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 brilliant and scholarly biography of an extraordinary figure.' Lord Blake, "Country Life"

'A fresh, engaging, conscientious account of one of the great Victorians.' Michael Foot, "London Review of Books"

'A thorough and convincing account of 'the sage''. Peter Ackroyd, "Times"

Thomas Carlyle was the most influential man of letters of his day, and his vivid account of the French Revolution remains one of the classic histories. Even George Eliot, no admirer, wrote: 'It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence; if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttes on his funeral pyre, it would only be like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest.'

Simon Heffer draws upon previously unavailable papers to reassess a magnificent, defiant and often lonely individualist whose idiosyncratic and passionate books brought him universal fame.

"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"

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.

Focusing on the core assessment objectives for A-Level English Literature, The Quotation Bank takes 25 of the most important quotations from the text and provides detailed material for each quotation, covering interpretations, literary techniques and detailed analysis. Furthermore, The Quotation Bank A-Level Guides analyse 10 essential critical quotations to utilise in your own essays. Also included are detailed contextual materials, revision activities and a comprehensive glossary of relevant literary terminology, all in a clear and practical format to enable effective revision and ultimate exam confidence.

"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"--

Despite all the biographical studies devoted to William Faulkner, there are still many fundamental contradictions in the way he is perceived. He has been described as a creator of worlds a la Dickens and as one of postmodernism's avatars, as indifferent to the intellectual currents of his time and as profoundly indebted to them, as deeply insightful about issues like race, class, and gender and as someone who merely reflects contemporary anxieties about them. A concise and focused study of Faulkner's literary lives can help readers sort through the questions raised by his work and by the voluminous response to it.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Killing Spanish suggests that the doubles, madwomen and other raging characters that populate the pages of contemporary U.S. Latino/a literature allegorize ambivalence about both present American identity and past Caribbean and Latin American origins. The family novels Sandn explores -- ranging from work by the Cuban American Cristina Garca to the island Puerto Rican Rosario Ferr -- uncover the split between Americanized protagonists and their families, a split usually resolved through the killing of a character representing origins. Race and class differences, and poverty, cause protagonists in work by the Nuyoricans Piri Thomas, the Dominican American Junot Daz, and others, to embrace the street as the new Latino home. If the family novels exact the death of "Spanish" in the person of a double character, the urban fiction and poetry project the "mean" street, churning with the productive and destructive energies of ambivalence, as the landscape of the fragmented U.S. Latino/a psyche.

In most histories of Europe before the First World War, modern life in Habsburg Mitteleuropa takes on a decidedly gloomy cast. Centering on Vienna in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such accounts describe the failure of rationalism and the rise of a dangerous politics of fantasy. This book tells a different story, highlighting a generation of Czech writers and artists distinguished by their affirmative encounter with the modern world in the first decades of the twentieth century. Novelist and playwright Karel Capek, along with other members of his cohort, embraced the possibilities of the post-Habsburg era. Tracing the roots of Capek's generation to cubist art and turn-of-the-century philosophy, author Thomas Ort shows that the form of modernism they championed led not into the thickets of fascism or communism but in fact closer to liberal political ideals.

This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902-1971). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as an eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. William May considers the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but provides new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.

Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, "Tales of Futures Past" introduces "anticipation"--the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds--as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China.
This book provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts. It stresses authors' and editors' efforts to redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic circumstances. Engaging with questions of translation, temporality, formation of genres, and stylistic change, Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship. Far-ranging in its chronological scope and impressive in its interdisciplinary approach, this book rethinks the legacies of socialism in postsocialist Chinese literary modernity.

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.

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.

After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals' thinking when it was translated into another language and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky. The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle (biography, theory, politics) or aspect (a single work, a personal constellation) deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual's work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, a German-Jewish refugee from Dresden, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced in this book for the first time.

Whereas Marlow has usually been discussed as a literary device who is of no special interest in himself, this study argues that Conrad portrays Marlow and his relationships with a psychological depth that is unsurpassed in literature. In "Youth," "Heart of Darkness," and "Lord Jim," he is a continuously-evolving character whose thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are expressions of his personality and experience. Understanding Marlow's motivations newly illuminates the formal complexity and thematic richness of these works, for his inner conflicts profoundly affect the structure of his narrations, his interactions with his auditors, and the elusive meanings of his tales.

"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.

Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Serious Poetry provocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.