Essential for students of Theatre Studies, this series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and reassessment of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume equips readers with an understanding of the context from which work emerged, a detailed overview of the range of theatrical activity and a close study of the work of four of the major playwrights by a team of leading scholars. Chris Megson's comprehensive survey of the theatre of the 1970s examines the work of four playwrights who came to promience in the decade and whose work remains undiminished today: Caryl Churchill (by Paola Botham), David Hare (Chris Megson), Howard Brenton (Richard Boon) and David Edgar (Janelle Reinelt). It analyses their work then, its legacy today and provides a fresh assessment of their contribution to British theatre. Interviews with the playwrights, with directors and with actors provides an invaluable collection of documents offering new perspectives on the work. Revisiting the decade from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Chris Megson provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1970s.

This is an important study of the publishing of contemporary writing in Britain. It analyzes the changing social, economic and cultural environment of the publishing industry in the 1990s-2000s, and investigates its impact on genre, authorship and reading. It includes case studies of Trainspotting and the His Dark Materials trilogy.

This is a collection of research by leading international scholars on Beckett, as well as younger academics, analyses a number of Beckett's poems, plays and short stories through consideration of mortality and death. Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception. This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and short stories through considerations of mortality and death. Chapters explore the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole, through three main approaches. The first of these situates Beckett's thinking about death in his own writing and reading processes, particularly with respect to manuscript drafts and letters. The second on the death of the subject in Beckett links dominant 'poststructural' readings of Beckett's writing to the textual challenge exemplified by the "The Unnamable". A final approach explores psychology and death, with emphasis on deathly states like catatonia and Cotard's Syndrome that recur in Beckett's work. "Beckett and Death" offers a range of cutting-edge approaches to the trope of mortality, and a unique insight into the relationship of this theme to all aspects of Beckett's literature.

This standard and definitive bibliography was first published in 1968. This new ediion is considerably expnaded to take account of the Waley literature of the last twenty years and incorporates additional entries for the entire period. An essential reference work for all librarians concerned with Chinese and Japanese language and literature.

Covering a diverse range of figures and issues from Jonathan Swifts pornographic poetry to Oscar Wildes famous cello-shaped coat this book collapses Irish studies into the critical perspective of disability studies: linking 'Irishness' and 'disability' together allows the emergence of a new critical perspective, an Irish disability studies.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the other to make his mark among the elite members of an international literary field. Taking his cue from some under-appreciated stories, Michael Nowlin argues that Fitzgerald's early use of tropes from blackface minstrelsy anticipated his race-inflected treatment of divided artist figures in the major novels from "The Beautiful and Damned" to the unfinished "The Love of the Last Tycoon." At issue in all these novels, both formally and thematically, is the dynamic state of the modern, multi-faceted, and ethnically diverse American cultural field Fitzgerald was constantly re-negotiating in order to meet his goal of long-term literary success.

This classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), was first published in 1913 and is written by a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, husband of Virginia Woolf. It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka. It includes a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of "Woolf in Ceylon", and a short story, "Pearls before Swine", which vividly draws on Woolf's experience as a young District Commissioner. This book reeks of first-hand knowledge of the colonial experience, and of its profound, malign disregard for the psychology and culture of its subject peoples.

This book investigates the impact of fascism on twentieth-century British fiction. With a solid archival underpinning, Suh locates anti-fascist counter-strategies in middlebrow genres associated with women writers (domestic fiction, melodrama, country house novels, and family sagas) and makes the powerful argument that these rhetorical and narrative strategies emerge as the most durable. Presenting works by Phyllis Bottome, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Muriel Spark, the book shifts the focus from high modernism and its heirs, widely considered the most important sites of literary conceptions of the political, to the under explored feminist anti-fascist strategies inherent to middlebrow fiction.

"Comedy Matters" traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, "Comedy Matters" demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present examines representations of war in literature, film, photography, memorials, and the popular press. The volume breaks new ground in cutting across disciplinary boundaries and offering case studies on a wide variety of fields of vision and action, and types of conflict: from civil wars in the USA, Spain, Russia and the Congo to recent western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of World War Two, Representing Wars emphasises idiosyncratic and non-western perspectives - specifically those of Japanese writers Hayashi and Ooka. A central concern of the thirteen contributors has been to investigate the ethical and ideological implications of specific representational choices. Contributors are: Claire Bowen, Catherine Ann Collins, Marie-France Courriol, Eliane Elmaleh, Teresa Gibert, William Gleeson, Catherine Hoffmann, Sandrine Lascaux, Christopher Lloyd, Monica Michlin, Guillaume Muller, Misako Nemoto, Clement Sigalas.

This rich volume is dedicated to the astounding South African writer and literary critic Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010).

In this book, Nkosi’s celebrated one-act play “The Black Psychiatrist” is published together with its unpublished sequel “Flying Home,” a play on the satirically fictionalized inauguration of Mandela as South African president. Critical appraisals, tributes and recollections by scholars and friends reflect on the beat of his writing and life.

An ideal volume for those encountering Lewis Nkosi for the first time as well as for those already devoted to his work. Edited by Astrid Starck, a literary scholar, and Dag Henrichsen, a historian.

By examining the relation between time and processes of figuration in James Joyce's later work, this groundbreaking study identifies his attempt to engage with the philosophical problem of describing time's characteristic movement whilst acknowledging the impossibility of reducing this movement to anything that can be observed, represented or even experienced. Ruben Borg argues that this problem informs the narrative structure, imagery and complex rhetorical strategies in Finnegan's Wake, Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Derrida, Borg challenges the assumption that Joycean time is organized around the idea of a totalizing present. Emphasizing his treatment of time as a force of measureless passing, Borg offers a better understanding of Joyce's endeavour to characterize time as a multiplicity that resists representation or objective measurement and its role as a central theme and structural element in his later work.

Behrman's prolific career as a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter spans a period from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. As a writer for popular performance, he had to contend with commercial influences and with producers and directors involved in the dynamics of the collaborative process. Though eminently successful, his works have not received adequate critical scrutiny. His ouevre probably will never be fully determined because of collaboration, numerous rewrites, and the many unpublished and unproduced plays and scripts. Author Robert F. Gross here provides an immensely detailed record of the primary materials, published and unpublished, including plays, filmscripts, fiction, and essays, and of the critical response, both reviews and analytical studies. Focusing on Behrman as a dramatist, Gross has written extensive plot summaries and critical overviews for each of fifty-one plays. Where applicable, full production credits are given for premieres and revivals, and references are made to reviews and commentary about specific productions as well as to the plays in general. The annotated secondary bibliography is divided into chronologically organized sections for reviews and for books, parts of books, and articles. Fully cross-referenced, the material is also accessible through an author index to the secondary bibliography and a general subject index. In an opening appraisal, Gross expresses his appreciation for Behrman, whose high comedies he finds to be informed by a probing ethical conscience and whose goal of scrupulosity he emulates in his own work. This scrupulous playwright is here given his due in a comprehensive sourcebook of value for theatre historians and theatre professionals.

Virginia Woolf's writing is alert to the politics of space, be it urban, domestic, textual or geopolitical. This is the first book to offer an in-depth treatment of Woolf's representations of space and place. Its eleven essays contribute not only to Woolf studies but also to emergent debates concerning modernism's relations to empire and geography. They offer innovative and interdisciplinary readings on topics such as London's imperial spaces, the spatial formations created by new technology, and the gendering of space.

The "Author Chronologies Series" aims to provide a means whereby the precise chronological facts of an author's life and career can be seen at a glance. This chronology provides a synopsis of Joyce's first years in Dublin and, from 1900, a more detailed account of his life there and attempts to become established as a writer when living mainly in Trieste and Zurich; and finally (when he became world-famous) Paris, concluding with his death in 1941.

Focusing on orally transmitted cultural forms in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as a mode of imaginative conceptualization. Paul A. Griffith cross-references Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates with issues at seminal sites where Caribbean imaginary insurgencies took root. This book demonstrates the ways residually oral forms distilled history, society, and culture to cleverly resist aggressions authored through colonialist presumptions. In an analysis of the archetypal patterns in the oral tradition--both literary and nonliterary, this impressive book gives insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it.

This book explores stylistic techniques that interweave different viewpoints in Modernist fiction. Consciousness was a central concern of the Modernist novel and there has been a strong critical interest in the techniques of its presentation. Critics are aware of the Modernist practice of refracting narratives through the consciousness of numerous characters, but while narratologists as well as stylisticians have studied the linguistic indices of narrative viewpoint, the linguistic mechanics of shifts across different characters' minds or across character's and narrator's voices have remained unexplored. This book offers the first stylistic analysis of the linguistic evidence and shows that the implications of such practices far exceed the attempt to simply juxtapose different characters' viewpoints and thereby interpret the narrative world through different perspectives; rather than simply co-existing in the tissue of the narrative, the viewpoints of D.H. Lawrence's and Virginia Woolf's characters are interconnected in dialogue that occurs at the interstices of viewpoint shifts. This is significant because it impacts on the very discourse of the novel itself as a genre, i.e. its dialogicity. James Joyce's rendering of consciousness intersects the voices of character and narrator, and this in turn implicates the reader in the construction of meaning. The identification of dialogic techniques in the presentation of consciousness serves to question a long accepted belief that the novel of consciousness is a novel of fragmentation and occlusion. Instead, the dialogic Modernism identified here suggests a more deliberate concern on the part of writers to engage directly with the philosophical questions of self and other that were being explored, in a very different format, by Heidegger, Bergson and Buber.

This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality is attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century--in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of Rene Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayrocker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the on-going fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded.

This book concerns the significance of the English Channel in British and French literature from the 1780s onwards: a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses contemporary authors who use the Channel as a focus for cultural comment, comparing their approaches to those of earlier writers, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Hugo and Dickens to historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1980s.

In Mexico, the confluence of the 1992 Quincentennial commemoration of Columbus's voyages and the neo-liberal "sexenio," or presidency, of Carlos Salinas de Gortari spurred artistic creations that capture the decade like no other source does. In the 1990s, Mexican artists produced an inordinate number of works that revise and rewrite the events of the sixteenth-century conquest and colonization. These works and their relationship to, indeed their mirroring of, the intellectual and cultural atmosphere in Mexico during the Salinas presidency are of paramount importance if we are to understand the subtle but deep shifts within Mexico's national identity that took place at the end of the last century.

Throughout the twentieth century, the post-revolutionary Mexican State had used "mestizaje" as a symbol of national unity and social integration. By the end of the millennium, however, Mexico had gone from a PRI-dominated, economically protectionist nation to a more democratic, economically globalizing one. More importantly, the homogenizing, mestizophile national identity that pervaded Mexico throughout the past century had given way to official admission of Mexico's ethnic and linguistic diversity--or 'pluriculture' according to President Salinas's 1992 constitutional revision.

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of literary, cinematic, and graphic images of Mexican national identity in the 1980s and '90s. Discussing, in depth, writings, films, and cartoons from a vast array of contemporary sources, Carrie C. Chorba creates a social history of this important shift.

To many, Edward Said's seminal 1978 work Orientalism is an enduring touchstone, a founding text of the field of postcolonial studies and a book that continues to influence debates in literary and cultural studies, Middle Eastern Studies, anthropology, art history, history and politics. To others, however, Orientalism has serious failings, not least in blaming the wrong people - namely, Orientalists - for the crimes of European imperialism. Debating Orientalism addresses the book's contemporary relevance without lionizing or demonizing its author. Bridging the gap between intellectual history and political engagement, the twelve contributors to this volume interrogate Orientalism's legacy with a view to moving the debate about this text beyond the manichean limitations within which it has all too often been imprisoned. Debating Orientalism seeks to consider Orientalism's implications with a little less feeling, though no less commitment to understanding the value and political effects of engaged scholarship.

Traditional critics of film adaptation generally assumed a) that the written text is better than the film adaptation because the plot is more intricate and the language richer when pictorial images do not intrude; b) that films are better when particularly faithful to the original; c) that authors do not make good script writers and should not sully their imagination by writing film scripts; d) and often that American films lack the complexity of authored texts because they are sourced out of Hollywood. The 'faithfulness' view has by and large disappeared, and intertextuality is now a generally received notion, but the field still lacks studies with a postmodern methodology and lens.Exploring Hollywood feature films as well as small studio productions, Adaptation Theory and Criticism explores the intertextuality of a dozen films through a series of case studies introduced through discussions of postmodern methodology and practice. Providing the reader with informative background on theories of film adaptation as well as carefully articulated postmodern methodology and issues, Gordon Slethaug includes several case studies of major Hollywood productions and small studio films, some of which have been discussed before ("Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York," and "Do the Right Thing") and some that have received lesser consideration ("Six Degrees of Separation, Smoke, Smoke""Signals, Broken Flowers," and various Snow White narratives including "Enchanted, Mirror Mirror, and Snow White and the Huntsman"). Useful for both film and literary studies students, Adaptation Theory and Criticism cogently combines the existing scholarship and uses previous theories to engage readers to think about the current state of American literature and film.

Considers the Indian periodical press as a key forum for the production of nationalist rhetoric. It argues that between the 1870s and 1910, the press was the place in which the notion of 'the public' circulated and where an expansive middle class, and even larger reading audience, was persuaded into believing it had force.