The metaphor of life as prison obsessed Edith Wharton, and, consequently, the theme of imprisonment appears in most of her 86 short stories. In the last several decades, critical studies of Wharton's fiction have focused on this theme of imprisonment, but invariably it is related to biographical considerations. This study, however, is not concerned with such insights and influences; rather, it concentrates on Wharton's skill as a craftsman in consciously and carefully fitting her narrative techniques to the imprisonment theme. Representative tales from Wharton's early period (1891-1904), her major phase (1905-1919), and her later years (1926-1937) have been examined and divided into four categories: individuals trapped by love and marriage, men and women imprisoned by the dictates of society, human beings victimized by the demands of art and morality, and persons paralyzed by fear of the supernatural.

Romance fiction is one of the most popular literary genres in America today. New writers are constantly emerging, and students and general readers often have trouble finding current information about their favorite authors. This book provides alphabetically arranged entries on more than 100 contemporary American romance writers. Each entry offers biographical information, a critical discussion of the novelist's works, and a list of fiction and nonfiction by the writer, to help readers enjoy and appreciate the full scope of the author's activity. A bibliography of print and electronic resources concludes the volume. America loves romance fiction. These works are extraordinarily popular among public library patrons and are widely read by high school students as well. Because the genre is so popular, new writers are constantly emerging, as are new works of fiction. As a result, general readers and students have trouble finding information about their favorite romance novelists and their most recent books. Written for students and readers of romance fiction, this book surveys contemporary American romance literature. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 100 contemporary American romance writers, including: Jennifer Crusie Patricia Gaffney Rachel Gibson Leigh Greenwood Nicole Jordan Susan Krinard Sandra Marton Francis Ray Nora Roberts Sharon Swan And many others. Each entry provides biographical information, a critical discussion of major works, and a bibliography of fiction and nonfiction by the writer. A list of print and electronic resources concludes the volume.

This innovative collection explores life stories produced in China between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. These essays draw on biographical and autobiographical narratives of men and women, paragons and pariahs, taken from official histories, personal diaries, plays, fiction and blogs, and use perspectives taken from life writing theory to illuminate that work. Whereas many earlier studies have emphasised the social rules of life writing in China, and suggested that lives and selves were often obscured by the weight of convention, the work in this volume shows that the rules were often actively evaded or creatively exploited by biographers and autobiographers, and suggest that a critical understanding of those evasions and exploitations can better reveal lives that were lived and written both within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game.

Bruce Kellner worked directly from the collection of often-overlooked novelist Donald Windham to produce this reference work. Entries on books, pamphlets, articles and criticism provided a comprehensive record of Windham's literary development, critical reception, failures, and achievements. According to Kellner, the public has yet to fully embrace the quiet eloquence of Windham's work; like authors Herman Melville and Gertrude Stein, he may be vindicated by time. Kellner introduces the bio-bibliography with a discussion of Donald Windham's background, writing style, and reception by publishers and readers. He likens Windham's subtle style to E.M. Forster, and he suggests that America's action-oriented culture lacks patience for Windham's offerings, which are homosexual but not erotic, Southern but not gothic. The book, which includes an addendum to the introduction by Windham himself, is divided into five parts: Books and Pamphlets, Books and Pamphlets with Contributions, Contributions to Periodicals, Ephemera, and Criticism and Biography. This book is valuable to students, scholars, and general audiences of literature.

Part ode, part academic treatise, this book traces the transformation of Cairo's historic downtown from its spectacular beginning as a French inspired Belle Epoque marvel to a site of contest and, more recently, to its role as a neo-bohemian public sphere. Using the work of several Egyptian novelists, this study explores the significance of this space to ideas of modernity, class consciousness, and the anti-colonial struggle. Drawing on urban studies scholarship, Arabic literary criticism, and cultural theory, this wide-ranging work argues that a re-examination of the historic city center in the face of globalization and the ongoing fragmentation of urban space is essential to understanding what it means to be Egyptian today.

Exploring five key texts from the emerging canon of second generation writing, this exciting new study" "brings together theories of autobiography, trauma, and fantasy to understand the how traumatic family histories are represented. In doing so, it demonstrates the continuing impact of familial and community Holocaust trauma, and the need for a precise, clearly developed theoretical framework in which to situate these works. This book will appeal to final year undergraduates and postgraduate students, as well as scholars in literary and Holocaust-related fields, and an audience with personal and professional interests in the 'second generation'.

By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, "Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance" explores how allegory can be used to resolve the "problem" of identity in both political theory and literary studies. Examining fiction and performance from Zoe Valdes and Cherrie Moraga to Def Poetry Jam and Carmelita Tropicana, Sugg suggests that the representational oscillations of allegory can reflect and illuminate the fraught dynamics of identity discourses and categories in the Americas. Using a wide array of theoretical and aesthetic sources from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this book argues for the crucial and potentially transformative role of feminist cultural production in transamerican public cultures.

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019 Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 'If you have even the slightest interest in Orwell or in the development of our culture, you should not miss this engrossing, enlightening book.' John Carey, Sunday Times George Orwell's last novel has become one of the iconic narratives of the modern world. Its ideas have become part of the language - from 'Big Brother' to the 'Thought Police', 'Doublethink', and 'Newspeak' - and seem ever more relevant in the era of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. The cultural influence of 1984 can be observed in some of the most notable creations of the past seventy years, from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs - and from the launch of Apple Mac to the reality TV landmark, Big Brother. In this remarkable and original book. Dorian Lynskey investigates the influences that came together in the writing of 1984 from Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War and war-time London to his book's roots in utopian and dystopian fiction. He explores the phenomenon that the novel became on publication and the changing ways in which it has been read over the decades since. 2019 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of what is arguably Orwell's masterpiece, while the year 1984 itself is now as distant from us as it was from Orwell on publication day. The Ministry of Truth is a fascinating examination of one of the most significant works of modern English literature. It describes how history can inform fiction and how fiction can influence history.

Modernist Mythopoeia argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of metaphysical perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. The book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in modernist studies.

Starting with the history of apocalyptic tradition in the West and focusing on modern Japanese apocalyptic science fiction in manga, anime, and novels, Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction shows how science fiction reflected and coped with the devastation in Japanese national identity after 1945. The structure of apocalyptic science fiction reveals what is at stake in Japanese society - cultural continuity, tradition, politics, ideology, reality, communities, and interpersonal relationships - and suggests ways to cope with these crises and visions for the future, both positive and negative. By looking at the postwar period, Motoko Tanaka observes how Japanese apocalyptic discourse has changed in its role as a tool according to the zeitgeists of various decades.

This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women's narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second and third generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Adopting the idea that the text itself becomes a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process and visual text. The last part questions the past in relation to trauma and identity displacement in the countries where abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the people lives.

This book is about the contemporary picaresque novel. Despite its popularity, the picaresque, unlike the bildungsroman, is still an undertheorized genre, especially for the context of postcolonial literatures. This study considers the picaresque novel's traditional focus on poverty and deprivation, and argues that its postcolonial versions urge us to conceive of as a more wide-ranging sense of precarity and precariousness. Non-linear biography, episodic style, protean identities, unreliable narratives, and abject landscapes are the social and formal aspects through which this precarity is thematized and performed. A concise analysis of these concepts and phenomena in the picaresque provides the structure for this book. What is especially significant in comparison to other forms of postcolonial (post)modernism is that the picaresque does not offer a general critique of a project of modernity, but through its persistent precarity points to the paradoxical logics of capitalism, which are especially nuanced under the conditions of neo-imperialism and neoliberalism. The book features texts by established postcolonial authors such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, but especially focuses on the more recent proliferation of the genre in works by Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Indra Sinha.

Why do the dead return? Are the dead lost to us for ever, or do they remain part of the world of the living? This book examines these questions as they persistently emerge in areas as diverse as film, Holocaust testimony, and in the works of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The book suggests that it may be as difficult for the living to get rid of the dead as it is to live without them.

This title introduces the work of James Joyce, the literary, historical and political contexts in which he wrote and his critical reception up to the present day. James Joyce stands at the forefront of modernism - a writer whose work has gained a unique status in modern Western culture. This book offers an introduction to reading and studying Joycean texts and surveys the key contexts - literary, historical, political, philosophical and compositional - which shaped and determined them. By identifying and engaging with Joyce's writing methods and style, the book opens up strategies and approaches for reading his complex texts. It also introduces the critical reception of Joyce and his work, from the early structuralist and 'myth' critics, through deconstruction, to recent developments including historical criticism and genetic criticism.

Postcolonial Literatures in Context is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to postcolonial literatures in English (and English translation) and their wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues involved in the study of postcolonial literature including old and new diasporas, postcolonial nationalisms, indigenous identities and politics and globalization. Close readings of commonly studied texts from and about Africa, Australia, Canada, Palestine and South Asian diasporas highlight critical questions and ways of reading postcolonial texts. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores a range of wider cultural texts including film, non-fiction and art. The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives including diaspora theory, feminism, indigeneity and the postcolony. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying postcolonial literatures.

James A. Michener is one of the most widely read American authors of the 20th century. He worked as a social studies teacher and as an editor, and went on to write such memorable works as Tales of the South Pacific and Centennial. He also wrote numerous scattered short pieces. Though a popular writer, Michener's importance to the American literary, educational, social, and political scene is now slowly being recognized, and his writings are being used as guides and touchstones for study in American schools. This volume contains a checklist of Michener's major novels and his scattered minor writings, along with an extensive annotated bibliography of works about him. The first part is a checklist of his works, while the second is an annotated listing of books and articles published on Michener from the 1920s to the 1990s. The volume also contains a selected list of reviews of Michener's major works. Two reviews for each work have been selected at random, and they provide an overview of the critical response to Michener's writings over the years.

The South has a rich cultural legacy and that of Louisiana is especially strong and diverse. Despite its similarities with the rest of the South, Louisiana has a distinct cultural identity rooted in the colonial impulses of France and Spain, the evolution of gender roles, the importance of religion, and the dramatic shift in racial politics after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps because of its diversity, it has inspired numerous writers, some of whom have contributed greatly to American literature. This book explores the influences at work on Louisiana writers and those writing about Louisiana from the end of the Civil War through World War II.

These writers reflect the effects of Louisiana's culture, politics, and colonial heritage. Such writers as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lyle Saxon, and George Washington Cable characterize the racial caste system, pointing out the flaws in its construction and its effects on relationships. Ruth McEnery Stuart, Kate Chopin, and Sallie Rhett Roman depict the lives of women in Louisiana and their struggles when taking on nontraditional roles. And William Faulkner and Arna Bontemps draw upon narrative and folk traditions, which provide the foundations for their works. Chapters are grouped in sections devoted to three of the broadest influences on writers of the era: women, work, and culture during Reconstruction; the impact of Modernism; and issues of race and class.

This book fills a gap in both literary and feminist scholarship by offering the first major study of femme fatales in hardboiled crime fiction. Maysaa Jaber shows that the criminal literary figures in the genre open up powerful spaces for imagining female agency in direct opposition to the constraining forces of patriarchy and misogyny.

Examines the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing. Focusing on women's writing of the last two centuries, Scenes of the Apple traces the intricate relationship between food and body image for women. Ranging over a variety of genres, including novels, culinary memoirs, and essays, the contributors explore works by a diverse group of writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Jeanette Winterson, as well as such nonliterary documents as discussions of Queen Victoria's appetite and news coverage of suffragettes' hunger strikes. Moreover, in addressing works by Hispanic, African, African American, Jewish, and lesbian writers, the book explodes the myth that only white, privileged, and heterosexual women are concerned with body image, and shows the many cultural contexts in which food and cooking are important in women's literature. Above all, the essays pay tribute to the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing as a symbol for all kinds of delightful--and transgressive--desires.

A socio-cultural analysis of the relationship between modernism and science fiction, from the 1870s to the 1970s, with examples drawn from literature and other media in Britain, Europe and the Americas. The book challenges how high and low culture has been mapped in the twentieth century.

This book, first published in 1944, is a comprehensive survey of post-revolutionary Russian literature up to the early 1940s. A huge range of writers are examined, and the analysis is made in the knowledge of the sometimes considerable pressure brought by the Government on writers in Soviet Russia. Links are made by the author between the writers being assessed, as well as to the Russian writers that had come before them. As a wide-ranging analysis of Soviet literature, this book has rarely been bettered.

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

In this evocative and engaging memoir, Thomas Wright recalls, with eloquence, frankness, and humor, a man coming to terms with his homosexuality and seeking his happiness in ignorant and repressive times. Throughout his life and in his travels, Wright gathered a distinguished circle of friends that included some of the most influential writers of the mid-20th century, among them Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, and Christopher Isherwood. Scion of an old Louisiana family, Wright left the South after college to live in the scintillating Manhattan of the late 1940s. Stimulated by the Columbia University of Trilling and Van Doren, he went on to develop lasting friendships with Allen and Caroline Tate, Tennessee Williams, and socialized with William Inge, Chester Kallman, Speed Lankin, Bill Goyen, Carson McCullers' family, and Harold Norse. Wright moved to southern California in the 1950s to become a writer. There he became intimate with Christopher Isherwood and Edward James (the purported son of Edward VII of England), enabling him to move in circles that included Igor Stravinsky, Gerald Heard, and Aldous Huxley. In the 1960s he began his travels, moving first to Mexico, then to Europe and on to Morocco, where he became a confidante of Paul Bowles. By the mid-1970s Wright began traveling again, moving throughout Latin America and finally settling in Guatemala where he now resides. Wright's honest treatment of his homosexuality and personal remembrances of the literary legends he befriended will inspire and fascinate readers.

Closely reading a range of performance work from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, "Naming Theatre" is a ground-breaking study of theater's growing obsession with technologies and effects of naming. How do theater-makers such as Ping Chong, Anne Bogart, Suzan-Lori Parks, Forced Entertainment, Lightwork, Ridiculusmus, Theodora Skipitares, Paula Vogel, and Riot Group intervene in naming practices across domains such as medicine, political activism, philosophy, horror films, television and print journalism, anthropology, advertising and brand development, semiotics, military training, and genetics?