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 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.

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.

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.

Gendering Modernism offers a critical reappraisal of the modernist movement, asking how gender norms of the time shaped the rebellion of the self-avowed modernists and examining the impact of radical gender reformers on modernism. Focusing primarily on the connections between North American and European modernists, Maria Bucur explains why it is imperative that we consider the gender angles of modernism as a way to understand the legacies of the movement. She provides an overview of the scholarship on modernism and an analysis of how definitions of modernism have evolved with that scholarship. Interweaving vivid case studies from before the Great War to the interwar period - looking at individual modernists from Ibsen to Picasso, Hannah Hoech to Josephine Baker - she covers various fields such as art, literature, theatre and film, whilst also demonstrating how modernism manifested itself in the major social-political and cultural shifts of the 20th century, including feminism, psychology, sexology, eugenics, nudism, anarchism, communism and fascism. This is a fresh and wide-ranging investigation of modernism which expands our definition of the movement, integrating gender analysis and thereby opening up new lines of enquiry. Written in a lively and accessible style, Gendering Modernism is a crucial intervention into the literature which should be read by all students and scholars of the modernist movement as well 20th-century history and gender studies more broadly.

Featuring nine in-depth interviews with Mike Murphy and three round-table discussions with fellow Irish writers and critics, Reading the Future creates a unique freeze-frame portrait of Ireland's literary culture at the turn of the century - and provides fascinating insights into the shaping influences on the lives, creative minds and working methods of twelve great writers. Including a challenging introduction by Declan Kiberd, consulting editor to the series and chairman of the selection panel, Reading the Future is an indispensable source for any serious reader of Irish literature.

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.

This study examines several unexplored aspects of Robert Frost’s poetry—proverbs, riddles, and names—and shows how they contribute to the reader's experience. Timothy D. O'Brien argues that while they often shape Frost’s poems as sites of inviting wisdom and play, these features also open up the poems to radical doubt about identity, authorship, and reality. This book offers the most extensive research to date of the relationship between Frost’s poetry and the visual art that often accompanied it and sheds new light on the work of one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded poets.    

This selection of letters from James Schuyler to legendary poet Frank O'Hara reconstruct a friendship that lay at the heart of the New York school - a convocation of poets including Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, with whom Schuyler later wrote a novel. It is an encapsulation of a friendship, a mind and a life.

J.R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy, yet did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. These essays examine that paradox and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern. The approach helps to explain the popularity of his works, the way in which they continue to be brought into dialogue with twenty-first century issues, and their contested literary significance in the academy.

This new volume in the "Author Chronology "series illuminates the writing of Edith Wharton by detailing her experiences and placing her in her social context. Edith Wharton was a prolific as well as a many-sided writer, who created not only novels, novellas, short stories, and poems, but also a notable series of travel writings, and did translations, pieces for the theatre, and essays on other writers and their works, as well as on the creation and criticism of fiction.This account of Wharton's personal and professional life provides an invaluable insight into an important American woman writer of the twentieth century.

Using a cognitive approach to literature, Self-Consciousness in Modern British Fiction uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. This innovative study offers new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lessing to demonstrate the emergence of a self who feels split from the world. Readings of individual novels are informed by early twentieth century British psychology and philosophy, and by contemporary scholarship in embodied cognition and narrative identity. The models of self-consciousness rendered visible by this analysis improve our understanding of modernist technical experiment with stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse.

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of "townies" and the ambitions of students debating books and ideas, couldn t have been more stark. In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself."

Anne Tyler is one of America's most significant contemporary writers. This book is a solid introduction to her life and work. It includes the first biography of Tyler, along with a record of her writings and the response to her work. It incorporates source materials from the Anne Tyler Papers at Duke University and letters from Tyler to the author. The volume lists all of Tyler's novels, short stories, articles, and book reviews and provides an annotated bibliography of critical studies. The first half of the book is a biography of Tyler. The author describes her childhood in a North Carolina commune, her high school years in Raleigh, her college years at Duke, and her earliest writing efforts. The biography charts the development of her life and career through her marriage, motherhood, early novels and stories, her life in Baltimore and career as a book reviewer, her rise to fame, and the themes of her major works. The bibliography that follows lists her novels, short stories, nonfiction articles and essays, poetry, children's books, book reviews, and the manuscripts in her papers at Duke University, along with an annotated secondary bibliography.

Voices from the Asylum is a fascinating investigation of the lives of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self-proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first-hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint.
By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century.
Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

This volume features new essays by eminent and emerging Woolf scholars, focusing on the aesthetics and influences of Virginia Woolf's work. Themes include eco-criticism, conceptions of intellectual women, spaces and places, and Woolf beyond Bloomsbury. The volume opens with a personal reflection by Cecil Woolf, nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

Relatively little critical attention has been directed towards the explication of James Merrill's difficult poems, much less towards the understanding of his densely-layered symbolism. This is the first comprehensive study to look at Merrill's difficult symbolic system and to provide a close reading of Merrill's epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Adams reads Merrill's poetry through various lenses, primarily those of Freudian psychology and of the Jungian archetypal system. His approach allows the reader to view individual works as part of the larger picture of Merrill's quest to save his life through his art.

What do fictional representations of older women add to our understanding of a group of individuals often marginalized in our youth-oriented society? Starting from an overview of 19th-century women's fiction, this book explores this and other questions through close readings of the work of major 20th-century women novelists, considered in relation to these non-fictional perceptions.

Pearl Buck made important contributions as a humanitarian and an advocate of racial equality and women's rights. She did much to change American attitudes toward persons with mental retardation and toward mixed-race children. She was a major force in shaping American views of Asia, particularly China, during the 1930s and 1940s. Until 1993, she was first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 13 essays in this book, the first such collection on Buck to be published in the United States, view her from historical, humanitarian, and literary perspectives.

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.

The Theatre of Nation is a study of the development of the theatre movement and its relationship to political change in Ireland during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Levitas traces the connections between Irish drama and Irish politics, and concludes that Ireland's theatre had a pivotal role to play in the controversies of its time and in the coming revolution.

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex--child, mother, father--suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--"a likely story!"--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies--Oedipus and others--which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands ofhis stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR and the literariness of its literature. The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature,but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.