"Russia's Dangerous Texts" examines the ways that writers and their works unnerved and irritated Russia's authoritarian rulers both before and after the Revolution. Kathleen F. Parthe identifies ten historically powerful beliefs about literature and politics in Russia, which include a view of the artistic text as national territory, and the belief that writers must avoid all contact with the state.
Parthe offers a compelling analysis of the power of Russian literature to shape national identity despite sustained efforts to silence authors deemed subversive. No amount of repression could prevent the production, distribution, and discussion of texts outside official channels. Along with tragic stories of lost manuscripts and persecuted writers, there is ample evidence of an unbroken thread of political discourse through art. The book concludes with a consideration of the impact of two centuries of dangerous texts on post-Soviet Russia.

British Writing of the Second World War investigates representations of violence and the relationship of imaginative literature to propaganda and politics. A wide-ranging survey of familiar and forgotten wartime writers, it focuses in greatest detail on the Blitz, military aviation, North Africa, war aims, POWs and the Holocaust. The book theorizes the role of culture in the prosecution of war, gives a richly-textured historical account of contemporary responses to Britains Second World War, and provides a substantial bibliographical resource for future research.

For nearly a decade, writers' collectives such as "Kwani Trust" in Kenya and "Femrite," the Ugandan women writers' association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. "Women's Literature in Kenya and Uganda: ""The Trouble with Modernity" extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve." "Marie Kruger demonstrates that the writers' simultaneous interest in gender dynamics within local communities and in social exchanges between two neighboring East African nations allows for a unique examination of the relationship between modernity, gender, and the complex cultural and political networks of the region.

This book reframes British First World War literature within Britain's history as an imperial nation. Rereading canonical war writers Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, alongside war writing by Enid Bagnold, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Roly Grimshaw and others, the book makes clear that the Great War was more than a European war.

The Austrian composer Hanns Eisler was Bertolt Brecht's closest friend and most politically committed collaborator. In these conversations with Hans Bunge which took place over a period of four years, from 1958 until his death in 1962, Eisler offers a compelling and absorbing account of his and Brecht's period of exile in Europe and the USA between 1933 and 1947, and of the quality of artistic, social and intellectual life in post-war East Germany. Brecht, Music and Culture includes a discussion of a number of Brecht's principal plays, including Life of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, considers the place of music in Brecht's work and discusses the time that Brecht was brought before The House of Un-American Activities Committee. It includes lively accounts of Brecht's meetings with key cultural figures, including Arnold Schoenberg, Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Mann, and offers throughout a sustained response to the question of the purpose of art in a time of political turmoil. Throughout the conversations, Eisler provides illuminating and original insights into Brecht's work and ideas and gives a highly entertaining first-hand account of his friend's personality and attitudes. First published in Germany in 1975, and now published in English for the first time, the conversations provide a fascinating account of the lives and work of two of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s, and posited the decline, even sterility of white European races. In early-twentieth-century Spain, the novels of Baroja and Blasco Ibanez both assimilated and subverted cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as Morel, Lombroso and Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties around reproduction and racial decadence, Murphy traces the creative tension between each author's literary representations of the degenerate female body and the profitable market provided by women readers in an evolving consumer society. Countering Baroja's resounding public disdain for his Valencian contemporary, Katharine Murphy repositions Blasco as markedly closer to the so-called Generation of 1898 than hitherto acknowledged. Dr Katharine Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter. Author of Re-reading Pio Baroja and English Literature (2004), she has published widely on Comparative Literature and Spanish Modernism.

A new and innovative approach to Latin American Studies which makes an important contribution to contemporary debates about cultural appropriation and the integration of immigrant communities Winner of the 2016-17 AHGBI/Spanish Embassy Publication Prize This book focuses on the contemporary production and consumption of Latin American culture in the UK through the lens of the !Viva! Film Festival in Manchester. It offers a comprehensive analysis of how the British press has used the framework of magical realism to interpret Latin America for readers and applies these findings to the festival in order to explore deeper questions of identity formation and cultural appropriation. The book traces the growth of Latin American communities in Britain; the popularity of Latin American literature, music, and film in many of the country's largest cities, including London and Manchester; and shows how people in Britain who do not have Latin American origins consume Latin American culture to reconcile issues of self-identity and cosmopolitanism. Imagining Latin America presents a new and innovative approach to Latin American Studies and makes an important contribution to contemporary debates about the cultural integration of immigrant communities and transnational exchange.

In the 1980s and 1990s French fiction has rediscovered its mission to entertain and tell stories, as well as to negotiate a path through traumatic experiences such as the legacy of France's colonial and wartime past, the Holocaust, the spectre of Aids, the labyrinths of desire and personal identity. Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize examine some of the most popular and some of the most challenging of texts which emerged during François Mitterrand's presidency of France (1981-1995) and relate them to the dominant literary and cultural trends of the period.

A diverse and multinational volume, this book showcases the passages of Joseph Conrad's narratives across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the transtextual and transcultural elements of his fiction. Featuring contributions from distinguished and emergent Conrad scholars, it unpacks the transformative meanings which Conrad's narratives have achieved in crossing national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Featuring studies on the reception of Conrad in modern China, an exploration of Conrad's relationship with India, a comparative study of the hybrid art of Conrad and Salman Rushdie, and the responses of Conrad's narratives to alternative media forms, this volume brings out transtextual relations among Conrad's works and various media forms, world narratives, philosophies, and emergent modes of critical inquiry. Gathering essays by contributors from Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this volume constitutes an inclusive, transnational networking of emergent border-crossing scholarship.

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.

In the first half of the twentieth century, modernist works appeared not only in obscure little magazines and books published by tiny exclusive presses but also in literary reprint magazines of the 1920s, tawdry pulp magazines of the 1930s, and lurid paperbacks of the 1940s. In his nuanced exploration of the publishing and marketing of modernist works, David M. Earle questions how and why modernist literature came to be viewed as the exclusive purview of a cultural elite given its availability in such popular forums. As he examines sensational and popular manifestations of modernism, as well as their reception by critics and readers, Earle provides a methodology for reconciling formerly separate or contradictory materialist, cultural, visual, and modernist approaches to avant-garde literature. Central to Earle's innovative approach is his consideration of the physical aspects of the books and magazines - covers, dust wrappers, illustrations, cost - which become texts in their own right. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, Earle's study shows that modernism emerged in a publishing ecosystem that was both richer and more complex than has been previously documented.

Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change investigates the evolving nature of postcolonial literary criticism in response to global, regional, and local environmental transformations brought about by climate change. It builds upon, and extends, previous studies in postcolonial ecocriticism to demonstrate how the growing awareness of human-caused global warming has begun to permeate literary consciousness, praxis and analysis. The breadth of the volume's coverage - the diversity of its focal locations, cultures, genres and texts - serves as a salient reminder that, while climate change is global, its impacts vary, effecting peoples from place to place unequally, and often in accordance with their particular historical experience of colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as their ongoing marginalisations. "Demonstrating the urgency of invoking novel epistemological approaches combining the scientific and the imaginative, this book is a "must read" for those concerned about the present and potential impacts of climate change on formerly colonised areas of the world. The comprehensive and illuminating Introduction offers a crucial history and current state of postcolonial ecocriticism as it has been and is addressing climate crises." - Helen Tiffin, University of Wollongong "The broad focus on the polar regions, the Pacific and the Caribbean - with added essays on environmental justice/activism in India and Egypt - opens up rich terrain for examination under the rubric of postcolonial and ecocritical analysis, not only expanding recent studies in this field but also enabling new comparisons and conceptual linkages." - Helen Gilbert, Royal Holloway, University of London "The subject is topical and vital and will become even more so as the problem of how to reconcile the demands of climate change with the effects on regions and individual nations already damaged by the economic effects of colonisation and the subsequent inequalities resulting from neo-colonialism continues to grow." - Gareth Griffiths, Em. Prof. University of Western Australia

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyzes the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that, rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasizes the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly, an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and "Geocritical Explorations "presents an array of concrete examples and readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices. Representing various areas of literary and cultural studies, as well as different parts of the globe and multiple types of space, "Geocritical Explorations" provides a succinct overview of geocriticism and a point of departure for further exploration.

The extraordinary flowering of Southern literary talent in the early twentieth century, the Southern Literary Renascence, has continued virtually unabated, showing increasing vitality in recent decades. These newer fiction writers, poets, dramatists, and journalists reflect in their work the changing social conditions of the South while also presenting traditional Southern values and qualities. Their astonishing output constitutes a phenomenon worthy of being called a Second Southern Literary Renascence. Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, editors of the acclaimed Fifty Southern Writers before 1900 and Fifty Southern Writers after 1900, found that they could only begin to suggest the continuing abundance and significance of Southern writing in the latter volume. Retaining the same format, they have developed two new volumes for the contemporary period. The first, focusing on fiction, comprises forty-nine talented novelists, including such popular figures as Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, T. R. Pearson, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. The companion volume, (Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook forthcoming from Greenwood Press) will cover primarily poets, playwrights, and essayists as well as fiction writers who have made major contributions to these other genres. The essays, written by scholars and critics, present in each case a biographical sketch, an analysis of the writer's style and major themes, an assessment of reviews and scholarship, a chronological list of works, and a bibliography of selected criticism. Considered individually and comparatively and with attention to the editors' introductory essay, these bio-bibliographical studiesclearly demonstrate the state and strength of Southern letters.

Warren's major theme--whether man can live on a purely naturalistic level--is seen as a parallel to the major intellectual currents of American literature in the past 25 years.

This study reclaims a lost body of theatrical work by focusing on four labor plays of the 1930s. These works dramatize union organizing efforts in American industry, using documentary detail in the dialogue and plot. To date, little attention has been given to the use of documentary detail in American scripts. Placing the labor plays in a social and historical context, Duffy raises interesting questions about the depiction of women as labor leaders and the overlooked role of women playwrights in the 1920s and 30s. The discussion focuses on the function of the plays and the question of whether they were merely didactic or if they served greater propagandistic ends. This work will be of interest to scholars in theatre history, American studies, southern history, and American labor history.

An original mapping of women's writing in the 1940s and 1950s, this book looks at Englishness and national identity in women's writing and includes writing from Scotland, Wales, Ireland the Indian subcontinent and Africa. The authors discussed include Virginia Woolf, Daphne Du Maurier, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark.

Melvin Burgess has made a powerful name for himself in the world of children's and young adult literature, emerging in the 1990s as the author of over twenty critically acclaimed novels. This collection of original essays by a team of established and new scholars introduces readers to the key debates surrounding Burgess's most challenging work, including controversial young adult novels Junk and Doing It. Covering a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, the volume also presents exciting new readings of some of his less familiar fiction for children, and features an interview with the author.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and post-memory of the Holocaust both scrutinises recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.

"The scope of the work is broad, with European and Latin American influences well represented. Recommended for collections that emphasize fiction of the past two decades." Library Journal

This book is a concise and engaging analysis of contemporary literature viewed through the critical lens of cosmopolitan theory. It covers a wide spectrum of issues including globalization, cosmopolitanism, nationhood, identity, philosophical nomadism, posthumanism, climate change, devolution and love.

"These essays trace the Western poem as it confronts indigenous alterity in Latin America. Rather than extend Western conceptions of writing in search of an alleged Amerindian ethno-literature, Ajens approaches literature as a Western invention. This book discusses a wide range of indigenous American, Hispanic, and European texts, with a focus on language, authorship, genre, and translation"--

Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Helene Cixous, Alfonso Cuaron, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.