Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin's work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin's most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O'Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin's interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin's essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

As a white woman of means living in segregated Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on "outsiders," and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith tracks the evolution of Smith from a young girls' camp director into a courageous artist who could examine controversial topics frankly and critically while preserving a lifelong connection to the north Georgia mountains and people. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South and refused to obsess on an idealized past. Smith took seriously the artist's role as she saw it-to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith's perspective cut straight to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she created compelling stories, using carefully chosen literary techniques in powerful ways. With words as her medium, she drew maps of her fictionalized southern places, revealing literally and metaphorically society's disfunctions. Through carefully crafted points of view, she offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, this volume explores these fascinating aspects of Smith's writings in an attempt to fill in the picture of this charismatic figure, whose work not only was influential in her time but also is profoundly relevant to ours. Contributions by Tanya Long Bennett, David Brauer, Cameron Williams Crawford, Emily Pierce Cummins, April Conley Kilinski, Justin Mellette, and Wendy Kurant Rollins.

Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society - from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives - that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

Introducing readers to a new theory of 'responsible reading', this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect.

Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce - particularly Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake - as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today. Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce's works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and "secular" reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.

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York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students.

Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Self-Translation is the first in-depth archival study to scrutinize the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky's self-translation practices during the period of his exile to the USA in 1972-1996. The book draws on a large amount of previously unpublished archival material, including the poet's manuscripts in Russian and English, draft translations, notes, comments in the margins and correspondence with his translators, editors and friends. Rulyova's approach to the study of self-translation is informed by 'social turn' in translation studies. She focuses on the process of text production, the agents and institutions involved, translation practices and the role played by translators and publishers in the production of the text.

Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. Sappho's and Catullus' reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho's and Catullus' modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange: key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and cover a wide range of unpublished archival material. Texts are analysed and compared through reception and translation theories and inserted within the current debate on the Classics as World Literature, demonstrating how sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry's relationship to human existence.

Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War frames William Faulkner's airplane narratives against major scenes of the early 20th century: the Great War, the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s, the Second World War, and the aviation arms race extending from the Wright Flyer in 1903 into the Cold War era. Placing biographical accounts of Faulkner's time in the Royal Air Force Canada against analysis of such works as Soldiers' Pay (1926), "All the Dead Pilots" (1931), Pylon (1935), and A Fable (1954), this book situates Faulkner's aviation writing within transatlantic historical contexts that have not been sufficiently appreciated in Faulkner's work. Michael Zeitlin unpacks a broad selection of Faulkner's novels, stories, film treatments, essays, book reviews, and letters to outline Faulkner's complex and ambivalent relationship to the ideologies of masculine performance and martial heroism in an age dominated by industrialism and military technology.

Focusing on relationships between Jewish American authors and Jewish authors elsewhere in America, Europe, and Israel, this book explores the phenomenon of authorial affiliation: the ways in which writers intentionally highlight and perform their connections with other writers. Starting with Philip Roth as an entry point and recurring example, David Hadar reveals a larger network of authors involved in formations of Jewish American literary identity, including among others Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander. He also shows how Israeli writers such as Sayed Kashua perform their own identities through connections to Jewish Americans. Whether by incorporating other writers into fictional work as characters, interviewing them, publishing critical essays about them, or invoking them in paratext or publicity, writers use a variety of methods to forge public personas, craft their own identities as artists, and infuse their art with meaningful cultural associations. Hadar's analysis deepens our understanding of Jewish American and Israeli literature, positioning them in decentered relation with one another as well as with European writing. The result is a thought-provoking challenge to the concept of homeland that recasts each of these literary traditions as diasporic and questions the oft-assumed centrality of Hebrew and Yiddish to global Jewish literature. In the process, Hadar offers an approach to studying authorial identity-building relevant beyond the field of Jewish literature.

Representing a shift in Carter studies for the 21st century, this book critically explores her legacy and showcases the current state of Angela Carter scholarship. It gives new insights into Carter's pyrotechnic creativity and pays tribute to her incendiary imagination in a reappraisal of Angela Carter's work, her influences and influence. Drawing attention to the highly constructed artifice of Angela Carter's work, it brings to the fore her lesser-known collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces to reposition her as more than just the author of The Bloody Chamber. On the way, it also explores the impact of her experiences living in Japan, in the light of Edmund Gordon's 2016 biography and Natsumi Ikoma's translation of Sozo Araki's Japanese memoirs of Carter.

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

This book explores queer identity in Morocco through the work of author and LGBT activist Abdellah Taia, who defied the country's anti-homosexuality laws by publicly coming out in 2006. Engaging postcolonial, queer and literary theory, Tina Dransfeldt Christensen examines Taia's art and activism in the context of the wider debates around sexuality in Morocco. Placing key novels such as Salvation Army and Infidels in dialogue with Moroccan writers including Driss Chraibi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, she shows how Taia draws upon a long tradition of politically committed art in Morocco to subvert traditional notions of heteronormativity. By giving space to silenced or otherwise marginalised voices, she shows how his writings offer a powerful critique of discourses of class, authenticity, culture and nationality in Morocco and North Africa.

Since his death in 1969, the legend of Jack Kerouac, 'King of the Beats', has continued to grow. Clark's biography reveals the essential Kerouac, often through his own words and writings.

Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others.

Perhaps the brevity of short fiction accounts for the relatively scant attention devoted to it by scholars, who have historically concentrated on longer prose narratives. The Geographies of African American Short Fiction seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the ways African American short story writers plotted a diverse range of characters across multiple locations-small towns, a famous metropolis, city sidewalks, a rural wooded area, apartment buildings, a pond, a general store, a prison, and more. In the process, these writers highlighted the extents to which places and spaces shaped or situated racial representations. Presenting African American short story writers as cultural cartographers, author Kenton Rambsy documents the variety of geographical references within their short stories to show how these authors make cultural spaces integral to their artwork and inscribe their stories with layered and resonant social histories. The history of these short stories also documents the circulation of compositions across dozens of literary collections for nearly a century. Anthology editors solidified the significance of a core group of short story authors including James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Using quantitative information and an extensive literary dataset, The Geographies of African American Short Fiction explores how editorial practices shaped the canon of African American short fiction.

This book is a pragma-stylistic study of Ian McEwan's fiction, providing a qualitative analysis of his selected novels using (im)politeness theory. (Im)politeness is investigated on two levels of analysis: the level of the plot and the story world (intradiegetic level) and the level of the communication between the implied author and implied reader in fiction (extradiegetic level). The pragmatic theory of (im)politeness serves the aim of internal characterisation and helps readers to better understand and explain the characters' motivations and actions, based on the stylistic analysis of their speech and thoughts and point of view. More importantly, the book introduces the notion of "the impoliteness of the literary fiction" - a state of affairs where the implied author (or narrator) expresses their impolite beliefs to the reader through the text, which has face-threatening consequences for the audience, e.g. moral shock or disgust, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or 'put out'. Extradiegetic impoliteness, one of the key characteristics of McEwan's fiction, offers an alternative to the literary concept of "a secret communion of the author and reader" (Booth 1961), describing an ideal connection, or good rapport, between these two participants of fictional communication. This book aims to unite literary scholars and linguists in the debate on the benefits of combining pragmatics and stylistics in literary analysis, and it will be of interest to a wide audience in both fields.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

In the wake of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett wrote some of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. This is the first full-length historical study to examine the far-reaching impact of the war on Beckett's creative and intellectual sensibilities. Drawing on a substantial body of archival material, including letters, manuscripts, diaries and interviews, as well as a wealth of historical sources, this book explores Beckett's writing in a range of political contexts, from the racist dogma of Nazism and aggressive traditionalism of the Vichy regime to Irish neutrality censorship and the politics of recovery in the French Fourth Republic. Along the way, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War casts new light on Beckett's political commitments and his concepts of history as they were formed during Europe's darkest hour.

Now available in paper, "The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter" is the first book-length analysis of J. K. Rowling's work from a broad range of perspectives within literature, folklore, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. A significant portion of the book explores the Harry Potter series' literary ancestors, including magic and fantasy works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Monica Furlong, Jill Murphy, and others, as well as previous works about the British boarding school experience. Other chapters explore the moral and ethical dimensions of Harry's world, including objections to the series raised within some religious circles. In her new epilogue, Lana A. Whited brings this volume up to date by covering Rowling's latest book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."