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British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s (British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940 #1)
By Adrienne E. Gavin, Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. 2018
This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from…
1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women’s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume’s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.Representations of Loss in Irish Literature (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
By Eugene O'Brien, Deirdre Flynn. 2018
This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented…
in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.Kafka's Hat
By Chantal Bilodeau, Patrice Martin. 2013
Multiple plot lines interweave with twentieth-century literary allusions as hapless bureaucrat P. attempts to secure delivery of a valuable cultural…
relic. Patrice Martin's ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka also evokes the literary techniques of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster.Polymath Patrice Martin is a writer, musician, and politician who is a former clerk in Canada's House of Commons, and currently is a Gatineau city councilor. He confesses his working life in government bureaucracy helped shape this, his first novel.Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal, Quebec.Yosl Rakover Talks to God
By Zvi Kolitz. 1999
A dying Jew's last words to God -- a text that is regarded as the greatest piece of writing to…
have emerged from the Holocaust -- the story of how it came to be written, and the afterlife of both the author and his creation.As the German tanks destroy the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the few remaining fighters, Yosl Rakover, writes out his last words to God, seals the text in a glass bottle, and thrusts it into the rubble before preparing to die. The text surfaces in Europe in the 1950s, is passed from hand to hand, is broadcast on Radio Berlin -- where it is acclaimed by Thomas Mann as a religious masterpiece -- is anthologized and translated into many languages.But what is hailed as the most important testament of the Holocaust is in fact a short story, written in 1946 for a Yiddish newspaper by a remarkable young Jew, Zvi Kolitz, in Buenos Aires, where he had gone to raise money for the Jewish underground in the struggle to establish the State of Israel. The Borgesian story of what happened to the text and to Kolitz in the fifty years since, and the detective work of German journalist Paul Badde that resulted in their eventual rejoining, form the second part of this fascinating book. And in an afterword, the great French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas's meditation on the text is answered in a commentary by Leon Wieseltier.Already an acclaimed bestseller in Europe, Yosl Rakover Talks to God restores a blazing artifact of twentieth-century writing to its true setting.Yann Andrea Steiner
By Mark Polizzotti, Marguerite Duras. 1992
Dedicated to Duras' companion with whom she spent her last decade of life, Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance…
between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andréa and a seaside romance observed - or imagined - by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister's murder at the hands of a German soldier. Memory blurs into desire as the summer of 1980 flows into 1944. An enigmatic elegy of history, creation, and raw emotion.Gate of the Sun
By Humphrey Davies, Elias Khoury. 2006
Gate of the Sun is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in…
1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Khalil--like Elias Khoury--is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments and various versions of stories that have been told to him. His voice is intimate and direct, his memories are vivid, his humanity radiates from every page. Khalil lets his mind wander through time, from village to village, from one astonishing soul to another, and takes us with him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.Dreams and Stones
By Bill Johnston, Magdalena Tulli. 2004
Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central…
and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli's hands myth, metaphor, history, and narrative are combined to magical effect. Dreams and Stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, trans- formed, and lost through words alone. A stunning debut by one of Europe's finest new writers.Grass for My Pillow
By Saiichi Maruya, Dennis Keene. 1966
First published in Japanese in 1966, the debut novel of the critically acclaimed author of Singular Rebellion is an unusual…
portrait of a deeply taboo subject in twentieth-century Japanese society: resistance to the draft in World War II. In 1940 Shokichi Hamada is a conscientious objector who dodges military service by simply disappearing from society, taking to the country as an itinerant peddler by the name of Sugiura until the end of the war in 1945. In 1965, Hamada works as a clerk at a conservative university, his war resistance a dark secret of the past that present-day events force into the light, confronting him with unexpected consequences of his refusal to conform twenty years earlier.The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction
By Reshmi Dutta-Flanders. 2017
This book introduces readers to linguistic stylistic analysis and combines both literary and linguistic analysis to explore suspense in crime…
fiction. Employing critical linguistics, discourse analysis and functional grammar, it demonstrates that suspense in plot-based stories is created through non-linear, causative presentation of the narrative. The author investigates how plot sequence is manipulated to ensure the reader cannot resolve the order of events until the end of the tale. From two-dimensional circumstantial detection in mystery stories to three-dimensional re-evaluation of offender orientation, she uses a linguistic-based stylistic framework to analyse offender motive. She also employs a 'discourse-based' frame analysis to examine the plot structure of crime stories for micro context and set-up scenarios, demonstrating that it is the unravelling of these devices that creates the suspense in murder mysteries and thrillers alike. Finally, she shows how grammaticization of the offending-self reveals an embedded diegetic space in the offender engagement discourse, provoking an intellectual and affective response and reshaping our overall outlook of the crime in the story. This book will appeal to researchers and students from literary and non-literary backgrounds looking for theoretical and practical advice on the linguistic stylistic approach to reading texts.The Peacekeeper's Wife
By Kevin Eze. 2015
The Peacekeeper's Wife explores lives torn by war, both far and near, strange and foreign, yet deep in the lives…
left behind. When Issa was sent as one of the several thousands to the peacekeeping mission in the Congo, Malika, his newly wedded wife, watched and waited in helpless horror, entangled in someone else's war. As Issa guarded the UN base, barring rebels from raping children, and patrolling borders of a rich ruined territory, back home in Segol, Malika felt the weight of separation, descending to a gradual but forceful emotional abyss. Fatimata, her mother-in-law, pained by the absence of a son, accused her of being a witch and sent her to Bintou, the marabout. The conflict between Malika and Fatimata escalated drawing fire from their mutual longing. The Peacekeeper's Wife deftly captures the human catastrophe of wars and migration in faraway lands through the excruciating loss and loneliness of estranged families, burdened by the separation from loved ones.Teaching Crime Fiction (Teaching the New English)
By Charlotte Beyer. 2018
More than perhaps any other genre, crime fiction invites debate over the role of popular fiction in English studies. This…
book offers lively original essays on teaching crime fiction written by experienced British and international scholar teachers, providing vital insight into this diverse genre through a series of compelling subjects. Taking its starting-point in pedagogical reflections and classroom experiences, the book explores methods for teaching students to develop their own critical perspectives as crime fiction critics, the impact of feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism on crime fiction, crime fiction and film, the crime short story, postgraduate perspectives, and more.Comics & Media
By Hillary L. Chute, Patrick Jagoda. 2014
The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success. Comics &…
Media reflects that, bringing together an amazing array of contributors--creators and critics alike--to discuss the state, future, and potential of the medium. Loaded with full-color reproductions of work by such legends as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Lynda Barry, the book addresses the place of comics in both a contemporary and historical context. Essays by such high-profile figures as Tom Gunning, N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and W. J. T. Mitchell address a stunning range of topics, including the place of comics in the history of aesthetics, changes to popular art forms, digital humanities, and ongoing tensions between new and old media. The result is a substantial step forward for our understanding of what comics are and can be, and the growing place they hold in our culture.The Blacker the Ink
By John Jennings, Craig Fischer, Frances Gateward, Rebecca Wanzo, William Lafi Youmans, Kinohi Nishikawa, Blair Davis, Nancy Goldstein, Daniel F. Yezbick, Sally Mcwilliams, James J. Zeigler, Qiana Whitted, Reynaldo Anderson, Hershini Bhana Young, Robin Means Coleman, Patrick F. Walter, Consuela Francis, Andre Carrington. 2015
When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps,…
inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged. But as this exciting new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels over the past century. The Blacker the Ink is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry. Organized thematically into "panels" in tribute to sequential art published in the funny pages of newspapers, the fifteen original essays take us on a journey that reaches from the African American newspaper comics of the 1930s to the Francophone graphic novels of the 2000s. Even as it demonstrates the wide spectrum of images of African Americans in comics and sequential art, the collection also identifies common character types and themes running through everything from the strip The Boondocks to the graphic novel Nat Turner. Though it does not shy away from examining the legacy of racial stereotypes in comics and racial biases in the industry, The Blacker the Ink also offers inspiring stories of trailblazing African American artists and writers. Whether you are a diehard comic book fan or a casual reader of the funny pages, these essays will give you a new appreciation for how black characters and creators have brought a vibrant splash of color to the world of comics.The Little Review "Ulysses"
By James Joyce, Robert Scholes, Sean Latham, Mark Gaipa. 2015
James Joyce's Ulysses first appeared in print in the pages of an American avant-garde magazine, The Little Review, between 1918…
and 1920. The novel many consider to be the most important literary work of the twentieth century was, at the time, deemed obscene and scandalous, resulting in the eventual seizure of The Little Review and the placing of a legal ban on Joyce's masterwork that would not be lifted in the United States until 1933. For the first time, The Little Review "Ulysses" brings together the serial installments of Ulysses to create a new edition of the novel, enabling teachers, students, scholars, and general readers to see how one of the previous century's most daring and influential prose narratives evolved, and how it was initially introduced to an audience who recognized its radical potential to transform Western literature. This unique and essential publication also includes essays and illustrations designed to help readers understand the rich contexts in which Ulysses first appeared and trace the complex changes Joyce introduced after it was banned.Junebug
By Maureen Mccoy. 2004
"I was raised zero-parent," says hormone-addled 17-year-old Junebug Host, "what the newspapers call it when your mother is in prison…
and the father was just a sperm."Junebug has been visiting her mother in Ellisville Reformatory for Women ever since she was five years-old, when beauty queen Theresa Host calmly stepped out of their trailer with an axe and inexplicably bludgeoned a neighbor to death. But during the summer of Junebug's high school graduation--and the summer of her first wildly passionate affair--with a snake-smooth greaser 20 years her senior--Theresa reels in her oversexed daughter, and shatters her world, by suddenly announcing the motive she had kept to herself since the day of the murder: an act of vengeance for a crime in which Junebug was intimately involved. "I did it for you," she tells Junebug, who is thrown into a ferment of memory and guilt.Set in the outsized landscape of far-western Nebraska, a nebulous region little known in contemporary fiction, and peopled by characters whose extreme individuality is exceeded only by their eccentricity--born again Fundamentalist snake charmers, housewives making ends meet with phone sex 900-number businesses, a 300-pound New Age priestess and the traveling meat salesman who worships her, as well as the all-female inmate population of the Ellisville Reformatory, Junebug is a novel with the intensity of the mother/daughter bond itself, with all its wildness, tragedy and depth.Maureen McCoy is the author of three previous novels, Diving Blood, Summertime, and Walking After Midnight (Poseiden/Simon & Schuster). She received her MFA from the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, and is a Professor of English at Cornell. Among her many awards are the James Michener Award, the Wurlitzer Foundation Award, and the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities, chosen by Toni Morrison.A Question Mark Above the Sun
By David Koepsell, Eric Lorberer, Kent Johnson. 2012
"At the end of last year, an extraordinary work of detective criticism briefly appeared, despite legal threats. Kent Johnson's A…
Question Mark Above the Sun (Punch Press) movingly speculates that Kenneth Koch forged one of Frank O'Hara's greatest poems as a posthumous tribute to his friend. A noir-ish middle also recounts some very funny run-ins with the English avant-garde. Shame on the poets who forced its redaction and suppression." - Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Times Literary Supplement, including a previous edition of A Question Mark Above the Sun as one of its 2011 Books of the YearWhat you have in your hands is a kind of thought-experiment. It proffers the idea that a radical, secret gesture of poetic mourning and love was carried out by Kenneth Koch in memory of his close friend Frank O'Hara. I present the hypothesis as my own very personal expression of homage for the two great poets. The proposal I set forward here, nevertheless, is likely to make some readers annoyed, perhaps even indignant. Some already are. A few fellow writers, even, have worked hard through legal courses to block this book's publication. The forced redaction of key quotations herein (replaced by paraphrase) is one result of their efforts.In this self-described "thought experiment"-part fiction, part literary detective work, and always daring-Kent Johnson proposes a stunning rewrite of literary history. Suppressed upon initial release, this is a one-of-a-kind book by one of our most provocative contemporary authors.Kent Johnson is the author, translator, or editor of over thirty books of poetry and criticism, including Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala Publications, 1991), Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1998), and his most recent collection of poems, Homage to the Last Avante-Garde (Shearsman Books, 2008). Best known for his radical ideas about authorship, scholarship, and experimentation, it was with his translations of Hiroshima survivor poet Araki Yasusada that Johnson became both celebrated and castigated. Only after Yasusada's poems were published in American Poetry Review did readers learn there was no Yasusada, and that Johnson was not a translator on this project, but the author. Johnson is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Illinois, where he is a faculty member in English and Spanish at Highland Community College.High Strung
By Quinn Dalton. 2003
Years after running away from America and the secrets surrounding her mother's death, Merle Winslow winds up editing low-end adult…
novels at X Publishing in West London. Paired with a diplomat's son who has a fondness for hash cigarettes and sex toys, she is, as she puts it, "underfed, sexually exhausted, pornographically overwhelmed." But disappointment in love isn't the only thing that sends Merle back to the hometown she's tried for so long to forget. There is also her sneaking suspicion that she never really left her old life; she's simply dragged it along with her, "like an outfit that was ill-fitting and too revealing, but impossible to get rid of." She lands in ratty temporary housing in Florence, Ohio, with no car, no phone, and no idea of what to do next. Worse, she's reminded at every turn of her own secretive youth and her mother's days as an accused Vietnam agitator -- a legacy that still haunts the town as well as their family. As she retraces the story of her parents' troubled marriage, Merle realizes disturbing new truths about her mother's life and discovers that her stodgy father might be falling in love after years of living alone. She looks to her brother, Olin, for help. But he's shaky too, having abandoned a lucrative job marketing novelty meat thermometers for his aspirations in performance art. It's not until she finds herself believing in a local charter pilot's affections, a man who nurses a failing plane, that she lets go of the questions still resting on a dark curve of road in her heart. In vivid cinematic prose, High Strung balances humor on the rough edge of loss, regret, and wounded family love. Through it all, Merle Winslow's wry but hopeful voice reminds us of how we tell ourselves the story of our lives, real and imagined. Her travels -- back to her hometown and through her family's past -- lead us to the crossroads of place and memory. With this debut novel, award-winning writer Quinn Dalton proves a generous storyteller with an innate understanding of pace and passion. She assures us once and for all that the questions of love are the most important questions of our lives.Le Choix de l'Ori
By Louis Camara. 2015
"Without a doubt, Louis Camara possesses this sense of the tale as well as the genius of narration. His magical…
pen draws from the ages and the deepest Yoruba thought the sons of gods, curious about humanity, playing out for us the game of individual destiny, unveiling for us its mysterious fabric woven from alternating strands of freedom and compulsion....And to choose one's Orí is for each soul on its way to humanity, to choose one's character, one's personality, and one's destiny." - Pr. Issiaka Prosper Lalèyê, Université Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, Sénégal "Louis Camara reveals a Yoruba world-view that is humane and sane, in luminous French prose that reveals a complex relationship to the material - which is to say, life itself - but one that is always philosophical, good-natured, and accepting. As his characters work through their destinies, ...in a sentimental pretence that all have the same opportunities for successful lives, Camara represents not only the foolish and thoughtless choices made by the protagonists, but also the deterministic aspects of their provenance, and we may not forget them...It is the human condition, that paradox of free will and determinism, which Louis Camara presents unflinchingly but always good-naturedly. The tone is unsentimental, humorous, perceptive, and accepting, and in itself portrays the attitude one should have toward existence. It bespeaks a deep religious faith in the sanity of the universe and eschews despair and meaninglessness." - Prof. Jean-Pierre Météreau, Department of English and Communication Studies, Texas Lutheran University, USA.The Countess von Rudolstadt
By George Sand, Gretchen Van Slyke. 2008
The first translation of The Countess von Rudolstadt in more than a century brings to contemporary readers one of George…
Sand's most ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French literature as her masterpiece. Consuelo, or the Countess von Rudolstadt, born the penniless daughter of a Spanish gypsy, is transformed into an opera star by the great maestro Porpora. Her peregrinations throughout Europe (especially Vienna, Berlin, and the Bohemian forest), become a quest undertaken on a number of levels: as a singer, as a woman, and as an unwilling subject of alienation and oppression.Sand's heroine moves through a mid-eighteenth-century Europe where absolute rulers mingle with Enlightenment philosophers and gender-bending members of secret societies plot moral and political revolution. As the old order breaks down, she undergoes a series of grueling initiations into radically redefined notions of marriage and social organization. In a novel by equal measures philosophical and lurid, nothing is what it seems. Written some fifty years after the French Revolution, the book taps into many of the political and religious currents that contributed to that social upheaval—and aims to channel their potential for future change.Fed by Sand's rich imagination and bold aspirations for social reform, The Countess von Rudolstadt is a sinuous novel of initiation, continuing the coming of age tale of the titular heroine of Sand's earlier Consuelo and drawing on such diverse models as Ann Radcliffe's Gothic tales and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.Wild Cat Falling
By Mudrooroo. 1965
This was the first novel by a writer of Aboriginal blood to be published in Australia and in 1965 marked…
a unique literary event. Wild Cat Falling is the story of an Australian Aboriginal youth who grows up on the ragged outskirts of a country town. He falls into petty crime, goes to gaol and comes out to do battle once more with the society that put him there. Mudrooroo is active in Aboriginal cultural affairs and is a prolific writer.