Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots ushered in the contemporary gay liberation movement, overt representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were few and far between. Even in the 1970s, when gay and lesbian cultures began to register on our national consciousness, such work was still quite rare.

In the 1980s and 90s, however, all that changed. The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to analyze critically this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, The Queer Renaissance is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics.

The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzalda, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, The Queer Renaissance interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.

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).

"Reading a wide range of well known postcolonial writers along with more recent authors, Spaces of Fiction / Fictions of Space implements a new theory of literary spatial marking derived from the linguistic theory of deixis, and made accessible via an analysis of Becketts 'semi-colonial' play Waiting for Godot"--Provided by publisher.

"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"

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.

"Modern Poetry and Ethnography: Yeats, Frost, Warren, Heaney, and the Poet as Anthropologist maps a new approach to the works of W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Seamus Heaney. Heuston analyzes the ways the works of each writer represent and explain a country or region (Ireland for Yeats, New England for Frost, the American South for Warren, and Northern Ireland for Heaney) as if the writers were anthropologists or ethnographers. This project argues provocatively that literary critics can benefit greatly from the insights and theories of anthropology and ethnography"--

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.

What does it mean for a painter to remain a visual artist even as a writer? Carlo Levi's Visual Poetics engages this question through a critical re-examination of one of the most influential Italian intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Levi's major texts through the lens of his philosophical and critical essays, the author explores the ways in which the productive dialogue between word and image inherent in his works becomes an instrument of literary and political subversion and contributes to the development of Levi's original humanistic cultural program.

Although often hailed as a 'quintessentially American' writer, the modernist poet, novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) spent most of her life in France. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Gertrude Stein in Europe is the first sustained exploration of the European artistic and intellectual networks in which Stein's work was first developed and circulated. Along the way, the book investigates the European contexts of Stein's writing, how her own work intersected with European thought, including phenomenology and the vitalist work of Henri Bergson, and ultimately how it was received by scholars and artists across the continent. Gertrude Stein in Europe opens up new perspectives on Stein as a writer and on the centrality of artistic and intellectual networks to European modernism.

This original and incisive study of the fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison uses cutting edge cultural and literary theory to examine the "knotted" mother-daughter relations that form the thematic basis of the texts examined. Using both close reading and contextualization, the analyses are focused through issues of race and contemporary theorizing of whiteness and trauma. Remarkably eloquent, scholarly and thought-provoking, this book contributes strongly to the broad fields of literary criticism, feminist theory and whiteness studies.

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.

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.

This book breaks the assumption that the racial tension the in 9/11 novels lies solely in the dynamic between "Americans" and "terrorists." It also interrogates post-9/11 constructions of whiteness and the treatment of African-American characters.

This volume attempts to engage one aspect of an amorphous and mysterious topic: what does it mean for women to "create "within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?

This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability--in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis--who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse.
Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States--such works as Juliet Wittman's "Breast Cancer Journal," John Hockenberry's "Moving Violations," Paul Monette's "Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir," and Lou Ann Walker's "A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family"--Couser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Couser's discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabledpeople.
With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, "Recovering Bodies" contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America.

This book analyses Black Consciousness poetry and theatre from the 1970s through to the present. South Africa's literature, like its history, has been beset by disagreement and contradiction, and has been consistently difficult to pin down as one, united entity. Much existing criticism on South Africa's national literature has attempted to overcome these divisions by discussing material written from a variety of different subject positions together. This book argues that Black Consciousness desired a new South Africa where African and European cultures were valued equally, and writers could represent both as they wished. Thus, a body of literature was created that addressed a range of audiences and imagined the South African nation in different ways. This book explores Black Consciousness in order to demonstrate how South African writers have responded in various ways to the changing history and politics of their country.

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."

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.

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 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.

This is the first book-length critical study of E.B. White, the American essayist and author of Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan . G. Douglas Atkins focuses on White and the writing life, offering detailed readings of the major essays and revealing White's distinctiveness as an essayist.

From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, New York-based literary agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre of her day. Audrey Wood and the Playwrights illuminates the gifts and strategies of the tenacious woman at the Liebling-Wood Agency who melded playwrights with producers, directors, and leading actors and shaped the American theatre and film industry during the mid-twentieth century. Wood's story is told here through her interactions with her clients, now household names, whose works she steered through periods of triumph and failure. In an era when women, with the exception of actresses, were rare in the theatre business, she was known as the "go-to" agent for success in the commercial theater. Dubbed a "guardian agent," her quiet determination and burning enthusiasm brought America's finest mid-century playwrights to prominence and altered stage history.

This is the first study of the shape and diversity of the literary career in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bringing together essays on a wide range of authors from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the book investigates how literary careers are made and unmade, and how norms of authorship are shifting in the digital era.

This volume is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's ""Castle Rackrent"" (1800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Kreilkamp argues that Irish fiction needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring the uniquely Irish dimensions of colonial and post-colonial societies, she charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry culture facing its extinction - more often and more successfully - with comic irony than nostalgia. Vera Kreilkamp positions the Big House novels within current debates in post-colonial criticism and theory. She argues that these fictional representations of a beleaguered society provide a complex, nuanced gaze into a hybrid colonial group that distanced itself from the self-aggrandizements of the revivalists. As she examines the gothic, revisionist and post-modern permutations of an enduring national form, she illustrates the ways ascendancy women transformed conventions of an English domestic genre into political fiction. Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever and the gothic forms of the Big House by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin, provides a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins and John Banville.