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.

In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpiecesGCo The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied herGCoranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environmentGCobut also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility.

This comprehensive, detailed study of Wilder's entire dramatic oeuvre is the only one to place the works in their broad aesthetic and philosophical context and to integrate literary analysis of the plays with interpretation of their theatrical techniques. Its sources include Gilbert Harrison's "authorized" 1983 biography of the dramatist and the published selections from Wilder's journals for the years 1939-1961, as well as unpublished material--letters, diaries, and notes--in the Yale Collection of American Literature Wilder papers. Lifton discusses the symbolist, naturalist, expressionist, Brechtian, futurist, Pirandellian, and existentialist elements in Wilder's plays, as well as parallels between Wilder's theatre and that of such diverse cultures as the classical Greek and Roman, medieval European, Elizabethan, Renaissance Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.

In a unique collection of essays devoted to one of America's most significant twentieth-century poets, a group of international contributors considers the Transatlantic nature of Stevens' poetry, providing original accounts of how a poet wary of 'influence' created a poetics which continues to haunt contermporary verse.

"Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature" argues that the outskirts of cities have become spaces for a new literature beyond boundaries of traditional notions of nation, class, and gender. These new constructions of dwellings and neighborhoods house new notions of the roles of women in the working class, a reconception paralleled by the use of the sorts of textual innovations once presumed to be the territory of metropolitan elites. Chapters on James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway, and Eoin McNamee examine appropriations of voice, shifts in narrative perspective, and strategic uses of local vernacular as techniques that characterize the explosion of working-class literary production in Scotland and Ireland in the eighties and nineties.

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.

'Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949' offers a theoretically innovative reconsideration of drama produced in the Irish Renaissance, as well as an engagement with non-canonical drama in the under-researched period 1926-1949.

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.

This is one of the first books to comprehensively explore representations of madness in postwar British and American Fiction. The five authors come from diverse backgrounds - literary studies, social psychology, medical psychiatry and psychiatric nursing - and as such the book's perspectives are informed through several discourses, making it a unique co-authored text in the discipline of Health Humanities. The book looks at representations of madness in a range of texts by postwar writers (such as Ken Kesey, Marge Piercy, Patrick McGrath, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Golding, Patrick Gale, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, to name a few), and explores the ways in which these representations help to shape public perceptions and experiences of mental disorder.
This book is relevant to both those with interests in literary studies and a vital read for psychiatric clinicians and professionals who are interested in how literature can inform and enhance clinical practices.

"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"

By the time of her death in 1992, Angela Carter had come to be regarded as one of the most successful and original British authors of the twentieth-century, and her writing has subsequently become the focus of a burgeoning body of criticism. This book disentangles the cult of Angela Carter as 'the fairy godmother of magical realism' from her own claims to be a materialist and a 'demythologiser' by placing her within the social, political and theoretical context within which she wrote. Drawing on Carter's own autobiographical articles as well as her novels and short stories, this study examines her engagement with topical issues such as national (particularly English) identity, class, politics and feminism, assessing the relationship between her life, her times and her art.

With a fresh and exciting perspective, "Narrating Class in American Fiction" offers close readings of American fiction from 1850-1940 in the context of literary and political history to illuminate the class discourses of its writers. Dow skillfully argues that the place of class in literary analysis has far to go in catching up to the panoply of "canonical" textual approaches. This book explores the uneasy attention American authors gave to class in their production of social identities and fills a gap in American literature scholarship.

In this first book-length study of Stevie Smith, Romana Huk reassesses the work of this major twentieth-century woman writer as emerging not only from the practices of female literary modernism, but also from within the tumultuous cultural context of mid-century Europe. Huk considers both the poems and the novels in the light of their cultural and literary context. Amongst the work treated here is Smith's rarely discussed trilogy of novels: Novel on Yellow Paper , Over the Frontier and The Holiday .

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.

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.

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.

Examines possible and fictional worlds, author and authority, otherness and recognition, translation, alternative critique, empire, education, imagination, comedy, history, poetry, and culture. The analyzed works include classical and modern texts and theorists of the past sixty years ranging from Jerome Bruner to Stephen Greenblatt.

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.

Born Rosa Lebensboym in Belarus, Anna Margolin (1887-1952) settled permanently in America in 1913. A brilliant yet largely forgotten poet, her reputation rests on her volume of poetry published in Yiddish in 1929 in New York City. Although written in the 1920s, Margolin's poetry is remarkably fresh and contemporary, dealing with themes of anxiety, loneliness, sexual tensions, and the search for intellectual and spiritual identity, all of which were clearly reflected in her own life choices. Sensitively and beautifully translated here, the poems appear both in the original Yiddish and in English translation. Shirley Kumove's fascinating critical-biographical introduction highlights Margolin's tempestuous and unconventional life. An exceptionally beautiful and gifted woman, Margolin adopted a bohemian and an eccentric lifestyle, and threw herself into both intellectual pursuits and romantic attachments beyond her two marriages.

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.

"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.

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.