Theatre has often found itself at the centre of recent debates over censorship and the arts, as a result of coverage of events such as the protests against the play "Behzti" and the controversy over "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This book offers the first sustained study of censorship of the British stage from 1968 into the twenty-first century.

Exploring the complex relationship between aesthetic experience and personal identity in Larkin's work, this book gives close and original readings of three major poems ('Here', 'Livings' and 'Aubade'), and two neglected but important themes (Larkin and the supernatural, Larkin and Flaubert).

This unique reference work provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers and topics. As well as detailed entries on women writing across a whole range of genres, it provides contextualizing material, with concise introductions to related topics, including organizations, movements, genres and publications, as well as literary and historical events. An integral timeline provides a framework for the entries, and a thorough, annotated bibliography of relevant critical material is an invaluable point of reference.

The 1999 centennial of Ernest Hemingway's birth marks a time for the reevaluation of his position as America's premier modernist writer. The previously unpublished essays in this collection plumb unexplored details of Hemingway's life to illuminate new and unexpected dimensions of the force of his literary accomplishments. The essays discuss biographical details of Hemingway's personal and professional life as well as describe the subleties of his character.

"As a historical legacy, and in the present, servitude remains an ideal macrocosm for examining the racial and class stratification that built this country. Margaret Jordan's brilliant analysis of fictional representations of servitude in the US reminds us of the extent to which the reproduction of the American family, community, and nation has been accomplished through racialized human interactions. Servitude continues today as racialized occupations built on the blood, sweat and tears of the working poor, many of whom are immigrants. "African American Servitude and Historical Imaginings" challenges current scholarship on the commodification of care work and material consumption that rely solely on gendered metaphors for serving and being served. Without understanding the legacy of Black servitude as America's racialized past, we cannot begin to illuminate the significance that race continues to play in our daily lives and most intimate spaces."--Mary Romero, author of "Maid in USA""Where does the truth lie? Does the truth lie? Can history tell the truth? Is the truth of history best served by fiction? Dr. Margaret Jordan boldly probes into the heart of woefully neglected considerations of power, color, caste, work, and guilt in A"frican American Servitude and Historical Imaginings. "Examining four American novelists' tales of master/servant relationships Jordan's perceptive examination, at long last, provides a proper place for vital discussions about the role of the help."--Bill Harris, author of "Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil" and "Yardbird Suite: Side One: A Biopoem on Charlie Parker""In "African American Servitude" Dr. Jordan shines clear light on the inclination of some writersto project and sustain damaging stereotypes. We see the all too familiar happy mammy, the wanton Jezebel, the ne'er-do-well lazy Willie shuckin' and jivin', the dangerous brute. We see resistance to accounting for and reckoning with the mothers, lovers, citizens, fathers, and builders living in full color beneath those encrusted, enforced, fradulent false faces masked by servitude. But Dr. Jordan also powerfully reveals that in the hands of some writers, such as Doctorow and Morrison, these 'dumb' not-quite-'people' turn out to be landmines for the national psyche. Beyond the book pages, and the writers' imaginings, we are forced to consider a society in denial."--Ron Milner, author of "Who's Got His Own" and "What the Wine Sellers Buy"

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.

"American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative" explores the contorted and often conflicted relationship writers have with their images and reputations as authors, particularly when they choose to write about themselves and their personal lives. By analyzing the autobiographical nonfiction of Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, and Dave Eggers in light of theories of authorship, autobiography, and celebrity, this book considers the art of literary self-representation practiced under the forces of publishing's business imperatives and mass culture's insatiable appetite for personal stories about public figures. Contributing to ongoing conversations about the explosion of popular and critical interest in life narrative as well as those about relation of an author to his text, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of contemporary American literature, life writing studies, and authorship and publishing history, as well as the many serious and dedicated readers of Eggers, Wideman, and Mailer.

The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power. Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire. This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century.

Where much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies, this book seeks to broaden the conversation through a wider range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairs's oeuvre. With particular attention to the ways Mairs shapes her essays around a variety of "unspeakables"--such as depression, female sexuality and infidelity, mortality and death, or the struggle for faith in a post-modern world--this collection demonstrates Mairs's provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.

At the center of Hardy's aesthetic practice is the recognition of desire as a necessary and fundamental condition of human existence. Yearning, disappointment, frustration and loss determine the relationship of his characters and poetic personae to the world and the systems in which their sense of self is expressed and constituted. Yet his work also explores the positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire. Structured around the themes of home and homelessness; eroticism; Poor Men, Ladies and social aspiration; the transgressivity of cross dressing; the creation of "sapphic spaces;" aesthetic desire and its fulfilment in the achieved work of art, Thomas Hardy and Desire demonstrates Hardy's commitment, as an artist in pursuit of "a way to the better," to exploring how the energy of desire pushes beyond the boundaries of class, sexuality, gender and even language itself to bring new ways of being and doing into the realm of knowledge.

A revised and updated version of this pioneering study covers the extraordinary revival of Irish drama in the second half of the twentieth century. By comparing the theatre of Samuel Beckett to more culturally specific Irish plays, the book establishes a greater international and theatrically experimental context for the field than has been recognised. Its three central chapters offer close and contextualised readings of the careers of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy across a span of more than four decades. The drama of Northern Ireland and its theatrical response to political violence receives sustained attention through a wide range of playwrights, including Frank McGuinness, Gary Mitchell, Christina Reid and Anne Devlin. A new chapter considers the work of such younger playwrights as Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr who emerged in the 1990s to probe the shortcomings of the 'Celtic Tiger' phenomenon. The book draws on significant productions of the period and will prove invaluable for students and theatregoers alike.

Is ventriloquism just for dummies? What is at stake in neo-Victorian fiction's desire to 'talk back' to the nineteenth century? This book explores the sexual politics of dialogues between the nineteenth century and contemporary fiction, offering a new insight into the concept of ventriloquism as a textual and metatextual theme in literature.

This book examines Field Day's cultural intervention into the Northern Irish 'Troubles' through individual readings of the fourteen plays produced by the enterprise. It argues that at the heart of this project were performances, in a variety of different forms and registers, of an ethics of translation that disrupted notions of Irish identity.

Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life offers an account of the poet's life, along with a critical reading of his work, that is designed to close what has been called 'the yawning gap' between Dylan Thomas's popular and critical reputations.

If the author is 'dead', if feminism is 'post-', why does the figure of the woman author keep appearing as a central character in contemporary fiction? She is concerned with ownership but, equally, with loss; determined to enter the cultural field but also rejecting that field; looking for control but subject to duplicity; seeking power alongside desire. Drawing on a diverse range of contemporary authors - including Atwood, Byatt, Brookner, Coetzee, Lurie, LeGuin, Michele Roberts, Shields, Spark, Weldon, and Walker - this study explores the complexity and continuing fascination of this figure.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

No one in the twentieth century used language with the same precision and wit as Noel Coward. In his plays, his verse, his song lyrics, stories and in everyday life, he chose his words to uniquely stylish and truthful effect. This affectionate portrait of Coward's life includes not only his best-loved witticisms and lyrics, but also excerpts from private papers and hidden gems from unpublished material. Barry Day Delves into the whole range of Coward's talents, as well as his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects - including the theatre, England, the Arts, religion, love and death - all the while giving insights into the man himself.

This is a new and comprehensive reconsideration of Graham Greene's use of Catholic and theological issues in his fictions and other writings from the 1920s until the 1980s. This major new reconsideration of Graham Greene's writings, from the 1920s until the 1980s, focuses both on his best known novels and his less familiar works, including his short stories, plays, poetry, film scripts and reviewing, journalism and personal correspondence. It explores the major issues of Catholic faith and doubt, particularly in relation to his portrayal of secular love and physical desire, and examines the religious and secular issues and plots involving trust, betrayal, love and despair. Although Greene's female characters have often been underestimated, Brennan argues that while sometimes abstract, symbolic and two-dimensional, these figures often prove central to an understanding of the moral, personal and spiritual dilemmas of his male characters. Finally, he reveals how Greene was one of the most generically ambitious writers of the twentieth century, experimenting with established forms but also believing that the career of a successful novelist should incorporate a great diversity of other categories of writing. Offering a new and original perspective on the reading of Greene's literary works and their importance to English twentieth-century fiction, this will be of interest to anyone studying Greene.

David Greig has been described as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation' ("Daily Telegraph") and 'one of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around' ("Guardian"). Since he began writing for theatre in the early nineties, his work has been both copious and remarkably varied, defying neat generalisations or attempts to pigeon-hole his work. Besides his original plays, he has adapated classics, is co-founder of the Suspect Culture Theatre Group and is currently Dramaturge for the National Theatre of Scotland. This Critical Companion provides an analytical survey of his work, from his early plays such as "Europe" and "The Architect "through to more recent works "Damascus," "Dunsinane "and "Ramallah"; it also considers the plays produced with Suspect Culture and his work for young audiences. As such it is the first book to provide a critical account of the full variety of his work and will appeal to students and fans of contemporary British theatre.Clare Wallace provides a detailed analysis of a broad selection of plays and their productions, reviews current discourses about his work and offers a framework for enquiry. The Companion features an interview with David Greig and a further three essays by leading academics offering a variety of critical perspectives.

This book develops an innovative Irish-Scottish postcolonial approach by galvanizing Emmanuel Levinas' ethics with the socio-cultural category of the 'subaltern'. It sheds new light on contemporary Scottish and Irish fiction, exploring how these writings interact with the recent restructuring of the three state-formations in Ireland and Scotland.

Rather than lamenting that postcolonial writers 'sell out' to multinational corporate publishing, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, Sarah Brouillette assesses how they respond to their own reception and niche positioning within a global marketplace that has faced staunch political critique. Combining analysis of recent postcolonial texts with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book is an exciting contribution to globalization studies and the emerging history of the postcolonial book.

Drawing on the insights offered by contemporary chaos theory, "Narrative Form and Chaos Theory" explores how models of turbulent dynamical systems in the physical world parallel structures in certain kinds of narratives. By closely looking at Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," and William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom ," Parker demonstrates how these insights can be applied to the analysis of narrative structure and meaning. This innovative interdisciplinary work will appeal to scholars interested in narratology and in the connection between chaos theory and literature.

This second edition reviews Carter's novels in the light of recent critical developments and offers entirely new perspectives on her work. There are now extended single chapters on Carter's most widely-studied novels, including" The Passion of New Eve" and "Nights at the Circus," and discussion of the long essay "The Sadeian Woman."

Surveying the later work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Edward Clarke unfolds their very last poems and considers the two poets' relations with western literature and tradition. This book shows how these two latecomers transform the ways in which we read earlier poets.