Bertolt Brecht has been perceived as an ardent proponent of social change, an avid advocate of a just world that he defined in terms of socialism, and an adamant foe of capitalism for whose demise he hoped. He is justly regarded as one of the great innovators of theater theory and practice in the 20th century, and his influence has extended to Latin America and Asia. This reference book surveys Brecht's enormous contribution to world drama. Chapters by expert contributors assess his dramatic innovations, his poetry and prose, and topics of special interest to Brecht studies. With the centennial of his birth approaching in 1998, Bertolt Brecht's controversial reception in general and in the United States in particular, is coming into clearer focus. One of the great dramatists of the 20th century, Brecht has been viewed as an ardent proponent of social change, an avid advocate of a just world that he defined in terms of socialism, and an adamant foe of capitalism for whose demise he hoped. With the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political and economic milieu of Europe has changed drastically, and socialist writers are now being studied from a fresh perspective. This volume surveys and assesses Brecht's enormous contribution to the arts. Chapters by expert contributors explore his innovative dramatic theory and theatrical practice. Though best known for his contribution to the stage, Brecht also wrote poetry and prose fiction, and his poems and prose are examined in this work. Brecht's influence is also considered, and chapters examine topics of special interest, such as Brecht and film, the role of music in his works, feminist and Marxist approaches to his writings, the problem of translating Brecht into English, and the reception and appropriation of his plays and dramatic theory in various countries. While the chapters are historical in focus, the contributors also demonstrate the continuing relevance of Brecht in general and the Brechtian theater in particular in the 1990s.

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantanamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.

This book applies models that reflect the fluid, mediated, hybrid, and nomadic global scenes within which Generation X artists and writers live, think, and work in Spain. Henseler touches on critical insights in comparative media studies, cultural studies, and social theory, and conveys the nuances of multiple voices, facts, figures, and faces.

Widely acclaimed as one of America's most distinguished female playwrights, Lillian Hellman made an entrance into a largely male-dominated field in 1934 with" The Children's Hour," a drama that rocked the literary establishment with its frank treatment of lesbianism while calling attention to her writing talents. Written between 1934 and 1963, Hellman's dramatic canon includes eight original plays and four adaptations. Two of these, "Watch on the Rhine" (1941) and "Toys in the Attic" (1960), received Drama Critics' Circle Awards. In addition to her dramatic activities, she wrote three memoirs and a novella, contributed articles to national magazines, edited ChekoV's letters and Dashiell Hammett's mysteries, and penned several screenplays. She is probably best known for "The Little Foxes" (1939), her drama about a family of predatory entrepreneurs who seek to build an industrial fortune on the ruins of the old South.

Both a quick reference guide and an exhaustive resource, this volume provides broad and thorough coverage of Hellman's dramatic career. It begins with a critical overview of her life, along with a chronology of her accomplishments. The bulk of the book, which treats her eight original plays and four adaptations, all written for the Broadway stage, provides detailed plot summaries, stage histories, and critical overviews. The next section offers an annotated bibliography of primary sources. This is followed by an annotated secondary bibliography, which is divided into sections on reviews, books, and articles. Entries in the bibliographies are first arranged chronologically and then alphabetically, so that the reader can gain a fuller sense of the development of Hellman's career and the response to her works over time. Detailed indexes conclude the volume and offer full alphabetical access to its contents.

Eric Bentley's graceful look at George Bernard Shaw was first published over 50 years ago, and time has only strengthened the conviction of his ideas and arguments about Shaw. When it arrived in the late 1940's, this book was hailed by the great poet William Carlos Williams as "the best treatise on contemporary manners I think I have ever read. I was fascinated and rewarded in the depths of my soul." Even Shaw himself described the book as "the best critical description of my public activities I have yet come across."

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.

The Body Beseiged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar by Helen Vassallo brings together the work of two important contemporary writers, Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar. Both authors embody a significant historical divide (they are half French and half Algerian), and each author's work returns unfailingly to the legacy of opposition engendered by the colonial past that France and Algeria share: neither Bouraoui nor Sebbar claims any intention to write about the Algerian War of Independence, and yet its impact is felt throughout all of the texts chosen for discussion. This inescapable omnipresence of the Algerian War is conceptualized here as "embodied memory," a corporeal impulse to write about a war whose legacy is transmitted to these "second-generation" writers rather than a conscious decision to engage with the historical aspect of their personal heritage. Both authors suffer a culturally imposed "de-territorialization" in their life and their early autobiographical narratives, and both subsequently undergo a voluntary "displacement," undertaking literal and psychological journeys to map out routes towards a sense of self, of belonging, and ultimately of "re-territorialization." However, the analysis reveals how this move from de-territorialization to re-territorialization is accompanied by a shift from internalization (through memory and silence) to externalization (via articulation and community): rather than using the individual as symbolic of the universal, Bouraoui's and Sebbar's life writing acknowledges that their experience begins with a universal, historical, or social context, and represents a personal act of remembrance which is key to the recovery of historical memory, and to the negotiation of an appropriate space for this memory. At a time of "reconciliation" and remembrance, the analysis exposes and probes open wounds in the Franco-Algerian relationship through a close focus on the autobiographical writings of two authors who embody both (hi)stories, and whose texts represent a site of this "embodied memory."

Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s, and posited the decline, even sterility of white European races. In early-twentieth-century Spain, the novels of Baroja and Blasco Ibanez both assimilated and subverted cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as Morel, Lombroso and Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties around reproduction and racial decadence, Murphy traces the creative tension between each author's literary representations of the degenerate female body and the profitable market provided by women readers in an evolving consumer society. Countering Baroja's resounding public disdain for his Valencian contemporary, Katharine Murphy repositions Blasco as markedly closer to the so-called Generation of 1898 than hitherto acknowledged. Dr Katharine Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter. Author of Re-reading Pio Baroja and English Literature (2004), she has published widely on Comparative Literature and Spanish Modernism.

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of 'palimpsestic memory', which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

2013 Winner of the Asian American Studies Association's prize in Literary Studies Anger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. In Ingratitude, erin Khue Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repayment-all the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority.Through readings of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance, and other texts, Ninh offers not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. She connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection. In so doing, literary criticism crosses over into a kind of collective memoir of the Asian immigrants' daughter as an analysis not of the daughter, but for and by her.

This book investigates male writers' use of female voices and female writers' use of male voices in literature and theatre from the 1850s to the present, examining where, how and why such gendered crossings occur and what connections may be found between these crossings and specific psychological, social, historical and political contexts.

Edgar Allen Poe's influence on the twentieth century French writer Paul Valery was profound, much more so than on Baudelaire and Mallarme. This book is the first comprehensive study of Poe's influence of Valery and is based on Valery's own concept of literary influence. Valery discovered in Poe's tales and literary essays a Drama of the intellect that was to inspire his Evening with Monsieur teste, Agathe, and Introduction to the method of Leonardo Da Vinci. Valery's poetics and approach to literary criticism have direct connections to Poe's Philosophy of Composition and Poetic Principle. Valery's only essay devoted to his American mentor, On Poe's Eureka, recognizes the importance of the cosmological poem in Valery's intellectual development. Eureka awakened in him an interest in science and mathematics that lasted a lifetime and inspired him to apply scientific analysis to literary genius, the first writer to place creative work on an analytical basis and explore the psychological aspects of literature.

Long before John Barth announced in his famous 1967 essay that late twentieth-century fiction was "The Literature of Exhaustion," authors have been retelling and recycling stories. Barth was, however, right to identify in postmodern fiction a particular self-consciousness about its belatedness at the end of a long literary tradition. This book traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the twenty-first century. It analyses how contemporary women writers deal with their literary inheritances, offering an illuminating and provocative study of contemporary women writers' re-writings of previous texts and stories. Through close readings of novels by key contemporary women writers including Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Emma Tennant and Helen Fielding, and of the ITV adaptation, Lost in Austen, Alice Ridout examines the politics of parody and nostalgia, exploring the limitations and possibilities of both in the contexts of feminism and postcolonialism.

Mina Loy is recognised today as one of the most innovative modernist poets, numbering Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot amongst her admirers. Drawing on substantial new archival research, this book challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as a 'modern woman' through an analysis of her unpublished autobiographical prose. Mina Loy's Autobiographies explores this major twentieth century writer's ideas about the 'modern' and how they apply to the 'modernist' writer-based on her engagement with twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetics-and charts how Loy herself uniquely defined modernity in her essays on literature and art. Sandeep Parmar here shows how, ultimately, Loy's autobiographies extend the modernist project by rejecting earlier impressions of avant-garde futurity and newness in favour of a 'late modernist' aesthetic, one that is more pessimistic, inward and interested in the fragmentary interplay between the past and present.

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

Gun-toting, rough-riding, crack-shot women; train-robbing female bandits; blood-thirsty mothers who refuse to accept injustice-- these women appear in vigilante literature as protagonists that recognize the extent of their own exploitation and directly confront the causes. In this dynamic study, Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction and develops a model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory. Through close-readings of important texts, including those by Flagg, Glaspell, Hong-Kington, Hurston, Rawlings, Walker, this analysis broadens our understanding of how law and culture infringe upon women's rights and joins the discussion about gender oppression and traditional identity politics.

The post-war redevelopment of London has been the most extensive in its history, and has been accompanied by a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. This book explores the literary re-imagining of the city in post-war fiction and argues that the image, history, and narrative of the city has been transformed alongside the physical rebuilding and repositioning of the capital. Drawing on the ideas of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Anthony Vigler and others as well as the latest work on urban representation, this book is an important contribution to the study of the intersection between place, lived experience, and the literary imagination. Texts covered include novels by some of the most significant and lesser known authors of the period, including Graham Greene, George Orwell, J. G. Ballard, Stella Gibbons, David Lodge, Doris Lessing, B. S. Johnson, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.

This collection of essays is dedicated to the theory and practice of drama translation. The focus is on foreign-language plays translated into English and staged in Anglo-American theatres. In this connection, concepts like acculturation and cultural transfer,

In Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, Ken Hirschkop shows that behind the familiar mythical figure lies a writer bound up with the historical crises of his time. Using the latest Russian scholarship, Hirschkop shows that Bakhtin's analysis of language, literature, and culture were all part of a continuing search for an ethical culture which would be simultaneously modern, democratic, and aesthetically satisfying.

Through examining the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, Katherine Ebury shows cosmology had a considerable impact on modernist creative strategies, developing alternative reading models of difficult texts such as Finnegans Wake and 'The Trilogy'.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus to explore the contributions of artists from regions like Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Together, these essays offer the most comprehensive worldwide examination of modernist studies available. Topics covered include: Richard Wright and photographic modernism; poetry of the Caribbean; Chinese modernism and Lu Xun's Ah Q-The Real Story; Ben Okri and magical realism; aesthetic autonomy in Paris, Italy, Russia; Cuba's avant-gardes; geography of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in Europe; Japanese modernism in works by Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Yokomitsu Riichi; and South African cinema.

Stunning three-volume slipcased set containing the most comprehensive in-depth companion to Tolkien's life and works ever published, including synopses of all his writings, and a Tolkien gazetteer, who's who and chronology. The three volumes contained in this slipcase, written by two of the foremost experts on J.R.R. Tolkien, comprise the definitive handbook to one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. Tolkien's progress is traced from his birth in South Africa in 1892, to the battlefields of France and the lecture-halls of Leeds and Oxford, to his success as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, until his death in 1973. His many academic and literary achievements, his public reception, and his enduring fame are examined in detail. The first volume in this set is a Chronology of Tolkien's life and works, the most extensive biographical resource about him ever published. Thousands of details have been drawn from letters, contemporary documents in libraries and archives, and a wide variety of other published and unpublished sources. Assembled together, they form a portrait of Tolkien in all his aspects: the distinguished scholar of Old and Middle English, the capable teacher and administrator, the devoted husband and father, the brilliant creator of Middle-earth. The second and third volumes, the Reader's Guide, is an indispensable introduction to Tolkien's life, writings, and art. It includes histories and discussions of his works; analyses of the components of his vast 'Silmarillion' mythology; brief biographies of persons important in his life; accounts of places he knew; essays on topics such as Tolkien's interests and attitudes towards contemporary issues, ideas found in his works, adaptations, and invented languages; and checklists of his published works, his poetry, his pictorial art, and translations of his writing.

American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence examines spectatorship in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on texts by Theodore Dreiser, Miriam Michelson, Irvin S. Cobb, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The spectator functions as a lens through which we view the relationship between violence and social change as depicted in the politically-charged crowds of fictional lynch mob scenes that expose the central tension of American democracy-the struggle for balance between the rights of the individual and the demands of the community. This has played out in American fiction through clashes between crowds and the primarily rural images that have so often been used to describe America. While this pastoral vision of America has dominated the study of American literature, this book argues for a reassessment of fiction that takes into consideration that the way the country defines itself collectively is as significant as the way its people define themselves individually. This study distinguishes itself from others by bringing together journalism, crowds, lynching, spectatorship, and literature in new and innovative ways that uncover how American literature at the turn of the twentieth century confronted and pushed beyond passive observation and static visual performances, which are traditionally associated with the terms "spectator" and "spectacle." The crowds in fictional lynch mob scenes clash with the idea of positive collective action because the crowd's vigilantism defies legitimate legal and democratic processes. Lynch mobs, in contrast to other crowds like strikes or political rallies, do not reclaim the democratic process from the control of the powerful and wealthy, but rather oppose those practices violently without regard to justice. As a figure who is simultaneously within and outside the crowd, the spectator (often in the form of a reporter character) is in a unique position to express the fractures occurring between the individual and the collective in American society. Racial conflicts are a key aspect of the crowd scenes examined. American writers contended with these issues by using the spectator to observe, question, and challenge readers to consider the impact on the structure of American society.

If Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't "think about his] reader at all when he's] writing," he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers, whether they be students, writers or academics, delighting in the diversity of his audience and in the "greater democratization of commentary" provided by alternative media.

These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, "Family Life," and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with "The Reserve." Most date from the late 1990s on, when the publication of Pulitzer-finalist "Cloudsplitter" in conjunction with the back-to-back release of film adaptations of his novels "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Affliction" suddenly put Banks in the spotlight as "Hollywood's Hottest New Property."

Banks has always believed that the writer plays "the role of the storyteller," fulfilling very basic and universal human needs: "to talk about the human condition, to tell us something about ourselves." Yet, for him, writing is not a one-way process. It is an exchange where the key is to tune in and listen--to the voices of the characters engaging the writer's imagination and to the voices of the readers sharing their own experiences of his books and of the world.

The provocative notion of a contemporary cross-cultural exchange within the medium of theatre is here imposed upon a dozen contemporary Anglo-American dramatists: Alan Ayckbourn and Neil Simon, Edward Bond and Sam Shepard, David Mamet and Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill and Maria Irene Fornes, David Hare and David Rabe, Christopher Hampton and Richard Nelson. In each pairing, Ruby Cohn unites a British with an American playwright, exploring similarities both apparent and embedded - similarities that serve as a springboard for the exposure of a more profound, culturally based difference. Cohn brings a critical eye of unusual versatility and experience to the reading of these paired playwrights. In Pinter and Mamet, for example, she notes the shared sense of linguistic play. In the plays of Bond and Shepard, on the other hand, she explores the plight of the artist in society; in those of Simon and Ayckbourn, the comic exposition of middle-class mores. Without engaging in cultural reductivism or misleading stereotypes, Cohn demonstrates how such themes lend themselves to differing interpretations in Great Britain and in the United States. A certain transatlantic double focus thus illuminates both the composition and the interpretation of dramatic works in an increasingly globally minded age.