This book demonstrates how Fredric Jameson's understanding of the novel form has heavily influenced his work as a critical theorist. It contends that Jameson's idiosyncratic engagements with the literary canon have had a major impact on his theoretical frameworks, particularly in his sense of historical change. The book investigates Jameson's predominant literary interests in chapters focusing on realism, modernism, postmodernism and genre fiction. These readings provide fresh perspectives on Jameson's career, ones that look beyond his most famous contributions to cultural theory and interpretive practice. Through this work, the book also rethinks the criticism that has surrounded Jameson, while suggesting ways in which his literary interpretation remains useful for contemporary reading practices.

Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works. Included are more than 350 alphabetically arranged entries, such as: Beale Street Belgium Black Boy Chicago Renaissance Civil Rights Movement Ralph Waldo Ellison Sigmund Freud Harlem Martin Luther King, Jr. Marxism Native Son Edgar Allan Poe Segregation Sharecropping And many more. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with an extensive bibliography. Literature students will value this work for its thorough overview of Wright's canon, while students in history and social studies classes will welcome it as a means of understanding the African American struggle for civil rights through literature.

Abandoning the Black Hero is the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel-novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby. John C. Charles argues that these fictions have been overlooked because they deviate from two critical suppositions: that black literature is always about black life and that when it represents whiteness, it must attack white supremacy. The authors are, however, quite sympathetic in the treatment of their white protagonists, which Charles contends should be read not as a failure of racial pride but instead as a strategy for claiming creative freedom, expansive moral authority, and critical agency. In an era when "Negro writers" were expected to protest, their sympathetic treatment of white suffering grants these authors a degree of racial privacy previously unavailable to them. White writers, after all, have the privilege of racial privacy because they are never pressured to write only about white life. Charles reveals that the freedom to abandon the "Negro problem" encouraged these authors to explore a range of new genres and themes, generating a strikingly diverse body of novels that significantly revise our understanding of mid-twentieth-century black writing.

This text reassesses the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Anglo-Irish Revival's heroic ideal, focusing on the diversity of the cultural landscape carved out by these writers, and its implications for Irish modernity and politics. It is a re-evaluation of the cultural logic of Irish nationalism.

British theatre of the 1990s witnessed an explosion of new talent and presented a new sensibility that sent shockwaves through audiences and critics. What produced this change, the context from which the work emerged, the main playwrights and plays, and the influence they had on later work are freshly evaluated in this important new study in Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series. The 1990s volume provides a detailed study by four scholars of the work of four of the major playwrights who emerged and had a significant impact on British theatre: Sarah Kane (by Catherine Rees), Anthony Neilson (Patricia Reid), Mark Ravenhill (Graham Saunders) and Philip Ridley (Aleks Sierz). Essential for students of Theatre Studies, the series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced from the 1950s to 2009. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights besides other theatre work, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Readers will understand the works in their contexts and be presented with fresh research material and a reassessment from the perspective of the twenty-first century. This is an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1990s.

This original study discovers the bourgeois in the modernist and the dissenting style of Bohemia in the new artistic movements of the 1910s. Brooker sees the bohemian as the example of the modern artist, at odds with but defined by the codes of bourgeois society. "Bohemia in London" reconstructs the usual history, situating the canonic names of modernism in the world of groups and coteries which shaped the allied experiments in art and life. Thus it renews once more the complexities and radicalism of the modernist challenge.

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard's axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.

This book examines how concepts of citizenship have been negotiated in Anglophone Canadian literature since the 1970s. Katja Sarkowsky argues that literary texts conceptualize citizenship as political "co-actorship" and as cultural "co-authorship" (Boele van Hensbroek), using citizenship as a metaphor of ambivalent affiliations within and beyond Canada. In its exploration of urban, indigenous, environmental, and diasporic citizenship as well as of citizenship's growing entanglement with questions of human rights, Canadian literature reflects and feeds into the term's conceptual diversification. Exploring the works of Guillermo Verdecchia, Joy Kogawa, Jeannette Armstrong, Maria Campbell, Cheryl Foggo, Fred Wah, Michael Ondaatje, and Dionne Brand, this text investigates how citizenship functions to denote emplaced practices of participation in multiple collectives that are not restricted to the framework of the nation-state.

Take Five brings together all of Kenneth McClane's poetry published since 1971, and reissues, for the first time, the privately-printed Running Before the Wind, his first collection of verse. Considered by many to be the finest Afro-American poet of his generation, McClane's works have been published in many of the nation's leading magazines. In his introduction to this volume, McClane candidly reveals some of his thoughts on what it means to be a poet, and what he feels about his own work in particular.

Ted Hughes is one of the major twentieth-century English poets. Including a previously unpublished poem written by Ted Hughes, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected offers new insights into neglected but essential aspects of his work. New essays by his friends and fellow poets Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage lead a collection of largely new voices in Hughes studies offering fresh readings and newly available archive research. Beyond the poetry and stories, these contributors draw upon recordings, notebooks, letters, writing for children, prose essays and translations. Several contributors have conducted new interviews and correspondence for this book. For the first time, this book challenges established views about Hughes's speaking voice, poetic rhythms, study at Cambridge, influence of other poets, engagement with Christianity, farming, fishing and healing. Close readings of popular texts are accompanied by new arguments and contexts that show the importance of works hitherto overlooked.

"Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma" studies the intersections of modernism, sexuality, and subjectivity in the work of two leading women modernists. Over the course of her writing career, each came to confront those aspects of her culture and her personal history that resulted in a degraded sense of female sexuality. In particular, both explored the ways in which traumatic childhood sexual experiences informed their relationship to female corporeality and fiction writing. Their narratives about these memories--and the essays and fictions in which they recovered and worked through them--are all the more remarkable in that they appeared at a time when Freud's renunciation of the seduction theory had become the authorizing narrative of psychoanalysis.

In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien's narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien's writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy. J.R.R. Tolkien's Christianity is often held in an unsteady tension with the pagan despair of his mythic world. Some critics portray these as incompatible, while Christian analysis tends to oversimplify the presence of religious symbolism. This polarity of opinion testifies to the need for a unifying interpretive lens. The fact that Tolkien saw his own writing as "religious" and "Catholic," yet was preoccupied with pagan mythology, nature, language, and evil, suggests that these areas were wholly integrated with his Christian worldview. Tolkien's Theology of Beauty examines six structural elements, demonstrating that the author's Christianity is deeply embedded in the narrative framework of his creative imagination.

This book investigates how girls' automedial selves are constituted and consumed as literary or media products in a digital landscape dominated by intimate, though quite public, modes of self-disclosure and pervaded by broader practices of self-branding. In thinking about how girlhood as a potentially vulnerable subject position circulates as a commodity, Girls, Autobiography, Media argues that by using digital technologies to write themselves into culture, girls and young women are staking a claim on public space and asserting the right to create and distribute their own representations of girlhood. Their texts-in the form of blogs, vlogs, photo-sharing platforms, online diaries and fangirl identities-show how they navigate the sometimes hostile conditions of online spaces in order to become narrators of their own lives and stories. By examining case studies across different digital forms of self-presentation by girls and young women, this book considers how mediation and autobiographical practices are deeply interlinked, and it highlights the significant contribution girls and young women have made to contemporary digital forms of life narrative.

This is the first comparative study of literature written by writers who fled from East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It includes not only interpretations of individual lives and literary works, but also studies of the most important literary journals, publishers, radio programs, and other aspects of exile literary cultures. The theoretical part of introduction distinguishes between exiles, emigres, and expatriates, while the historical part surveys the pre-twentieth-century exile traditions and provides an overview of the exilic events between 1919 and 1995; one section is devoted to exile cultures in Paris, London, and New York, as well as in Moscow, Madrid, Toronto, Buenos Aires and other cities. The studies focus on the factional divisions within each national exile culture and on the relationship between the various exiled national cultures among each other. They also investigate the relation of each exile national culture to the culture of its host country. Individual essays are devoted to Witold Gombrowicz, Paul Goma, Milan Kundera, Monica Lovincescu, Milos Crnjanski, Herta Muller, and to the "internal exile" of Imre Kertesz. Special attention is devoted to the new forms of exile that emerged during the ex-Yugoslav wars, and to the problems of "homecoming" of exiled texts and writers.

Bosha collects major, representative criticism of John Cheever's fiction, and his posthumously published Letters and Journals, from the earliest reviews of 1943, through to the present. The volume provides a clear and comprehensive assessment of Cheever's critical reputation both during his lifetime, as each of his books was published and reviewed, and retrospectively, by academics and literary historians who have sought to place Cheever's work in a larger literary context. In addition to several new essays written specifically for this volume, this book publishes, for the first time, a long interview which John Cheever gave less than a year before his death. This interview, according to Prof. Robert G. Collins, who conducted it, is almost certainly the last to be publicly heard. The book begins with a critical introductory essay that traces the dominant themes and patterns in Cheever criticism and comments on the critical reception of his work over the last five decades. A chronology highlights the chief events in Cheever's life and career. The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, with each chapter devoted to one of Cheever's works. Within each chapter are selections of criticism. The book concludes with a bibliography and index.

In "This Bridge Called My Back," Gloria Anzaldua wrote: "A woman who writes has power. A woman who writes is feared. In the eyes of the world this makes us dangerous beasts." Her statement marked a moment of collective self-recognition. "Radical Chicana Poetics" considers this moment as a point of entry into Chicana writings. Offering a transdisciplinary analysis of works by Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Ana Castillo, Emma Perez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Sandra Cisneros, this book explores how radical Chicanas deal with tensions that arise from their focus on the body, desire, and writing. Delving into the subtle differences between the authors, Ricardo F. Vivancos Perez sheds new light on contemporary cultural production and feminist activism, and reflects upon positionality and ethics in Chican@ and Latin@ scholarship.

Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.

During the short history of the United States, war has marked the stages of the nation's journey, and imaginative literature has reflected and shaped an understanding of that journey. To study the war literature of the United States, then, is to study not only the representation of individuals at war but also creative renderings of the American experience. Until now, the treatment of American war literature has been handicapped by the absence of a single-source reference that can be the foundation for significant inquiry. This book addresses that need by presenting succinct, authoritative entries on the major writers and texts that have imaginatively represented the American experience of war.

This reference establishes the range and character of a significant body of work never before treated so comprehensively. It includes critical commentary on the novels, poems, nonfiction prose, and plays that reflect major conflicts from before the Revolutionary War through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It also includes topical entries that survey the literature of America's major wars as well as such subjects as Indian captivity narratives, women's diaries of the Civil War, the literature of the Spanish-American War, and African American war literature. Entries are written by expert contributors and conclude with brief bibliographies, while the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

Metafiction explores the great variety and effects of this popular genre and style, variously defined as a type of literature that philosophically questions itself, that repudiates the conventions of literary realism, that questions the relationship between fiction and reality, or that lies at the border between fiction and non-fiction. Yael Schlick surveys a wide range of metafictional writings by diverse authors, with particular focus on the contemporary period. This book asks not only what metafiction is but also what it can do, examining metafictional narratives' usefulness for exploring the role of art in society, its role in conceptualizing the figure of author and the reader of fiction, its investigation and playfulness with respect to language and linguistic conventions, and its troubling of the boundaries between fact and fiction in historiographic metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory. Metafiction is an engaging and accessible introduction to a pervasive and influential form and concept in literary studies, and will be of use to all students of literary studies requiring a depth of knowledge in the subject.

Reading Late Lawrence is a study of a number of the neglected fictional works of D.H. Lawrence's late period: these include Glad Ghosts, The Lovely Lady, The Blue Moccasins, and the first two revisions of Lady Chatterly's Lover. The particular focus is on Lawrence's revisions, and the insights they offfer into the complexity of his writing processes and the depth of his commitment to renewal and reimagining. The study draws extensively upon the manuscript and variant material recently made available in the new scholarly editions of his work.

Despite the devastation of combat in WWII, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, the fiction produced in America in the decade following resolutely avoided the events and their implications. "Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature" challenges popular notions regarding the ability of fantasy genres to force a confrontation with repressed horror by exploring the ways realist literature became a subversive site of reified taboo in America following World War II.

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.

Via readings of novels by J.M. Coetzee, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie and the later poetry of W.B. Yeats, this book reveals how postcolonial writing can encourage the enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility needed to supplant ongoing forms of imperial violence with cosmopolitan institutions, relationships and ways of thinking.