"Rewriting the Thirties" questions the myth of the 'anti-modernist' decade. Conversely, the editors argue it is a symptomatic, transitional phase between modern and post-modern writing and politics, at a time of cultural and technological change.
The text reconsiders some of the leading writers of the period in the light of recent theoretical developments, through essays on the ambivalent assimilation of Modernist influences, among proletarian and canonical novelists including James Barke and George Orwell, and among poets including Auden, MacNeice, Swingler and Bunting, and in the work of feminist writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. In this substantial remapping, the complexity and scope of literary-critical debate at the time is discussed in relation to theatrical innovation, audience attitudes to the mass medium of modernity - cinema - the poetics of suburbia, consumerism and national ideology, as well as the discursive strategies of British and American documentarism.

More than 100 years after the death of Queen Victoria, contemporary culture remains fascinated by the Victorians. This fascination is most marked in fiction, where an entirely new genre of neo-Victorian fiction has emerged. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative argues that while neo-Victorian fiction emerges within a wider cultural appropriation of the Victorians, it is characterized by its commitment to the historical specificity of the Victorian era. Neo-Victorian fiction is historical fiction and as such involves a dual approach to the present and the past: these novels are determined by both the contemporary moment of writing and the Victorian moment in which they are set. This book mimics that dual approach by analyzing neo-Victorian fiction in relation to both contemporary debates about history and Victorian historical narratives. It combines broad discussion of the genre with detailed analysis of a range of neo-Victorian texts from the last 20 years.

This is an investigation of Yeats's experiments with the media of language and dance in his plays. He was allied to other artists of the 1890s in his fascination with the biblical dancer Salome and in his preoccupation with things Japanese, particularly "Noh" theatre with its central dance. The impact of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes also played its part in influencing Yeats's drama and he took interest in the "dance-as-meaning" debate. The book contains new data on Yeats's "At the Hawk's Well" dancer, Ito and new information on his personal acquaintance with music-hall and Ballets Russes from yet unpublished letters.

This study focuses on themes and techniques of empowerment in the full range of produced plays by Caryl Churchill from 1960 to the present. The playwright is well known for combining theatrical inventiveness with uncompromising social critique. She is one of the very few contemporary women playwrights to have achieved international prominence, and she has done so on the basis of a forthright socialist-feminist stand.

What exactly is 'modernism'? And how has the critical definition of the word changed? Exploring shifting understandings of modernism from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, this is a concise critical history of modernist criticism. Taking an accessible chronological approach, Modernism: Evolution of An Idea covers such topics as: *Early debates, from Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity to The New Age magazine and writer-critics such as T.S. Eliot and Cyril Connolly *New Criticism and the forming of the modernist canon *The rise of Theory - from Derrida and Houston Baker to the Frankfurt School *New modernist studies and contemporary approaches: from international modernisms to engagements with race, sexuality and gender With annotated guides to further reading throughout and a companion website with additional resources, this is an essential survey for students and scholars working in modernist studies at all levels.

Modernist writers were well aware of the new physics and its underlying concepts. Einstein's Wake shows how the most innovative scientific thinking was understood by non-specialists such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot, and how it entered into their literary works.

The use of the spatial metaphor of a left vs. right opposition originated in the tendency of 19th century European legislatures to seat more radical members to the left of the presiding official. For nearly five decades, the left has come to be identified with totalitarianism and with Marxism and Communism, the most successful leftist movements of the 20th century. Many 20th century British novels reflect values antithetical to capitalism, explore the plight of the working class, and challenge the traditional socioeconomic and political views of the right. The British novel of the left represents a long and rich cultural tradition that includes a large number of important works. These novels are best understood as part of a cultural phenomenon that reacts against the mainstream tradition of British literature but also establishes and draws upon traditions of its own. British leftist novels have been produced in a number of modes and subgenres, including realism, modernism, historical novels, detective novels, and science fiction. This reference book provides students and scholars interested in pursuing research into modern British leftist and working-class culture with a convenient starting place that provides extensive coverage of British leftist and working-class novels of the past century. Through an introductory essay, the volume provides a brief historical survey of the development of this important cultural phenomenon from the Chartist period of the early 19th century to recent working class novels by such contemporary authors as Pat Barker and James Kelman. This survey is followed by an introductory discussion of Marxist literary theory, which is used throughout the book to illuminate individual novels within a theoretical framework consistent with that of most of the novels themselves. The second major part of the book is a guide to selected critical and historical works that presents brief descriptions of a variety of studies useful as background to any study of the British novel of the left. The bulk of the book consists of discussions of more than 130 individual novels of the left in a variety of modes and subgenres. This section includes late 19th century works by authors such as Margaret Harkness and George Bernard Shaw, important early 20th century works such as Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a wide variety of works from the 1930s, when leftist cultural production was at its peak, and post World War II novels by writers such as Alan Sillitoe and John Berger. The book then ends with a discussion of a number of postcolonial novels of the left that help to illuminate issues relevant to British leftist culture as well.

The first book-length look at childhood in Edwardian fiction, this book challenges assumptions that the Edwardian period was simply a continuation of the Victorian or the start of the Modern. Exploring both classics and popular fiction, the authors provide a a compelling picture of the Edwardian fictional cult of childhood.

Psychoanalytic theory has been the critical instrument of choice for colonial critics. This book examines why critics who are otherwise suspicious of Western forms of knowledge are drawn to psychoanalytic theories, and whether it is possible to use such theories without reproducing the colonial discourse that also structures psychoanalytic thought.

This book provides students with an introduction to the work of Irvine Welsh that places his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores Welsh's biography, his impact on contemporary Scottish fiction and the cultural relevance of the "Irvine Welsh phenomenon." Including a timeline of key dates, it offers an accessible reading of Welsh's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has provoked.

No dramatist in the recent history of the American theatre has gained more celebrity than Sam Shepard. Exploring a career that includes fifty stage and screen plays, four books of nondramatic writings, and over a dozen appearances in feature films, this work traces Shepard's rise from an Off-Off-Broadway renegade to a Hollywood leading man, and explores his evolution from counterculture to cultural icon. The study situates Shepard's career within the shifting production modes and economic contexts of the American entertainment industry, and views his popularity against the identity politics of postwar American culture. Through an analysis of his life, plays and screen roles, this book investigates how Shepard's dramatic voice and film persona address issues of American consensus and community. The study argues that Shepard's popularity--in an era of cultural diversification and dissent--owes much to nationalism and nostalgia and begs important questions concerning American myths, media representations, and the construction of an American audience.

Provides an introduction to the life and works of Ezra Pound, a major modernist poet, theorist and literary critic. Throughout his life Pound was regarded by many to be a contentious and controversial figure, and since his death in 1972, theoretical, literary, political and biographical comentators have done much to perpetuate this view. Peter Wilson's survey, however, presents a balanced view of his life and work allowing the reader to judge for themselves. The major sections of the book offer introductions to the complex life and work of Pound, outlining the various cultural, political and literary issues which are important to a full understanding of his place in twentieth century English literature. Critical commentaries are then given on all of Pound's major poetry, adopting some analytical techniques from stylistics. Brief biographies of important figures in Pound's career, and in the development of literary modernism are provided. A gazeteer, glossary, and suggestions for further reading complete the book.

Here the spirituality of the East and the West have met in a novel that enfigures deep human wisdom with a rich and colorful imagination. Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, it is the story of a soul's long quest in search of he ultimate answer to the enigma of man's role on this earth. As a youth, the young Indian Siddhartha meets the Buddha but cannot be content with a disciple's role: he must work out his own destiny and solve his own doubt--a tortuous road that carries him through the sensuality of a love affair with the beautiful courtesan Kamala, the temptation of success and riches, the heartache of struggle with his own son, to final renunciation and self-knowledge. The name "Siddhartha" is one often given to the Buddha himself--perhaps a clue to Hesse's aims in contrasting the traditional legendary figure with his own conception, as a European (Hesse was Swiss), of a spiritual explorer.

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

Dennis Potter is the most well-known, respected and controversial television dramatist Britain has ever produced. Plays and serials such as The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven received huge critical acclaim whilst always attracting audiences in their millions. This book will critically analyse both the strengths and the weaknesses of Potter's oeuvre, whilst investigating his status as both an 'author' and a 'celebrity'. Re-examining the drama, it foregrounds its ambiguities and contradictions, whilst clarifying the complex mixture of themes, styles and techniques which produced its distinctive and often provocative appeal.

The two volumes edited by Dr Wilson, Director of the John Memorial Foundation, make an important body of Johnson's writings more readily available to scholars in African-American studies. Volume II comprises literary essays, political essays, and song lyrics. The critical introduction places Johnson in relation to other black artists, the development of African-American literature and early integrationist movements.

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

This edited volume is a wide ranging collection of essays on Ernest Hemingway and his work by some of the world's leading scholars and critics in the field of Hemingway studies. The collection offers the latest views--and some of the most challenging--of many of the best scholars in the field. The conclusions drawn are as various as the sixteen contributors; many of which challenge generally accepted views in the field. This study will be of interest and use to Hemingway "buffs," to scholars of modern American literature, and to academic libraries.

From this renowned research-level series, Poems and Contexts: Yeats Annual 16 thrusts Yeats's poems back into the circumstances of their creation and revision, thereby addressing what is very much the coming subject in studies of the Irish Literary Revival and the Modernist Movement: the historicity of Yeats's texts. Essayists and their themes include Wayne Chapman on Yeats's Rebellion Poems, while Joseph M. Hassett and P. S. Sri address Yeats's poetic sequences from fresh viewpoints. Deirdre Toomey illuminates the turning point of 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', A. Norman Jeffares contributes a major biographical study of Iseult Gonne, and Neil Mann a study of George Yeats and Athanasius Kircher. The volume also features research materials, including a full printing of Richard Ellmann's Notebooks on Yeats.

In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukacs discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present 'concrete potentialities' of individual character in novel ways. Powers of Possibility explores how American experimental writers since the 1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including: Allen Ginsberg's anti-Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines how relations of character and social power were widely discussed in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated the 'revolutionary potential' of African Americans, while advances in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of 'human potential' in space colonies. In considering how the literary writers engage with such debates, Alex Houen also shows how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of 'potential': 'possible as opposed to actual'; 'a quantity of force'; a 'capacity' or 'faculty'; and 'potency'. Such an approach can be characterised as a literary 'potentialism' that turns literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form) into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a literary movement, Houen emphasises, so much as a novel concept of literary practice-a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative to notions of 'postmodernism' and the 'postmodern avant-garde'.

This timely study offers a radical rereading of Conrad's work in light of contemporary theories of masculinity. Drawing on feminism, gay studies, film theory and literary theory, the author shows that Conrad's fiction, even as it reflects certain assumptions of its day about gender roles, offers striking insights into the instability of the "masculine." The book explores the relationship of masculinity with imperialism, modernity, the visual and the body in a wide range of Conrad's less-known fiction.

The fin de siecle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siecle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society.

Offers new insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on a wide range of international picture books for children published between 1963 and 2008. Its chapters include metafiction; disruption to narrative conventions; interrogation of 'truths'; historiographic metafiction; difference and ex-centricity; globalisation and media.

Beckett and Philosophy examines and interrogates the relationships between Samuel Beckett's works and contemporary French and German thought. There are two wide-ranging overview chapters by Richard Begam (Beckett and Postfoundationalism) and Robert Eaglestone (Beckett via Literary and Philosophical Theories), and individual chapters on Beckett, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badious, Merleau-Pointy, Adorno, Hebermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche. The collection takes a fresh look as issues such as postmodern and poststructuralist thought in relation to Beckett studies, providing useful overview chapters and original essays.

The Literature of Terror: the Modern Gothic is the second volume in David Punter's impressive survey of gothic writing covering over two centuries. The text was originally published in 1980 to wide acclaim and following its publication, critical interest in gothic writing has risen substantially. This long awaited second edition has been expanded to take into account the latest critical research, and is now published in two volumes.Volume One covers the period from 1765 to the Edwardian age while Volume Two discusses modern gothic, starting with the 'decadent' gothic writing of Oscar Wilde and continuing through the twentieth century. David Punter's thorough analysis places gothic writing within its historical and sociological context. A new chapter on post-war fiction and film extends the scope of the original study, exploring the development of a contemporary 'culture of horror' and showing the continuing relevance of the Gothic as a means of expression. This new edition also contains a new chapter which analyses the relationship between cultural material and sociopathic behaviour, offering an important contribution to contemporary sociological debate. The two volumes combined pr