird” and “fantastic” literature and culture. Given their focus on the culturally marginal, unknown, and “other,” these genres figure as diagnostic modes of storytelling, outlining the latent anxieties and social dynamics that define a culture’s “structure of feeling” at a given historical moment. The contributions in this volume map the long and continuous tradition of weird and fantastic fiction as a seismograph for eco-geographical turmoil from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, offering innovative and insightful ecocritical readings of H. P. Lovecraft, Harriet Prescott Spofford, China Miéville, N. K. Jemisin, Thomas Ligotti, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others.Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
By Justin Omar Johnston. 2019
This book examines several distinctive literary figurations of posthuman embodiment as they proliferate across a range of internationally acclaimed contemporary…
novels: clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, animal-human hybrids in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, toxic bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and cyborgs in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. While these works explore the transformational power of the “biotech century,” they also foreground the key role human capital theory has played in framing human belonging as an aspirational category that is always and structurally just out of reach, making contemporary subjects never-human-enough. In these novels, the dystopian character of human capital theory is linked to fantasies of apocalyptic release. As such, these novels help expose how two interconnected genres of futurity (the dystopian and the apocalyptic) work in tandem to propel each other forward so that fears of global disaster become alibis for dystopian control, which, in turn, becomes the predicate for intensifying catastrophes. In analyzing these novels, Justin Omar Johnston draws attention to the entanglement of bodies in technological environments, economic networks, and deteriorating ecological settings.The Dregs of the Day (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Máirtín Ó Cadhain. 2019
A riveting English translation the Irish classic tale of heartache, death, and loneliness by the beloved author of The Dirty…
Dust The final published work by the renowned Máirtín Ó Cadhain, this novella follows a widower as he attempts to plan his wife’s funeral arrangements without money, direction, or whiskey. Thrown into a desert of unknowing, he knows not where to turn or what to do. In a poignant meditation on regret, possibilities, maybes, and avoidances, the author portrays a man hopelessly watching as the people in the world go about their lives around him. With black humor sprinkled throughout, the book, a profound look at psychic loss and puzzlement by a writer at the height of his powers, illustrates Ó Cadhain’s conviction that tragedy and comedy are inextricably connected. Bringing this work to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this volume includes an illuminating introduction by Alan Titley, whose skillful translation captures the spirit and tone of the original.Cold War Stories: British Dystopian Fiction, 1945-1990
By Andrew Hammond. 2017
This book is the first comprehensive study of mainstream British dystopian fiction and the Cold War. Drawing on over 200 novels…
and collections of short stories, the monograph explores the ways in which dystopian texts charted the lived experiences of the period, offering an extended analysis of authors' concerns about the geopolitical present and anxieties about the national future. Amongst the topics addressed are the processes of Cold War (autocracy, militarism, propaganda, intelligence, nuclear technologies), the decline of Britain's standing in global politics and the reduced status of intellectual culture in Cold War Britain. Although the focus is on dystopianism in the work of mainstream authors, including George Orwell, Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter and Anthony Burgess, a number of science-fiction novels are also discussed, making the book relevant to a wide range of researchers and students of twentieth-century British literature.Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
By Elisabeth Rose Gruner. 2019
This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that…
contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, reading magical and religious books, and reading as a means to developing civic agency. These examinations reveal that books for teens depict teen readers as doers, and suggest that their ability to read deeply, critically, and communally is crucial to the development of adolescent agency.Contemporary Literature: The Basics (The Basics)
By Suman Gupta. 2012
‘Contemporary Literature’ is among the most popular areas of literary study but it can be a difficult one to define.…
This book equips readers with the necessary tools to take an analytical and systematic approach to contemporary texts. The author provides answers to some of the critical questions in the field: What makes a literary text contemporary? Is it possible to have a canon of contemporary literature? How does a reader’s location affect their understanding? How do print, electronic, and audio-visual media impact upon contemporary literature? Which key concepts and themes are most prevalent? Containing diverse illustrative examples and discussing the topics which define our current sense of the contemporary, this is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to engage critically with contemporary literature.The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett’s Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and…
evolutionary import of Beckett’s works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and insidious mechanisms of capture, exploitation, and repression, alongside unprecedented demands for high-volume information-processing and connectivity. Part I shows that, in generating consistent flows of solidarity-based angry laughter, Beckett’s works sabotage coercive couplings of the subject to social machines by translating subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience. Through an examination of Beckett’s attack on gender/ class-related normative injunctions, the book shows that Beckett’s works can generate solidarity and action-oriented affects in readers/ spectators regardless of their training in textual analysis. Part II proposes that Beckett’s works can weaken the cognitive dominance of constrictive “frames” in readers/ audiences, so that toxic ideological formations such as the association of safety and comfort with simplicity and “sameness” are rejected and more complex cognitive operations are welcomed instead—a process that bolsters the mind’s ability to operate at ease with increasingly complex, malleable, extensible, and inclusive frames, as well as with increasing volumes of information.This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird…
fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist
By Richard Cronin. 2019
George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and…
poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith’s novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote—arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith’s novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith’s personal side—including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages—as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel
By Teresa Huffman Traver. 2019
Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel argues that the Creedal doctrines of “the communion of saints” and…
the “holy Catholic Church” provided Victorian novelists—both Roman Catholic and Protestant—with a means of exploring religious forms of cosmopolitanism. Building on research exploring the divisions between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in Victorian literature and culture, Teresa Huffman Traver considers the extent to which anti-Catholicism, domesticity, and national identity were linked. Huffman Traver connects this research with cosmopolitan theory, and analyzes how the conception of Catholicity could be used to reach beyond national identity towards a transnational community. Investigating the idea of a “rooted” cosmopolitanism, grounded in the local and limited in scope, this Pivot book offers a new angle on how religion, domesticity, and national identity were constructed in nineteenth-century British culture.