"Manipulating Masculinity" uses literature from World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq wars to argue that when a society labels broadly human traits "feminine," that society can more easily manipulate men to war. All men are bound to detect some of those traits in themselves--and then fear that they have strayed into a feminine, inferior realm. If a society convinces men that fighting is essentially manly, it entices men to war simply to prove that they are not their sisters (sissy, wimp, wuss). Western cultural attitudes toward sex also fuel wars by encouraging the displacement of sexuality into violence, by fostering titillation in combination with guilt and its accompanying need for self-punishment (which war abundantly supplies), and by defining sexual orientations so as to provoke self-doubt in everyone.

While scholars have begun to study popular women's novels of the 19th century, there has been relatively little attention paid to popular women's fiction of the early 20th century. This is the first study to focus on popular fiction written by, for, and about women in the period between the two world wars. The author examines such well-known best sellers as Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" and Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth," as well as dozens of other popular novels that have been all but forgotten today, and seeks to uncover the values and attitudes widely held by middle-class women of the era by examining the basic beliefs affirmed in the books they read.

"This is the first sustained study of Samuel Beckett and testimony. It offers new readings of the problem of unspeakability in Beckett in relation to testimonial expression and the problems of knowledge which arise in recent theoretical conceptions of testimony and the archive"--

Appropriation emerged during the Celtic Revival as a singular mode of engaging with the Shakespearean text to conceptualise and frame national identities in Ireland using the English language. With The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake, Adam Putz has examined the ways in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics shaped the Shakespeares of Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, and W. B. Yeats. His close readings underscore the instability of the binary oppositions upon which these writers relied to predicate their appropriations. However, Putz finds in James Joyce an urgent concern for the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics mediated the relationship with Shakespeare for a generation of Irish men and women. Therefore, Putz reconsiders periodization and literary inheritance, the nation and modernity in order to point up the contingency of those values located in and imposed upon Shakespeare during the Revival.

This book reveals a "female sexual economy" in the marketplace of contemporary short fiction which locates a struggle for sexual power between mothers and daughters within a larger struggle to pursue that to pursue that object of the American dream: "whiteness."

This sophisticated book argues that human rights literature both helps the persecuted to cope with their trauma and serves as the foundation for a cosmopolitan ethos of universal civility-a culture without borders. Michael Galchinsky maintains that, no matter how many treaties there are, a rights-respecting world will not truly exist until people everywhere can imagine it. The Modes of Human Rights Literature describes four major forms of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter to reveal how such works give common symbolic forms to widely held sociopolitical emotions.

In this book, Dr. Ekman examines Strindberg's four plays of 1907: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican, the works which have gained most resonance internationally. For the first time, these works are studied in relation to Strindberg's lifelong obsession with the five senses and their function in stage plays, both symbolic and dramatic. The fact that impressions from a stage can only be seen and heard led Strindberg to disregard the senses in favour of the insights of wisdom and inner vision; and it is from this position that the Chamber Plays were written. Examined from this perspective, much that seems obscure in these plays and their new style of drama is revealed in an original and clarifying light.

This volume undertakes a fundamental reassessment of utopianism during the modernist period. It charts the rich spectrum of literary utopian projects between 1885 and 1945, and reconstructs their cultural work by locating them in the material 'spaces' in which they originated. The book brings together work by leading academics and younger scholars.

Examining a wide range of genres, including novels, memoirs, travel writing and journalism, this book explores representations of Muslims and Islam in modern English literature. The relationship between Islam and the West is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues of our time. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the way in which Muslims are represented within modern English writing, ranging from the novel, through memoir and travel writing to journalism. Covering a wide range of texts and authors, it scrutinises the identity 'Muslim' by looking at its inscription in recent and contemporary literary writing within the context of significant events like the Rushdie Affair, the Gulf War and 9/11. Examining the wide range of writing internationally that takes Islam or Islamic cultures as its focus, the authors discuss the representation of Muslim identity in writing by non-Muslim writers, former Muslim 'native informants', and practising Muslims.

This account of Orwell's life is chiefly concerned with what influenced Orwell, his relations with publishers and editors, and the analysis of certain key experiences. These include the deposition that during the Spanish Civil War he was guilty of espionage and high treason; his work at the BBC; his interest in pamphlet literature; and his time as a war correspondent. The work offers an assessment of his earnings from 1922 to 1945, and a look at his attitudes of class, women and religious belief. Special attention is paid to his essays.

After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.

This study argues that the private homes in transnational women's fiction reflect public legacies of colonialism. Published in Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, Puerto Rico and the United States between 1995 and 2005, the novels use fictional houses to criticize and unsettle home and homeland, depicting their linked oppressions and exclusions.

Imagine reading a classic novel like James Joyce's "Ulysses" as though for the first time. Such an exercise, especially when informed by contemporary narrative theory, makes possible a different reading experience of the work, one with a renewed focus on plot and a surprising amount of suspense. Veteran Joyce scholar Margot Norris offers an innovative study of the processes of reading "Ulysses" as narrative and focuses on the unexplored implications, subplots, subtexts, hidden narratives, and narratology in one of the twentieth century's most influential novels. It is a striking and essential contribution to literary criticism that will change the readings and understandings of Joyce's most important work.

Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yade Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Gunter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Muller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.

Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as "The Comforters" (1957), DEGREESThe Public Image" (1968), "The Driver's Seat" (1970), "Reality and Dreams" (1996), and "Aiding and Abetting" (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction.

The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.

Listening to poets read their work focuses critical attention on the craft of the poem, while raising questions about the relationship between social history, technology, and the poet's "voice." "Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell" offers an analysis of a wide range of recordings, from commercial and amateur, to official studio sessions, to ephemeral events captured on reel-to-reel tape. Through the mid-century performances of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas and Anne Sexton, Derek Furr draws penetrating new conclusions about how and why poetry was recorded in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Critical Essays on William Faulkner compiles scholarship by noted Faulkner studies scholar Robert W. Hamblin. Ranging from 1980 to 2020, the twenty-one essays present a variety of approaches to Faulkner's work. While acknowledging Faulkner as the quintessential southern writer-particularly in his treatment of race-the essays examine his work in relation to American and even international contexts. The volume includes discussions of Faulkner's techniques and the psychological underpinnings of both the origin and the form of his art; explores how his writing is a means of "saying 'no' to death"; examines the intertextual linkages of his fiction with that of other writers like Shakespeare, Twain, Steinbeck, Warren, and Salinger; treats Faulkner's use of myth and his fondness for the initiation motif; and argues that Faulkner's film work in Hollywood is much better and of far greater value than most scholars have acknowledged. Taken as a whole, Hamblin's essays suggest that Faulkner's overarching themes relate to time and consequent change. The history of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stretches from the arrival of the white settlers on the Mississippi frontier in the early 1800s to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. Caught in this world of continual change that produces a great degree of uncertainty and ambivalence, the Faulkner character (and reader) must weigh the traditions of the past with the demands of the present and the future. As Faulkner acknowledges, this process of discovery and growth is a difficult and sometimes painful one; yet, as Hamblin attests, to engage in that quest is to realize the very essence of what it means to be human.

This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia's earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city 'built on water'. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney's provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies, Sydney and its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows the capacity of water and human-water relations to make both generative and disruptive contributions to urban topography and narrative topology

VictorianStudies on theWebCritics Choice!Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism is an exploration of two fundamental yet greatly neglected aspects of the author's life and writings: his deep-seated pessimism and his complex creed of heroism. The method of the book is both biographical and critical. Biographically, it traces the roots of Kipling's dark worldview and his search for something to believe in, a way of thinking and acting in defiance of life's hellishness. There matters were more basic to him than any of his social or political opinions, but this the first full-length study devoted to them. Critically, the book takes a fresh and close look at some of Kipling's most important works. The result challenges long established assumptions and amounts to a major reconsideration of novels like Kim and stories like "Mary Postgate" and "The Gardener." Central in these discussions of individual writings is Kipling's concern with the heroic life, but of equal importance is the analysis and evaluation of them as works of art. Avoiding the tangled and special language of some recent literary theory, this will appeal to a wide audience of those interested in Kipling's mind and art.

In the run-up to, during and after the invasion of Iraq a large number of literary texts addressing that context were produced, circulated and viewed as taking a position for or against the invasion, or contributing political insights. This book provides an in-depth survey of such texts to examine what they reveal about the condition of literature.

Tackling subjects as varied as Madrid night-life, the necessity of alcohol, Renaissance art, sex, the importance of scholarship, boys on motor scooters, the nature of love, Plato, blue jeans, classicism and rock music, Luis Antonio de Villena (b.1951) is one of modern Spain's best-known writers. Although far from being realist, his work engages indirectly with historical phenomena in surprising and complex ways. This introduction to a provocative and sophisticated writer situates Villena's creative work in relation to the contemporary Spanish cultural scene, to 20th-century homosexual culture and to significant gay and dissident figures of the past, including Lorca and Luis Cernuda. The author explains how Villena has developed a radical new aesthetic out of the old raw materials of love, sex, death, power and the primacy of art and desire.

In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpiecesGCo The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied herGCoranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environmentGCobut also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility.

This volume examines a wide variety of the ways in which the fantastic has impacted upon contemporary women's fiction. Some of the issues addressed include: the importance of the cyborg and the spectre to critical and fictional discourses of gender; the interface between the grotesque and contemporary readings of feminist utopianism; and the growing similarity between late 20th century gothicism and the magical real. The study is based upon the work of 15 writers and includes novels by Allende, Atwood, Carter, Head, Morrison, Weldon, Winterson and Wittig.

An unusual grouping of mainly British writers, this insightful study includes some, like Henry James, who are indisputably leaders of the canon regardless of genre, and others, like Algernon Blackwood, who wrote almost exclusively in the supernatural; all, however, were clearly masters of this genre. The author, Edward Wagenknecht, writes from a long lifetime of scholarly study and publishing, thoroughly internalized familiarity with all of the exemplary works chosen for examination, and personal friendship fostered by extensive epistolary intercourse with two of the subjects, Walter de la Mare and Marjorie Bowen. The seven chapters on the individual writers each examine plot, character, mood, and setting in a traditional sense, sparked by personal observations and unique comparisons. Each study is preceded by a biographical sketch and documented by comprehensive bibliography and notes. In the case of the less studied writers, like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, these chapters may be the fullest accounts ever published. For all, Wagenknecht combines a fan's appreciation with a scholar's insights to produce an important and enjoyable book.

"Philip Larkin, one of England's greatest and most popular twentieth-century poets, is nonetheless widely regarded as a misanthropic, provincial recluse. This volume re-examines that critical view and argues that Larkin's poetry, far from demonstrating his misanthropy, highlights his profound awareness of and concern for readers"--Provided by publisher.