This essential discussion of Amy Tan's life and works is a necessity for high school students and an enriching supplement for book club members. A tour-de-force in Asian American writing, Amy Tan has created works that are essential to high school and undergraduate literature classes and are often book club selections. Reading Amy Tan is a handy resource that offers both groups plot summaries of five of Tan's novels, as well as character and thematic analysis. The handbook also provides an overview of Tan's life and discusses how she emerged onto the scene as a novelist. Tan's typical themes, including Asian American issues and mother-daughter relationships, are examined in relation to today's current events and pop culture. Readers will also discover how and where they can find Tan on the Internet, and how the media has received her works. The "What Do I Read Next" chapter will help readers find other authors and works that deal with similar subjects. This handbook is an indispensable tool for both high school and public libraries. Summarizes each of Tan's novels, offering a plot summary and a discussion of themes, settings, and characters Provides questions that can be used to generate classroom and book club discussion Includes sidebars to highlight interesting information about the author and her work Offers a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources to facilitate further study

Using place studies within a postcolonial context, this study explores the sense-aesthetic dimensions in literature such as smell, sound, etc. that often challenge the rationalizing logic of modernity. Through close readings of writers such as Conrad and Coetzee, Moslund invites scholars to shift focus from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis.

Focusing on the intersection of literature and politics since the beginning of the 20th century, this book examines authors, historical figures, major literary and political works, national literatures, and literary movements to reveal the intrinsic links between literature and history. Literary works have often engaged political issues, and many political writings give close attention to literary concerns. This encyclopedia explores the complex relationship between literature and politics through detailed entries written by expert contributors on authors, historical figures, major literary and political works, national literatures, and literary movements, covering specific themes, concepts, and genres related to literature and politics from the 20th century to the present. The work covers cover authors that include Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Philip K. Dick, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, and Virginia Woolf, just to mention a few. International in scope, Literature and Politics Today: The Political Nature of Modern Fiction, Poetry, and Drama covers writing ranging from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, with special emphasis on works written in English. The content of the some 150 alphabetically arranged entries is ideal for high school students working on assignments involving literature to explore such current yet historically ongoing social issues as censorship and propaganda. This book is appropriate for public libraries where it will serve to support student research and to help general readers learn more about enduring political concerns through literary works. Academic libraries will find this reference a valuable guide for undergraduates studying literature, history, political science, law, and other disciplines. Covers numerous authors from around the world ranging from the beginning of the 20th century to the modern era Enables students to better understand literary works central to the curriculum by considering them in their political contexts Helps readers to use literature in order to learn about modern political and social issues across cultures and better appreciate the political significance of contemporary writings Contains a number of "gateway" entries that survey entire national literatures, thereby giving readers an introduction to the authors who are important within those literatures Assists students in evaluating rhetorical strategies and political views, thus fostering critical thinking in support of the Common Core State Standards

Dudley Randall was one of the foremost voices in African American literature during the twentieth century, best known for his poetry and his work as the editor and publisher of Broadside Press in Detroit. While he published six books of poetry during his life, much of his work is currently out of print or fragmented among numerous anthologies. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall brings together his most popular poems with his lesser-known short stories, first published in The Negro Digest during the 1960s, and several of his essays, which profoundly influenced the direction and attitude of the Black Arts movement. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall is arranged in seven sections: "Images from Black Bottom," "Wars: At Home and Abroad," "The Civil Rights Era," "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects," "Love Poems," "Dialectics of the Black Aesthetic," and "The Last Leap of the Muse." Poems and prose are mixed throughout the volume and are arranged roughly chronologically. Taken as a whole, Randall's writings showcase his skill as a wordsmith and his affinity for themes of love, human contradictions, and political action. His essays further contextualize his work by revealing his views on race and writing, aesthetic form, and literary and political history. Editor Melba Joyce Boyd introduces this collection with an overview of Randall's life and career. The collected writings in Roses and Revolutions not only confirm the talent and the creative intellect of Randall as an author and editor but also demonstrate why his voice remains relevant and impressive in the twenty-first century. Randall was named the first Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit and received numerous awards for his literary work, including the Life Achievement Award from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1986. Students and teachers of African American literature as well as readers of poetry will appreciate this landmark volume.

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

Monteath examines the international literature of the Spanish Civil War across the entire range of the political spectrum, from anarchism to nazism. Utilizing this approach he is able to highlight the extraordinary creative potential of a period in which political and aesthetic practice were almost inseparable. It is widely recognized that there was an extraordinarily high level of political commitment in the literature of the 1930s in general, and of the Spanish Civil War in particular. Writers as well as the general public seemed to interpret the world very much in political terms, and they sought in political ideologies, such as fascism and communism, the answers to the pressing problems of the age. Monteath examines the fiction, non-fictional prose texts, poetry, and drama of the period across the entire range of the political spectrum to assess the impact of political commitment on literature. While an opening chapter establishes the political background to the war, subsequent chapters are structured around the question of the relationship between literature and a particular political ideology, moving from Right to Left across the spectrum. Monteath confirms the inadequacy of the notion that the Spanish Civil War was simply a war between two sides. He shows that there are a number of themes which transcend political boundaries. Beyond those, however, it is evident that the substantive interests expressed in the literature of the war vary not only from one side of the political spectrum to the other, but also within the two opposing camps, and in particular within the Left. Monteath examines these variations and the politically based reasons for their existence in detail. An important work for all students and scholars of the Spanish Civil War and the literature of the twentieth century.

A descriptive bibliography of the science fiction works of L. Sprague de Camp, including both foreign and English language publications.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

This volume brings into focus a range of emergent issues related to women in the Indian diaspora. The conditions propelling women's migration and their experiences during the process of migration and settlement have always been different and very specific to them. Standing 'in-between' the two worlds of origin and adoption, women tend to experience dialectic tensions between freedom and subjugation, but they often use this space to assert independence, and to redefine their roles and perceptions of self. The central idea in this volume is to understand women's agency in addressing and redressing the complex issues faced by them; in restructuring the cultural formats of patriarchy and gender relations; managing the emerging conflicts over what is to be transmitted to the following generations,; renegotiating their domestic roles and embracing new professional and educational successes; and adjusting to the institutional structures of the host state. The essays included in the volume discuss women in the Indian diaspora from multidisciplinary perspectives involving social, economic, cultural, and political aspects. Such an effort privileges diasporic women's experiences and perspectives in the academia and among policy makers.

This book reads Oscar Wilde as a queer theorist and Wilfred Owen as his symbolic son. It centers on the concept of 'male procreation', or the generation of new ideas through an erotic but non-physical connection between two men, and it sees Owen as both a product and a continuation of this Wildean tradition.

"Fetishism and Its Discontents "argues that post-1960 American fiction utilizes fetishism as a strategy for expressing social and political discontent and for negotiating traumatic experiences. Through close readings of novels and short stories by Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, John Hawkes, and Tim O’Brien, among others, Christopher Kocela moves away from the entrenched, Freudian constructs of fetishism and uncovers a new understanding of the fetish as a parallax object that testifies to often threatening differences in racial, gender, and class perspectives.  The first detailed study of its kind, this book brings originality and rigor to a culturally timely topic.   

Breaking new ground in this century, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first of its kind to address the work of contemporary international women playwrights. The book considers the work of established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Marie Clements, Lara Foot-Newton, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Caridad Svich, and Judith Thompson, but it also foregrounds important plays by many emerging writers. Divided into three sections-Histories, Conflicts, and Genres-the book explores such topics as the feminist history play, solo performance, transcultural dramaturgies, the identity play, the gendered terrain of war, and eco-drama, and encompasses work from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Oceania, South Africa, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. With contributions from leading international scholars and an introductory overview of the concerns and challenges facing women playwrights in this new century, Contemporary Women Playwrights explores the diversity and power of women's playwriting since 1990, highlighting key voices and examining crucial critical and theoretical developments within the field.

Clifford Odets through his plays, which include "Waiting for Lefty" and "Awake" and "Sing!," was the champion of the oppressed, avenger for the poor. He and his plays, as presented by the influential Group Theatre, were the conscience of America during the Depression. Author Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a respected psychoanalyst and close personal friend, penned what is considered the classic biography of Odets. Based on exhaustive research, including access to his personal papers, plus her own insights into the man and his career, it is at last back in prtin. The book is richly annotated, with a thorough bibliography, personal chronology, a list of Odets' works, published and unpublished, and a section of rare photographs.

Part of a new phase of post-1960s U.S. Latino literature, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros both engage in unique networks of paratexts that center on the performance of latinidad. Here, Ellen McCracken re-envisions Gerard Genette's paratexts for the present day, arguing that the Internet increases the range, authorship, and reach of the paratextual portals and that they constitute a key element of the creative process of Latino literary production in 21st century America. This smart and useful book examines how both novelists interact with the interplay of populist and hegemonic multiculturalism and allows new points of entry into these novels.

This work attempts to provide a portrait of Joyce from many viewpoints, aiming at selecting those interviews and recollections that have not been reprinted as well as those that are not readily accessible. James Joyce was a self-centred man. Unlike Wilde and Behan, who were too busy living to write, Joyce, like O'Casey and Yeats, gave the totality of his life to his art. He did not find his diversion in his friends because of the exigencies of his work. However, he was not unsociable - he was capable of strong friendships and the number of people who knew him was enormous, as this collection tries to reflect.

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.

This book traces the creative process in Yeats's writing, in his making and remaking of verse, and in the development of a whole body of work during the last forty years of his life. Lyrical and philosophical poetry, verse-drama, the shifting contexts of personal and political events -including controversy, world and civil war, and a large dose of artistic experimentation - are all dealt with here. The book is illustrated and loaded with unpublished material, including the extant remains of Yeats's ambitious but unfinished 'fifth play for dancers', based on the local legends of Ballylee that Yeats made his own. The book addresses overlooked or inadequately presented findings in Yeats studies and brings to light much wholly new matter, including a comprehensive 'Chronology' of the composition of poems, the first since Ellmann's The Identity of Yeats. The book welcomes newcomers interested in detailed narratives about poetry 'well-made' and life well-lived.

Popular fiction follows literature professors wherever they go. At coffee shops or out for drinks, after faculty meetings or classes, even at family reunions - they are persistently pressed to talk about bestselling novels. Questions immediately follow: What do I mean when I say a book is "good"? Why do contemporary novels like these, conversations like these, matter to professors of literature? Shouldn't they be spending their time re-reading The Great Gatsby? The Ulysses Delusion confronts these questions and answers their call for more engaged conversations about books. Through topics like the Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter, and Chick Lit, Cecilia Konchar Farr explores the lively, democratic, and gendered history of novels in the US as a context for understanding how avid readers and literary professionals have come to assess them so differently.

While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.

Featuring canonical Spanish American and Brazilian texts of the 1920s and 30s, Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature is an innovative analysis of the body as site of inscription for avant-garde objectives such as originality, subjectivity, and subversion. Guided by close attention to socio-historical contexts and mythical sources, the study illuminates aspects such as the relationship between synecdoche and the body politic, the corporeal and linguistic effects of immersion in the return to language origin, and the quest for new frontiers in poetic ontologies. Unpacking the vanguard body legacy, this insightful anatomy will be of interest to scholars of the avant-garde, body theory, and Latin American comparative literature.

In the years since World War II, what began in the United States as a shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy soon led to a massive outpouring of new commercial offerings of consumer products and services accompanied by unprecedented efforts to market these commodities. How, Monroe Friedman asks, did these extraordinary commercial developments change the American people over the course of the postwar period? He offers the beginnings of an answer to this, and many other related questions, by bringing together the individual components of a recently completed series of studies on changes in language used in the popular literature of the United States since 1945. The studies ask how literature has been influenced by commercial developments. Brand names were used as the indicator of linguistic influence, and detailed content analyses were conducted to examine trends in the use of brand names in popular literature contexts. The first chapter provides background information for the individual studies and the last chapter attempts to make sense of their aggregate findings. Several intervening chapters examine the results of content analyses of popular novels, plays, and songs of the postwar era. Additional chapters look at the use of brand names in newspaper reporting of non-business stories, as well as the symbolic communication functions of brand names in both humorous and non-humorous writings. The penultimate chapter uses test data from Consumer Reports to analyze the quality of the consumer products whose brand names are used frequently in the popular literature of the postwar era. Friedman offers a unique and important combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to an extremely large and diverse set of popular culture materials. His findings, which shed light on significant commercial developments of the postwar period, cut across many disciplines including American studies, history, literature, journalism, drama, linguistics, marketing, advertising, mass communications, sociology, psychology, and popular culture.

Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction examines the representation of the Irish woman migrant and ideas of exile in the contemporary Irish novel. Women have frequently been overlooked or made to serve an emblematic or symbolic function in the portrayal of exile in Irish writing, but more recent treatments of exile and emigration show a keen interest in reclaiming the history of the Irish woman emigrant and in explicitly addressing this lacuna. The book surveys how the Irish woman emigrant is imagined from the early twentieth century to the present day, and explores how six Irish authors - Julia O'Faolain, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, John McGahern, William Trevor and Colm Toibin - have contributed to the recovery of the story of the woman migrant. Particular emphasis is given to how these writers offer complex representations of women in relation to the Irish emigrant experience and respond to a range of different meanings of exile and emigration in an Irish context.

The Irish Theatre in Transition explores the ever-changing Irish Theatre from its inception to its vibrant modern-day reality. This book shows some of the myriad forms of transition and how Irish theatre reflects the changing conditions of a changing society and nation.

From the early 20th century to the present, Southern literary talent has flourished. The newer poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists of this region often use their writings to explore the changing social values of the South, while also drawing upon traditional Southern values and culture. This reference work is a guide to the writings of 50 contemporary Southern poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists. Many of the authors profiled in this volume have established themselves as writers of lasting significance. However, the book also profiles the careers and work of authors who are emerging only now as masters of their art. Each chapter in this book is devoted to a single author, and arranged alphabetically for the reader's convenience. Each is written by an expert on the author, and includes a biographical sketch, a discussion of major themes, a survey of criticism, and a bibliography of works by and about the author. An introductory essay overviews modern Southern writing, and a selected, general bibliography concludes the work.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.