"A Manner of Utterance" offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.

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.

This book rigorously examines the work of leading contemporary playwright Martin Crimp. It examines his plays, adaptations, translations and versions, treats them as texts and performance events and argues that their challenge to audiences derives from their 'making strange': producing theatrical innovation, thus rendering the familiar unfamiliar.

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.

This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known post-war novelists, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.

This comprehensive introduction places the work of Julian Barnes into historical and theoretical context. Including a timeline of key dates, this guide explores his characteristic literary techniques, offers extensive readings of all ten novels and provides an overview of the varied critical reception his work has provoked.

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.

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 .

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.

As the first essay collection dedicated to Philip K. Dick in two decades, this volume breaks new ground in science fiction scholarship and brings innovative critical perspectives to the study of one of the twentieth century's most influential authors.

Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology is the first detailed exploration of Hardy's linguistic `awkwardness', a subject that has long puzzled critics. Dennis Taylor's pioneering study shows that Hardy's language must be understood as a distinctive response to the philological and literary issues of his time. Deeply influenced by the Victorian historical study of language, Hardy deliberately incorporated into his own writing a sense of language's recent and hidden history, its multiple stages and classes, and its arbitrary motivations. Indeed, Taylor argues, Hardy provides an example of how a writer `purifies the dialect of the tribe' by inclusiveness, by heterogeniety, and by a sense of history which distinguishes Hardy from a more ahistorical, synchronic modernist aesthetic and which constitutes an ongoing challenge to literary language. In what is the first major treatment of a writer's relation to the Oxford English Dictionary, the author also examines the influence on Hardy's language of the founding and development in this period of the OED.

Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony.

Postcolonial African writers have made an enormous contribution to world literature. These writers frequently examine such issues as emerging identities in the postcolonial climate, neo-colonialism and new forms of oppression, cultural and political hegemonies, neo-elitism, language appropriation, and economic instability. During the last decade, their works have elicited increasing critical attention. This reference book overviews the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume focuses on how postcoloniality is reflected in the novels, poetry, prose, and drama of major, minor, and emerging writers from diverse countries in Africa, including representative North and South African writers as well as writers of the Indian diaspora born in Africa. While authors in indigenous African languages continue to produce valuable works, the volume principally considers Anglophone and Francophone authors, along with two Lusophone writers. The reference book begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing. The volume then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of approximately 60 writers, such as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Tabar Ben Jelloun, Doris Lessing, Peter Nazareth, Gabriel Okara, Femi Osofisan, and Efua Theodora Sutherland. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's works, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many valuable perspectives. The volume concludes with a selectedgeneral bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.

Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers - mainly Andre Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, Rene Magritte, Charles Estienne, Rene Huyghe and others - who viewed the same artists in terms of magic, occultism, precognition, alchemy and esotericism generally. It introduces the history of the ways in which those artists who came after Impressionism - Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh - became canonical in the 20th century through the broad approaches we now call modernist or formalist (by critics and curators such as Alfred H. Barr, Roger Fry, Robert Goldwater, Clement Greenberg, John Rewald and Robert L. Herbert), and then unpacks chapter-by-chapter, for the first time in a single volume, the Surrealist positions on the same artists. To this end, it contributes to new strains of scholarship on Surrealism that exceed the usual bounds of the 1920s and 1930s and that examine the fascination within the movement with magic.

How does affective madness influence the social understanding of writers and other artists, or shape the creative act itself? In a 15-year longitudinal study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a study little known outside of psychiatry, 80 per cent of the writers reported either living with, or having had a lifetime incidence of, an affective disorder (depression or manic depression), as opposed to only 30 per cent of non-writer controls. Affective Disorder and the Writing Life interrogates the age-old mythos of the 'mad writer' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection, and contemporary neuroscience. These essays explore how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind a " and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination.

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.

This is a one-stop resource containing introductory material through to practical case studies in reading primary and secondary texts to introducing criticism and new directions in research."The Modernism Handbook" is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to British Modernism as a literary movement, providing a one-stop resource for literature students, with the essential information and guidance needed at the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. It includes: introductions to authors, texts and contexts; guides to key critics, concepts and topics; an overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research; case studies in reading primary and secondary texts; and annotated further reading (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms.Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of Modernism."Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills.

Using close readings of Shaw's plays and letters, as well as archival research, David Clare illustrates that Shaw regularly placed Irish, Irish Diasporic, and surrogate Irish characters into his plays in order to comment on Anglo-Irish relations and to explore the nature of Irishness.

This collection focuses attention on theoretical approaches to travel writing, with the aim to advance the discourse. Internationally renowned, as well as emerging, scholars establish a critical milieu for travel writing studies, as well as offer a set of exemplars in the application of theory to travel writing.

This book promises to be a very useful reference work, covering material that has heretofore been hard to find. . . . . useful in academic libraries and large public libraries. "Reference Books Bulletin"

This dictionary provides an exhaustive reference guide to representative figures in Hispanic literature within the geographic, political, and cultural boundaries of the United States. While concentrating on contemporary writers who have made or promise to make a lasting contribution to multiethnic letters in this country, it is designed to make accessible to the English-language reader a literary world that has until now been articulated primarily in Spanish. Focusing mainly on Puerto Rican and Cuban writers, each entry summarizes the importance of the subject and indicates the literary genres and themes cultivated. There is a brief biography of each author, an analysis of major works and themes, and a survey of the criticism of the author's works.

The first and most comprehensive volume on the subject, this extraordinarily detailed sourcebook is a compilation of bio-bibliographical essays on leading Hispanic novelists, poets, and dramatists, and includes secondary bibliographies for each entry as well as a general bibliography on Hispanic literature. Especially highlighted are such authors as Nuyorican Miguel Pinero, winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play; Chilean novelist, critic, and editor Fernando Alegria; the Cuban-American chronicler of life in Miami's exile community, Roberto Fernandez, and others. Kanellos' work answers a definite need for comprehensive biographical and critical information on these writers, and it will be a significant addition to academic and public libraries, and to research in Spanish, English, bilingual education, and ethnic studies.

The financial crisis of 2008 quickly gave rise to a growing body of fiction: "crunch lit". Populated by a host of unsympathetic characters and centred around banking institutions, these 'recession writings' take the financial crisis as their central narrative concern to produce a new wave of literary and popular writings that satirise the origins and effects of modern life, consumer culture and the credit boom. Examining a range of texts from such writers as John Lanchester, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Sebastian Faulks and Bret Easton Ellis, this book offers the first wide-ranging guide to this new genre. Exploring the key themes of the genre and its antecedents in fictional representations of finance by the likes of Dickens, Conrad, Zola and Trollope, Crunch Lit also includes a timeline of key historical events, guides to further and online resources and biographies of key authors. Supported by online resources, the book is an essential read for students of 21st century literature and culture.

This monograph undertakes the first extensive comparative analysis of the works of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, placing the fiction and non-fiction of both writers in relation to the broader cultural, social and political contexts of London from 1979. It begins by tracing the two different Londons of both writers, arguing that their literary and cultural projects are intrinsically linked, yet have remained under explored in academic criticism. Alex Murray argues that while both Sinclair and Ackroyd attempt to utilise radical narrative practices to challenge the dominant historical discourses within contemporary London, those challenges must be placed in relation to broader issues of cultural history, government appropriation of historical narratives and debates about the relationship between literature and the city. This argument is traced from the 'radical' historical fiction of the 1980s which launched the career of both writers, through to their extensive bodies of work on creating a specifically London form of literary history, to their engagements towards the turn of the millennium with larger questions of historiography and material history. This study then links these issues of narrative and material history, demonstrating the increasingly problematic relationship that both writers have as their fictionally 'radical' recalling of London is transformed into issues of material history, primarily the issues of politics and ethics in historical representation, and the relationship between history and commodification.

Gertrude Stein's works encompass a variety of genres. She explicitly called many of her works plays, operas, or novels intending her works to be read with certain generic expectations in mind, be it only to have them undermined. Although many writers depart from generic norms, Stein's generic transgressions are radical and are related to gender-specific traits of her writing. This work examines Stein's questions about gender hierarchies, classifications, and categories, and brings to light the direct relationship between gender and genre in her works. Gygax looks at a number of Stein's texts, including "Ida A Novel, A Circular Play, Everybody's Autobiography, The Geographical History of America, " and "Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, " which Stein called a detective story.

Readers bring to a text a set of expectations often relating to its genre. A novel, for example, is expected to share certain features with other novels, which is why it is not considered a play. But these distinctions are difficult to make, and writers often depart from generic conventions for the sake of being innovative. Generic expectations also closely relate to gender. For example, an autobiography may be read in light of the gender of the author. Like various genres, gender brings with it certain expectations, which are largely determined by social values. Some individuals transgress the conventional bounds of gender roles, just as some works of literature go beyond traditional generic frames.

The works of Gertrude Stein typically challenge the expectations of both gender and genre. As a lesbian writer, Stein was acutely aware of society's expectations with respect to gender. And in her writings, she is clearly concerned with genre. She explicitly calls many of her works plays, operas, or novels intending them to be read with certain generic expectations in mind only to transgress traditional generic expectations. Gygax explores why Stein was inevitably confronted with questions about gender and generic categories. Including a number of Stein's theoretical statements about writing, this insightful book illuminates the relationship between gender and genre in her works.

First published in 1969. This title concerns itself with the ambivalence of Lawrence's attitude towards corruption. Clarke demonstrates that Lawrence's attitude to 'will' and to sensational or disintegrative sex is much more equivocal than conceded. At the same time this is a study of Lawrence's debt as a novelist to the English Romantic poets. A tradition of metaphor is traced from the second half of the eighteenth century, through the poetry of the major Romantics to the Decadents, and so to Lawrence, whose attitudes to mechanism and corruption are shown to be articulated, above all, through ambivalent images of dissolution and disintegration. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This intriguing study examines the truth behind the myths and misconceptions that defined the Roaring Twenties, as portrayed through the popular literary works of the time. This one-stop reference to the "Jazz Age"-the period that began after the First World War and ended with the stock market crash of 1929-digs into the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of the era. Author Linda De Roche examines the writing of the time to look beyond the common conceptions of the Roaring Twenties and instead reflect on the era's complexities and contradictions, including how gender and race influenced social mores. The book profiles key American literature of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Sinclair Lewis's Babbit, Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Nella Larsen's Passing. Filled with essays that offer historical explorations of each work as well as suggested learning activities, chapters also feature study questions, primary source documents, and chronologies. Support materials include activities, lesson plans, discussion questions, topics for further research, and suggested readings. Outlines key events and developments and provides context for the historical period and work Aligns with Common Core standards in English language arts and social studies Discusses five major writers of the Jazz Age Provides numerous suggestions for class activities and further individual exploration Supplies educators with ready reference work that aligns with Common Core Standards in English Language Arts (ELA) in Social Studies Gives readers insight into how literature and other art forms reflect the social conditions and are inspired by events of the time