Cosmopolitanism and Place considers the way contemporary Anglophone fiction connects global identities with the experience in local places. Looking at fiction set in metropolises, regional cities, and rural communities, this book argues that the everyday experience of these places produces forms of wide connections that emphasize social justice.

While Doris Lessing was composing The Golden Notebook , she was intimately involved with Clancy Sigal and their relationship influenced the literary methods of both writers. Focusing on literary transformations, Rubenstein offers compelling insights into the ethical implications of disguised autobiography and roman a clef .

Fin-de-Siecle Fictions, 1890s- 1990s focuses on fin-de-siecle British and postmodern American fictions of apocalypse and investigates the ways in which these narratives demonstrate shifts in the relations among modern discourses of power and knowledge.

Sartre has more to say about Evil--its origins in, effects on modern man, and how to fight it--than any other philosopher in the 20th century. In this book, the authors examine many of Sartre's literary and philosophical writings for what they have to say about the nature of Evil and its effect on our lives. From this, they evolve guidelines for those wishing to fight Evil in their own lives. Using examples from their experience with human rights violations, the authors suggest that Evil is any attempt to purposely destroy the freedom of a person, and clearly demonstrate that Sartre's work can be useful as a guide for getting along in the contemporary world.

The first book devoted entirely to a critical examination of contemporary Irish prison literature, "Contemporary Irish Republican Prison Writing" explicates extant and previously unpublished texts by world-famous figures like Gerry Adams and Bobby Sands as well as the works of lesser-known and anonymous authors, paying special attention to women's writing. This book analyzes Republican resistance within Northern Irish prisons as it traces the textual history of these writings, demonstrating the ways in which POWs appropriate prison space through discursive strategies. As it explores the aesthetic alterity of prison writing "Contemporary Irish Republican Prison Writing" critiques traditional assumptions about literature, simultaneously shedding light on the continuing conservatism of canonical boundaries.

Inverting the traditional focus of ethnic studies on blackness as the object of scrutiny, this book explores dominant forms of white masculinity as seen by African American authors placed alongside certain white writers. Author analyzes texts by Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin.

This comprehensive and sophisticated feminist analysis contradicts the negative evaluations of earlier feminist critics to define Oates' feminist accomplishments. Wesley presents Oates' fiction as a dynamic structure that grew out of her obsessive concern with the American family and shows her literary patterns of resistance to the gender ideology that shapes it. She illustrates how Oates' disturbing portrayals of troubled families can and do address complex issues of power in contemporary society--economic dislocation, gender inequity, and violence--as they are experienced in intimate relationships. The author defines and exemplifies the central concepts of family, power, and resistance in Oates' work with reference to her own literary criticism and the theoretical principles of Frederic Jameson. She begins by examining the presentation of the mother and the father in Oates' earliest works and then charts mother and daughter, brother and sister, and other family relationships. Wesley contends that the power dynamics of Oates' families relegate daughters to a position of impotence and sons to one of isolation and shows that the evolution of the children's refusal to identify themselves with their male or female models is a major focus in Oates' fiction.

While masculinity has been an increasingly visible field of study within several disciplines (sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, film and tv) over the last two decades, it is surprising that analysis of contemporary representations of the first part of the century has yet to emerge. Professor Brian Baker, evolving from his previous work Masculinities in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000, intervenes to rectify the scholarship in the field to produce a wide-ranging, readable text that deals with films and other texts produced since the year 2000. Focusing on representations of masculinity in cinema, popular fiction and television from the period 2000-2010, he argues that dominant forms of masculinity in Britain and the United States have become increasingly informed by anxiety, trauma and loss, and this has resulted in both narratives that reflect that trauma and others which attempt to return to a more complete and heroic form of masculinity. While focusing on a range of popular genres, such as Bond films, war movies, science fiction and the Gothic, the work places close analyses of individual films and texts in their cultural and historical contexts, arguing for the importance of these popular fictions in diagnosing how contemporary Britain and the United States understand themselves and their changing role in the world through the representation of men, fully recognising the issues of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. Baker draws upon current work in mobility studies and in the study of masculinities to produce the first book-length comparative study of masculinity in popular culture of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

How can the most silent member of the family carry the message of subversion against venerated institutions of state and society? Why would two playwrights, writing 300 years apart, employ the same dramatic methods for rebelling against the establishment, when these methods are virtually ignored by their contemporaries? This book considers these and similar questions. It examines the historical similarities of the eras in which Shakespeare and Shaw wrote and then explores types of father-daughter interactions, considering each in terms of the existing power structures of society.

These two dramatists draw on themes of incest, daughter sacrifice, role playing, education, and androgyny to create both active and passive daughters. The daughters literally represent a challenge to the patriarchy and metaphorically extend that challenge to such institutions as church and state. The volume argues that the father-daughter relationship was the ideal dramatic vehicle for Shakespeare and Shaw to advance their social and political agendas. By exploring larger issues through the father-daughter relationship, both playwrights were able to avoid the watchful eyes of censors and comment on such topics as the divine right of kings, filial bonds of obedience, and even regicide.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: The Recovery of Tradition is a study of the embedded texts that function as the formal and thematic backbone of Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel. Robert M. Nelson identifies the Keresan and Navajo ethnographic prelexts that Silko reappropriates and analyzes the many ways these texts relate to the surrounding prose narrative.

"British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters" reveals that British modernists read widely in anthropology and ethnography, conducted their own "fieldwork," and thematized the challenges of cultural encounters in their fiction. By bringing canonical and popular fiction together with travel writing, ethnographic monographs, and other anthropological texts, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how ethnographic ideas and methods not only permeated the subject matter of literary modernism, but also helped stimulate many of its most important aesthetic innovations.

Richard Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important African-American writers and as a significant 20th-century author. With the publication of Native Son in 1940, Wright established his enduring reputation as a man of letters. With the immense critical success of Native Son, Wright went on to author Black Boy, The Outsider, and Eight Men. His writings reflect his experiences growing up in the poverty and racial strife of the South, and his thoughts on major social issues. This volume traces the critical reception of Wright's major works, from the publication of Native Son to the present day. An introductory chapter overviews the critical response to his writings, while two biographical chapters discuss his writings in relation to his life. Sections are then devoted to Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider. Each of these sections presents reviews and articles reflecting the best criticism of Wright's works. A final section, "Richard Wright Today," offers contemporary assessments of Wright's reputation, as well as fascinating discussions of the recent Library of America editions of his works.

This book examines how a new dialect emerges. It is based on empirical research carried out in Waumandee, Wisconsin, a small community set in a linguistically uncharted territory in North America. Waumandee English is influenced by the native languages of settlers who arrived from different parts of Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Austria and Ireland. Traditional dialectology augmented by sociolinguistic and psychological parameters enables the reader to follow the path of current dialect emergence in Waumandee English.

This is the first study of the cultural meanings of advertising in the Irish Revival period. John Strachan and Claire Nally shed new light on advanced nationalism in Ireland before and immediately after the Easter Rising of 1916, while also addressing how the wider politics of Ireland, from the Irish Parliamentary Party to anti-Home Rule unionism, resonated through contemporary advertising copy. The book examines the manner in which some of the key authors of the Revival, notably Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, reacted to advertising and to the consumer culture around them. Illustrated with over 60 fascinating contemporary advertising images, this book addresses a diverse and intriguing range of Irish advertising: the pages of An Claidheamh Soluis under Patrick Pearse's editorship, the selling of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the advertising columns of The Lady of the House, the marketing of the sports of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the use of Irish Party politicians in First World War recruitment campaigns, the commemorative paraphernalia surrounding the centenary of the 1798 United Irishmen uprising, and the relationship of Murphy's stout with the British military, Sinn Fein and the Irish Free State.

This is the first comprehensive study of Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett's innovative work for the screen. "Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television "provides meticulous analysis of every play Beckett wrote, directed, or adapted for the screen. Herren studies Beckett's use of "memory machines"--technological media for channeling personal, cultural, philosophical, and artistic ghosts from the past. Having conjured these ghosts, Beckett "decomposes" them in order to recompose them for distinctly innovative use. Herren traces this countraditional approach to tradition as Beckett's signature style for film and television. The book concludes with a consideration of the "Beckett on Film" project, where Herren defends the vital need for creative freedom in future productions of Beckett's plays. With this publication, the film and television plays can now assume their rightful place alongside Beckett's remarkable fiction and stage plays, collectively constituting one of the most innovative artistic achievements of the twentieth century.

The works of D.H. Lawrence have always generated critical controversy. From the early prosecution of "The RainboW" (1915) to more recent disputes about feminist criticism, Lawrence engenders strong feelings, both for and against his writings. His appeal, both artistic and intellectual, knows no boundaries. His works remain in print and are widely taught, anthologized, and translated around the world. So too, his texts have engaged some of the best critical minds, and scholarship on Lawrence and his works continues to grow. This reference chronicles the critical response to his writings.

A chronology presents the highlights in his publishing career, while an introductory essay summarizes the major trends in Lawrence criticism. The sections that follow present previously published reviews and essays on his novels, plays, poems, short fiction, and prose and letters. These items are arranged chronologically to illustrate the response to Lawrence over time. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

What did Britain look like to the Muslims who visited and lived in the country in increasing numbers from the late eighteenth century onwards? This book is a literary history of representations of Muslims in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the eve of Salman Rushdie's publication of The Satanic Verses (1988).

This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land .

The December 2006 Iran Holocaust Denial Conference and the following international excoriation of it reveal a paradox of two cultural strands that are emblematic of the legacy of the twentieth century: official denial and historical amnesia on the one hand; and public, cooperative attempts at truth telling and redress on the other. "Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction" shows how this dynamic of amnesia and truth telling shapes literary constructions of history. Focusing on works by Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Bharati Mukherjee, and Julie Otsuka, Marni Gauthier identifies a new form of the historical novel that, arising from this distinct climate, articulates a politics of truth.

"Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature" proposes an interdisciplinary approach to reading and situating narratives of repatriation produced by former exiles. It examines the work of exiles from the Soviet Union who returned to a reformed post-Soviet Russia to initiate narrative processes of self-definition at a time of social, political and cultural transition. It is the first study to demonstrate how narratives of return variously reorganize the poetics of exilic writing and engage the reader in the project of constructing stable identities within a changing national imaginary.

In "The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois," Ryan Schneider shows how and why two of America's most influential public intellectuals--writing from opposite sides of the color line--defined race not only in biological and geo-cultural terms but also as an emotional phenomenon. Drawing on and advancing recent work in Cognitive Literary Studies, Critical Race Theory, and the History of Emotions, Schneider comparatively examines the range of feelings Emerson and Du Bois attribute to the experience of racial difference; his innovative close readings reveal the surprising extent to which they conceive of race reform as an emotive process and how expressions of personal feeling underwrite their public commitments to re-imagining black-white relations.

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism offers a typology of alien encounters and addresses a range of texts including classic novels of alien encounter by H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein; recent blockbusters by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler and Sheri Tepper; and experimental science fiction by Peter Watts and Housuke Nojiri.

Pierre Michon is one of France's most significant contemporary writers. Since the publication in 1984 of his first book, Vies minuscules, Michon's work has never ceased to evade generic classifications. His work ingests books, lives and thought and probes their complex interrelationship and those moments of convergence that transform an ordinary name into that of an 'Author' or of an 'Artist'. The contents of Michon's work are well documented: they are drawn from canonical novels, chronicles, archives and the biographies of artists' lives and are worked into cross-generic forms that revive names and make us rethink the uncertainty of literature. Less has been written of his engagement with avant-garde thought. The legacy of French avant-garde thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of Roland Barthes, informs Michon's work. Barthes's notions of the referent, of intertextuality and of authorship, for example, are transposed, reconfigured and sometimes contested within Michon's work. In this way, Barthes's name, the afterlife of his thought, remains encrypted within Michon's prose. This book situates and reads Michon's texts through the complex inscription and transformation of names drawn from the Creuse, literature, art and avant-garde thought. And it is within this matrix that Michon puts in play his own name and its uncertain relation to literature.

This is a key monograph surveying the portrayal of finance and money in British fiction over the last thirty years.Fiction has become increasingly concerned with the political and imaginative significance of finance, speculation and the money markets - from Ian Fleming's "Goldfinger" to Jonathan Coe's "What a Carve Up" and Martin Amis' "Money". This book argues that recent British fiction demystifies the 'weightless' economy of contemporary money and critiques the popular sense of money as being everywhere but nowhere. The monograph provides a comprehensive survey of a large body of fictional texts that have striven to represent and understand the formative significance of finance capital on contemporary culture. In these novels, the implications of finance capitalism for political identity, for class politics, for the sovereignty of the nation state and a new global order are all explored, dramatised and critiqued. Authors covered include Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Coe, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis and Malcolm Bradbury.