In the late nineteenth century, Asian American drama made its debut with the spotlight firmly on the lives and struggles of Asians in North America, rather than on the cultures and traditions of the Asian homeland. Today, Asian American playwrights continue to challenge the limitations of established theatrical conventions and direct popular attention toward issues and experiences that might otherwise be ignored or marginalized. While Asian American literature came into full bloom in the last 25 years, Asian American drama has yet to receive the kind of critical attention it warrants. This reference book serves as a versatile vehicle for exploring the field of Asian American drama from its recorded conception to its present stage.

Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 52 Asian American dramatists of origins from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and China. Each entry includes relevant biographical information that contextualizes the works of a playwright, an interpretive description of selected plays that spotlights recurring themes and plots, a summary of the playwright's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. The entries are written by expert contributors and reflect the ethnic diversity of the Asian American community. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography, which includes anthologies, scholarly studies, and periodicals.

Jewish identity in German culture remains in a critical state of flux. Analyzing its construction and perception in public discourse, the contributors of this volume discuss the works of a number of authors--from Kafka to new writers such as Irene Dische and Maxim Biller. In addition, topics covered include: American-Jewish writers in Germany, minority culture, homosexuality, and Jewish magazines.

This book focuses on the struggles and strategies of the Muslim woman immigrant to Britain after 9/11, as depicted in a group of thematically-related novels published over the past decade. The book looks at the work of Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Fadia Faqir, Camilla Gibb, Kia Abdullah, Almas Khan and Nadeem Aslam - all of whom raise questions about the integration of the Muslim woman who has moved from a majority position in her Muslim homeland to a minority position in her adopted home in Britain (usually London). Drawing on the idea of 'disorientation' (a period of withdrawal, confusion and alienation experienced by the Muslim woman after arrival in the West), this book argues for a greater focus on religion as an element of immigrant identity-creation, ultimately showing that the heterogeneity of immigrant religious experience requires a new and more complex understanding of diasporic existence.

As twentieth-century writers confronted the political violence of their time, they were overcome by rhetorical despair. Unspeakable acts left writers speechless. They knew that the atrocities of the century had to be recorded, but how? A dead body does not explain itself, and the narrative of the suicide bomber is not the story of the child killed in the blast. In the past, communal beliefs had justified or condemned the most horrific acts, but the late nineteenth-century crisis of belief made it more difficult to come to terms with the meaning of violence. In this major new study, Joyce Wexler argues that this situation produced an aesthetic dilemma that writers solved by inventing new forms. Although Symbolism, Expressionism, Modernism, Magic Realism, and Postmodernism have been criticized for turning away from public events, these forms allowed writers to represent violence without imposing a specific meaning on events or claiming to explain them. Wexler's investigation of the way we think and write about violence takes her across national and period boundaries and into the work of some of the greatest writers of the century, among them Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Alfred Doeblin, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald.

Lizette Woodworth Reese was a professional, independent woman from the time she left high school in 1873. She began her teaching career that year and published her first poem in Baltimore's Southern Magazine in 1874. She taught for 45 years in the public schools of Baltimore. Her poetry and her readings of it were particularly popular in women's roups throughout the United States. She was one of the founders of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore and its chairman of poetry until her death in 1935. In April, 1931 she was named Poet Laureate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In that same month, she was iven an honorary doctorate of literature by Goucher College which called her one of the greatest living women in America. In her lifetime, Reese was internationally admired for her poetic genius and hailed by H.L. Mencken as one of the most distinguished poets in the United States. This volume is the first extensive collection of her poems since her Selected Poems was published in 1926. The volume begins with a short biographical sketch of the poet and includes some 250 of her poems. The poems are arranged into sections illustrating some of her major themes: nature, love, remembrance, faith, family, history, and literature. An eighth section contains a complete narrative poem, Little Henrietta, about the life and death of a young girl. Introductory comments help to place Reese in the continuum of American poetry and to indicate her influence on succeeding generations of poets. The book also includes an extensive bibliography and a subject index.

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.

Respected by his peers and hugely successful internationally in his own time, Andre Maurois is now hardly read. Moderate and conciliatory in everything, including his literary style, he appealed to the educated reader of his time, but did those very qualities prevent him from achieving lasting distinction and impact?

The radical, 'postmodernist' waves of experimentation that swept Anglo-American fiction from the late 1960s constitute a delayed response to the upheavals of the Second World War, yet the legacy of the war barely figures in prevalent accounts of the postmodernist movement. As Paul Crosthwaite shows in this provocative book, to recognize the significance of the war in contemporary culture is to acknowledge that postmodernism, as a sensibility, aesthetic style, and mode of thought, must be entirely reconceived. Challenging dominant theorizations of the postmodern as depthless and dehistoricized, Crosthwaite demonstrates that postmodernism has not abandoned history but has rather reformulated it in terms of trauma, trauma that is traceable, time and again, to the catastrophes of the 1940s. The book stages a revealing confrontation between influential theories of trauma and postmodernism and offers innovative close readings of key texts by Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Richard Powers and Ian McEwan.

Speculative fiction often shows the complicated and rather fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women. Through prominent writers like Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson, Jones highlights how personal experiences of illness and disease frequently reflect larger societal sicknesses in connection to race and gender.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter ... Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien is now hailed as one of the most majestic writers of her era - and Country Girl is her fabulous memoir. Born in rural Ireland, O'Brien weaves the tale of her life from convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, moving on to the wild parties of 1960s bohemian in London, encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans, love and unrequited love, and glamorous trips to America as a celebrity writer. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have forged a legendary author. O'Brien recasts her life with the imaginative alchemy of a poet, and the result is a memoir of sparkling wisdom and honesty. Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

With the exhaustion of postcolonial studies, and following the historical turn in studies of European imperialism, the time is ripe for a more sharply historical consideration of the role of European legal thought in processes of colonial governance. Rather than recycling general theories of the ideological role of law in European colonization, the contributions to this volume focus on the historical interaction between law and politics in British colonial contexts in order to clarify how European legal doctrines and institutions were actually transmitted, negotiated and modified in the concrete circumstances of frontier polities.

Implementing a never-before-seen approach to sea literature, American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations explores the role of American maritime activities and their cultural representations in literature. Differentiating between the 'terrestrial' and 'oceanic' as concepts, Shin Yamashiro divides sea literature into three categories: literature on the sea, by the sea, and beneath the sea. Discussing both canonical works and new books on scuba diving, deep-sea explorations, and surfing, this fascinating study recognizes sea literature's unique influence on American history.

When Constance Garnett's translations (1910-20) made Dostoevsky's novels accessible in England for the first time they introduced a disruptive and liberating literary force, and English novelists had to confront a new model and rival. The writers who are the focus of this study - Lawrence, Woolf, Bennett, Conrad, Forster, Galsworthy and James - either admired or feared Dostoevsky as a monster who might dissolve all literary and cultural distinctions. Though their responses differed greatly, these writers were unanimous in their inability to recognize Dostoevsky as a literary artist. They viewed him instead as a psychologist, a mystic, a prophet and, in the cases of Lawrence and Conrad, a hated rival who compelled creative response. This study constructs a map of English modernist novelists' misreadings of Dostoevsky, and in so doing it illuminates their aesthetic and cultural values and the nature of the modern English novel.

Laments and complaints are among the most ancient poetical forms and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Understanding plaintive language, however, is often prevented by the resentment and fear it evokes. Lamenting and complaining seems pointless, irreconcilable, and destructive. Language of Ruin and Consumption examines Freud's approaches to lamenting and complaining, the heart of psychoanalytic therapy and theory, and takes them as guidelines for reading key works of the modern canon. The re-negotiation of older--ritual, dramatic, and juridical--forms in Rilke, Wittgenstein, Scholem, Benjamin, and Kafka puts plaintive language in the center of modern individuality and expounds a fundamental dimension of language neglected in theory: reciprocity is at issue in plaintive language. Language of Ruin and Consumption advocates that a fruitful reception of psychoanalysis in criticism combines the discussion of psychoanalytical concepts with an adaptation of the hermeneutical principle ignored in most philosophical approaches to language, or relegated to mere rhetoric: speech is not only by someone and on something, but also addressed to someone.

Shortlisted for the 2017 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women's aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. The everyday has been noted as a "keynote of the New Modernist Studies" (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday.

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.

Nobel laureate William Faulkner is one of the most distinctive voices in American literature. Known for his opaque prose style and his evocative depictions of life in the American South, he is recognised as one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. This introductory book provides students and readers of Faulkner with a clear overview of the life and work of one of America's most prolific writers of fiction. His nineteen novels, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses and Absalom, Absalom! are discussed in detail, as are his major short stories and nonfiction. Focused on the works themselves, but also providing useful information about their critical reception, this introduction is an accessible guide to Faulkner's challenging and complex oeuvre.

Famed and outspoken Russian poet, Maximilian Voloshin's notoriety has grown steadily since his slow release from Soviet censorship. For the first time, Landa showcases his vast poetic contributions, proving his words to be an overlooked solution both to the political and cultural turmoil engulfing the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century.

This is the first collection to examine the theory and practice of the historical novel in twentieth-century German and Austrian literature. One of the main aims of the volume is to work against the conventional view of the historical novel as an antiquated and escapist genre, remote from contemporary problems and tied to nineteenth-century models of realism. These essays show that the historical novel is in fact always a response to contemporary history.

John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions is an exploration of Banville's novels from the point of view of various psychoanalytic understandings of the concept of narcissism. It presents this increasingly central figure in contemporary fiction as a writer for whom narcissism is both an essential truth of selfhood and a fundamental aspect of the writing of fiction. Though it deals with a number of theoretical concepts, it does so in a straightforward and highly accessible manner. The book is not simply a reading of a single, isolated aspect of Banville's work; rather, it presents narcissism as the key to understanding this writer, and as a way of bringing together the various disparate strands - thematic, stylistic and formal - of his complex and enigmatic oeuvre.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. In this first study of Latino/a literature to systematically examine the post-Sixties generation of writers, The Latino/a Canon challenges the ways that Latino/a literary studies imagines the relationship between art, politics, and the market.

This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destruction from a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

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.

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.

"Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett's Works "places sex and sexuality firmly at the heart of Beckett's ouevre. From the earliest prose to the late plays, Paul Stewart uncovers a profound mistrust of procreation and a surprising variety of non-reproductive forms of sex-- the solitary, the homoerotic, and the geriatric--which challenge established notions of propriety and identity politics. Sex informs Beckett's search for a means of aesthetic creation not infected by aspects of natural procreation, and the suffering and death which it entails, in the hope that the tyranny of Schopenhauer's will-to-live might be overcome. Paul Stewart ably and amply shows that sex, so long overlooked, is an integral, and troubling, facet of Beckett's art.