David Grant's study of the stagecraft of Brian Friel results from many years of professional association with the Irish playwright's work. This Student Guide explores the dramatic and cultural significance of Friel's vision of Ireland, the ways in which the plays might be interpreted on the stage and a synoptic view of his contribution to the theatre. Of special interest is Grant's inclusion of theatrical workshops to enhance our understanding of Friel's craft.

How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today. -- .

Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant. -- .

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change. Antonia Mehnert turns to a set of contemporary American works of fiction, reading them as a unique response to the challenges of representing climate change. She draws on "climate change fiction"- texts dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change-and explores how these works convey climate change, deal with its challenging characteristics, and with what narrative techniques they ultimately participate in its communication. Indeed, a number of challenging traits make climate change a difficult issue to engage with including its slow and long temporal dimension, global scale, scientific controversy, and its disconnect between cause and effect. Considering such complexity and uncertainty at the source of climate change fictions, this book moves beyond a solely ecocritical analysis and shows how these climate change fictions constitute an insightful cultural repertoire valuable for discussion in the environmental humanities in general.

Despite the fame Ted Hughes's poetry has achieved, there has been surprisingly little critical writing on his children's literature. This book identifies the importance of Hughes's children's writing from an ecocritical perspective and argues that the healing function that Hughes ascribes to nature in his children's literature is closely linked to the development of his own sense of environmental responsibility. This book will be the first sustained examination of Hughes's greening in relation to his writing for children, providing a detailed reading of Hughes's children's literature through his poetry, prose and drama as well as his critical essays and letters. In addition, it also explores how Hughes's children's writing is a window to the poet's own emotional struggles, as well as his environmental consciousness and concern to reconnect a society that has become alienated from nature. This book will be of great interest to not only those studying Ted Hughes, but also students and scholars of environment and literature, ecocriticism, children's literature and twentieth-century literature.

This bold new reading of Orwell's work focuses upon his representation of communities and the myths that shape them. In particular, it analyzes his interpretations of class, gender and nationality within the context of the political and literary culture of the Nineteen-Thirties and Forties. The book uses a wide range of literary, historical and theoretical texts to argue that Orwell's radicalism lay in his attempt to integrate 'traditional' communal identities into a revolutionary socialist politics.

This is a collection of original essays on Philip Roth offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of recent texts. Philip Roth has without doubt been one of the most important writers of fiction in the United States during the latter part of the twentieth century. "Philip Roth" collects new essays by noted Roth scholars on three essential novels appearing in recent years, "American Pastoral" (1997), "The Human Stain" (2000), and "The Plot Against America" (2004). The volume illuminates Roth's multilayered perceptions of twentieth-century America as a place, a culture, and an idea that shapes its inhabitants in profound ways. Focusing on such topics as ethnicity, gender, race, the family, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Roth's penetrating explorations of American selfhood. The contributors probe this American Jewish writer's insights into the paradoxes of freedom and self-determination, the politics of identity, especially as defined by racial or ethnic affiliation, and the possibilities available for self-definition and transformation within the context of American history and culture. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.

During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century. Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America. More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.

WHY PUBLISH: - It develops, in "beginning-orientation", a wholly original approach to analysing and understanding detective fiction. - Due to the popularity of Agatha Christie's fiction, this book would have a broad appeal, particularly in the UK, Europe, US and Australasia. There might be scope for a French translation, given the author's focus on Pierre Bayard's scholarship. - Not only does this book challenge Agatha Christie's plots, but also dissects previous re-readings of them (Banyard's) to formulate new interpretations.

In 1916, Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron, a dime-store colonial adventure story, "[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life." John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement -- made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation -- is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka's ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka's Travels elegantly re-reads Kafka's major works (Amerika, The Trial, In the Penal Colony, The Castle ) through the lens of fin-de-siecle travel culture. Making use of previously unexplored literary and cultural materials--travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure novels--Zilcosky argues that Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of the author's complex encounter with the travel discourses of his day.

This revelatory study explores how Scottish history plays, especially since the 1930s, raise issues of ideology, national identity, historiography, mythology, gender and especially Scottish language. Covering topics up to the end of World War Two, the book addresses the work of many key figures from the last century of Scottish theatre, including Robert McLellan and his contemporaries, and also Hector MacMillan, Stewart Conn, John McGrath, Donald Campbell, Bill Bryden, Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Jo Clifford, Peter Arnott, David Greig, Rona Munro and others often neglected or misunderstood. Setting these writers' achievements in the context of their Scottish and European predecessors, Ian Brown offers fresh insights into key aspects of Scottish theatre. As such, this represents the first study to offer an overarching view of historical representation on Scottish stages, exploring the nature of 'history' and 'myth' and relating these afresh to how dramatists use - and subvert - them. Engaging and accessible, this innovative book will attract scholars and students interested in history, ideology, mythology, theatre politics and explorations of national and gender identity.

Travel Writing and the Transnational Author explores the travel writing and transnational literature of four authors from the 'postcolonial canon': Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie.

This book argues that many of the mid-twentieth century's significant novelists were united by their desire to return the interior novel to ethical engagement. They did not seek morality in society, politics or the individual will, but sought to unveil a transcendent God through the use of techniques drawn from the canon of mystical literature.

Here's a one stop resource, containing 100 profiles of your favorite contemporary African American writers, along with complete lists of their works. Focusing on writers who have made their mark in the past 25 years, this guide stresses African American writers of popular and genre literature-from Rochelle Alers and Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delaney to Walter Mosley, and Omar Tyree, with a few classic literary giants also included. Short profiles provide an overview of the author's life and summarize his or her writing accomplishments. Many are accompanied by black-and-white photos of the author. The biographies are followed by a complete list of the author's published works. Where can you find information about popular, contemporary African American authors? Web sites can be difficult to locate and unreliable, particularly for some of the newer authors, and their contents are inconsistent and often inaccurate. Although there are a number of reference works on African American writers, the emphasis tends to be on historical and literary authors. Here's a single volume containing 100 profiles of your favorite contemporary African American writers, along with lists of their works. Short profiles provide an overview of the author's life and summarize his or her writing accomplishments. Many are accompanied by black-and-white photos of the author. The biographies are followed by a complete list of the author's published works. Focusing on writers who have made their mark in the past 25 years, this guide covers African American writers of popular and genre literature-from Rochelle Alers, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delaney to Walter Mosley, Omar Tyree, and Zane. A few classic literary giants who are popular with today's readers are also included-e.g., Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright. Readers who want to know more about their favorite African American authors or find other books written by those authors, students researching AA authors for reports and papers, and educators seeking background information for classes in African American literature will find this guide invaluable. (High school and up.)

The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature explores and analyses political conflicts between individuals and authority figures, as those conflicts are depicted in thirteen Egyptian novels written from 1957 to the last years of Mubarak's presidency. The book discusses the various reasons that lead an individual or a group of people from all strata of society (common people, intellectuals, and public figures) to confront policemen, senior security officials, and even the heads of the state. It further examines how the conflicts develop and what their outcomes are in the short term as well as in the long term, for both the individuals and the authority figures. In this context, the volume also examines the possibility of standing against an oppressive regime and even overcoming it. This text argues that while the authority figure initially subdues individuals who confront them, their victory is short term. In the long term, their cruelties bring about sown deaths, either by the individuals themselves or by their relatives. Furthermore, large assemblies of people can confront the regime with success. These discoveries, along with other findings presented in the book, remain relevant to the reality in the Middle East and the events leading to the Arab Spring.

In this new research monograph, Tudor Balinsteanu draws on concepts of dance to demonstrate how the nonhuman is dealt with in terms of practical politics, that is, choreographies of social performance which emerge at the intersection of literature, art, and embodied life. Drawing on a number of influential texts by William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce, this truly interdisciplinary monograph explores the relations between the human and the nonhuman across centuries of literature and as demonstrated in philosophical concepts and social experiments.

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-’50s America as the “tough guy.” The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender “otherness,” this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.

This collection of critical essays explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish suburbia, and the historical, social and aesthetic contexts in which these cultures have emerged. The lived experience and the artistic representation of Irish suburbia have received relatively little scholarly consideration and this multidisciplinary volume redresses this critical deficit. It significantly advances the nascent socio-historical field of Irish suburban studies, while simultaneously disclosing and establishing a history of suburban Irish literary and visual culture. The essays also challenge conventional conceptions of what constitutes the proper domain of Irish writing and art and reveal that, though Irish suburban experience is often conceived of pejoratively by writers and artists, there are also many who register and valorise the imaginative possibilities of Irish suburbia and the meanings of its social and cultural life.

Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern times and argues that the novels of this period reveal a dramatic shift in conceptions of "creatureliness." Scholars have turned to the term "creaturely" recently to describe shared aspects of human and animal experience, thus moving beyond work that primarily attends to distinctions between the human and the animal. Carrying forward this recent scholarship, Novel Creatures argues that creatureliness has been an intensely millennial preoccupation, but in two contrasting forms-one leading up to the turn of the millennium, and the other appearing after the tragic events of 9/11.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org.
Examining recent rewritings of the Victorian period by authors such asA. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Gail Jones and Graham Swift, "Victorian Afterimages" explores the way in which neo-Victorian fictions enact and celebrate the power of cultural memory in an age historically obsessed and yet charged with the inability to think historically.

R. S. Thomas's presentation of God has given rise to controversy and dissent. In exploring Thomas's techniques of creating his image of God, Elaine Shepherd addresses the problems surrounding the language of religion and of religious poetry. After a consideration of the possibilities of both the positive and negative ways of imaging God and the problematics of religious poetry as a genre, a sequence of close readings engages the reader in an exploration of language and image. Each chapter focuses on a significant image, examining its construction and its potential to stand as an image for God, from the image of woman as constructed by the Impressionists to the non-image of the mystical theologian.

When Tom Wolfe declared that 'new' journalism had surpassed the novel as the most vital form of literature, he set off a rivalry that Norman Mailer, the novelist and 'new' journalist, labeled an 'undeclared war' between journalism and fiction. Many of the important twentieth century journalist-literary figures in the United States and the United Kingdom rejected so-called non-fictional methods as their favored way to convey social truths. Despite their own careers in jorunalism, they came to believe that the writing formulas that grew out of industrialized journalism could be an impediment to expressing an authentic view of the world. In this volume, Doug Underwood asks whether much of what is now called literary journalism is, in fact, 'literary, ' and whether it should rank with the great novels by such journalists-turned-novelists such as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, who believed - as Mailer did - that fiction provided a more expansive way for the realistic writer to express the important 'truths' of life.

In British Women Writers of World War II , Phyllis Lassner offers a challenging analysis of politicized literature in which such British women writers as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson debated the `justness' of World War II. Lassner questions prevailing approaches to women's war writing by exploring the complex range of pacifist and activist literary forms of women who redefined such pieties as patriotism and duty and heroism and victimization.

"Modern Irish Autobiography" provides the first comprehensive overview of the Irish autobiographical tradition as it has received expression in both Irish and English from the nineteenth-century to the present day. Featuring original essays by leading Irish, British and American critics, the book combines historically grounded analyses of key trends and themes with theoretically informed readings of canonical and non-canonical texts. Focusing mainly on written autobiography, the volume locates Ireland's autobiographers in their historical, literary and ideological contexts and surveys the rich diversity of their achievement.