In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play.
Thomas Karshan argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. He traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian emigre writers who espoused those aesthetics. Karshan then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As he does so, he demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Pope, and the humanist tradition of the literary game.
Drawing in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, and on highly restricted archival material, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play provides the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for, and influence on, contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard. Through Nabokov, it addresses the literary game-playing that is one of the most distinctive elements in post-1945 literature.

Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 explores the intersections of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in America as it is depicted in the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth. Maggie McKinley reconsiders the longstanding association between masculinity and violence, locating a problematic paradox within works by these writers: as each author figures violence as central to the establishment of a liberated masculine identity, the use of this violence often reaffirms many constricting and emasculating cultural myths and power structures that the authors and their protagonists are seeking to overturn.

Leading scholars critically explore three leading novels by Louise Erdrich, one of the most important and popular Native American writers working today. Louise Erdrich has shaped the possibilities for Native American, women's and popular fiction in the United States during the late twentieth century. Louise Erdrich collects new essays by noted scholars of Native American Literature on three important novels that chart the trajectory of Erdrich's novelistic career, "Tracks (1988)," "The Last Report on the Miracles At Little No Horse (2001)" and "The Plague of Doves (2007)". This book illuminates Erdrich's multiperspectival representation of Native American culture and history. Focusing on such topics as humor, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Erdrich's explorations of Native American identities through her innovative fictions. 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.

From Henry James' fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz; from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov; modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth-century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. Having its roots in the late-nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, "wastepaper modernism" arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book's own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature's dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

Russia in Britain offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on British intellectual life from the 1880s, the decade which saw the first sustained interest in Russian literature, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War. By focusing on the role played by institutions, disciplines and groups, libraries, periodicals, government agencies, concert halls, publishing houses, theatres, and film societies, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to highlight the role of a small number of individuals, notably Sergei Diaghilev, Constance Garnett, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Katherine Mansfield, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on recent research and newly available archives, Russia in Britain shifts attention from individual figures to the networks within which they operated, and uncovers the variety of forces that enabled and structured the British engagement with Russian culture. The resulting narrative maps an intricate pattern of interdisciplinary relations and provides the foundational research for a new understanding of Anglo-Russian/Soviet interaction. In this, it makes a major contribution to the current debates about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and 'global modernisms' that are reshaping our knowledge of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture.

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo. By examining implicit and explicit allusion to these events in their work, it becomes apparent that both consider 9/11 a crucial event, and that it has profoundly impacted their work. From this important point, the volume focuses on the major change identifiable in both authors' work; a change in the perception, and conception, of time. This is not, however, a simple change after 2001. It allows, at the same time, a re-examination of both authors work, and the acknowledgment of time as a crucial concept to both authors throughout their careers. Engaging with several theories of time, and their reiteration and examination in both authors' work, this volume contributes both to the understanding of literary time, and to the work of Pynchon and DeLillo.

Julia Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by developing a theoretical approach that is uniquely attuned to the dynamic interplay between, on the one hand, linguistic and formal experimentation, and, on the other hand, subjective crisis and socio-political upheaval. Inspired by the contestatory spirit of the late 1960s in which she emerged as a theorist, Kristeva has defended the project of the European avant-gardes and has systematically attempted to reclaim their legacy in the new societal structures produced by a global, spectacle-dominated capitalism. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism brings together essays that take up the threads in Kristeva's analyses of the avant-garde, offering an appreciation of her overall contribution, the intellectual and political horizon within which she has produced her seminal works as well as of the blind spots that need to be acknowledged in any contemporary examination of her insights. As with other volumes in this series, this volume is structured in three parts. The first part provides new readings of key texts or central aspects in Kristeva's oeuvre. The second part takes up the task of showing the impact of Kristeva's thought on the appreciation of modernist concerns and strategies in a variety of fields: literature, philosophy, the visual arts, and dance. The third part is a glossary of some of Kristeva's key terms, with each entry written by an expert contributor.

J. G. Ballard self-professedly devoured the work of Freud as a teenager, and entertained early thoughts of becoming a psychiatrist; he opened his novel-writing career with a manifesto declaring his wish to write a science fiction exploring n

Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece. Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors. Approaching Silence promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endo, within and beyond the West. Includes an Afterword by Martin Scorsese on adapting Silence for the screen as well as the full text of Steven Dietz's play adaptation of Endo's novel.

In his attitude toward religion, George Orwell has been characterised in various terms: as an agnostic, humanist, secular saint or even Christian atheist. Drawing on the full range of his public and private writings - from major works such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London to his shorter journalism and private letters and journals - George Orwell and Religion is a major reassessment of Orwell's life-long engagement with religion. Exploring Orwell's life and work, Michael Brennan illuminates for the first time how this profound engagement with religion informed the intensely humanitarian spirit of his writings.

One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity undertakes the first extensive analysis of the works of Dave Eggers, an author who has grown from a small-time media upstart into one of the most influential author-publishers of the twenty-first century. Eggers' rise to fame is charted in careful detail, offering analysis of the circumstances of his success and their effects on the production of his literary oeuvre. As both a memoirist and novelist Eggers has distinguished himself from his cohort of young American authors by insisting on seizing the reins of his publishing output. The nature of this independent streak is given attention in this study, particularly the cultural circumstances of a digitalised, consumer society in which books and literature are primarily commodities. Hamilton examines this spirit of independence as both a practical and figurative state in Eggers' works, and seeks to address the reasons why in a contemporary, globalised society independence is not only personally gratifying for Eggers but also a popularly successful strategy for producing books.

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the "post-truth" era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes - the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams provides the essential guide to Williams' most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on four of Williams' plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers are wanting a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Williams' artistry. A chronology of the writer's life and work helps to situate all his works in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of Williams' writing, its recurrent themes and concerns and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: * The context * Themes * Characters * Structure and language * The play in production (both on stage and screen adaptations) Questions for study, and notes on words and phrases in the text are also supplied to aid the reader. The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Williams' work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Williams' greatest plays.

From wide-ranging overviews of the entire region to close readings of specific works, this volume opens a fascinating window on the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, covering texts in the multiplicity of languages used in the wider Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and the region's many creoles. Authors and works discussed range from luminaries such as Derek Walcott to hitherto practically unknown works in Antillean creole languages. Underlying is the idea to foster the study of the Caribbean literary, artistic and visual text through a comparative lens, a firm proposal to think beyond the persisting linguistic barriers and scholarly divides in the field. As such, Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures brings a new approach to the Caribbean embracing the region's linguistic multiplicity and complexity without eschewing the many theoretical challenges and obstacles such a scholarly endeavor entails. Because of its ample scope this book will appeal to scholars and students working on the Caribbean and Latin America, but also to those interested in the broader fields of postcolonial and cultural studies.

Taking as its starting point the work of Professor Dennis Tate, this volume brings together essays which explore varieties of East German autobiographical writing before, during and after German unification. The volume examines the invention and re-invention of the self through literature in response to historical change, analysing how authors have negotiated social transition in the East German context. Many of the contributions also discuss how authors have sought to understand lives which have spanned the National Socialist, socialist and post-unification periods. This volume will be particularly valuable to students and researchers working on contemporary Germany and its culture, as well as to those with an interest in autobiographical writing.

Extending the study of post-9/11 literature to include transnational perspectives, this book explores the ways in which contemporary writers from Europe as well as the USA have responded to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the ensuing 'war on terror.' Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' demonstrates the ways in which contemporary fiction has wrestled with anxieties about national and international security in the 21st century. Reading a wide range of novels by such writers as Amy Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Frederic Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, Joseph O'Neill, Moshin Hamid, Jose Saramago, Ricardo Menendez Salmon, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, Susana Araujo explores how the rhetoric of the 'war on terror' has shaped recent representations of the city and how "security" discourses circulate transatlantically and transnationally. By focusing not only on 9/11 but also on the way subsequent events such as the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq are represented in fiction, this book demonstrates how notions of "terror" and "insecurity" have been absorbed, reworked or critiqued in fiction. Araujo examines to what extent transatlantic relations have reinforced or challenged new fictions of "white western middle class captivity."

The idea of the "outside" as a space of freedom has always been central in the literature of the United States. This concept still remains active in contemporary American fiction; however, its function is being significantly changed. Outside, America argues that, among contemporary American novelists, a shift of focus to the temporal dimension is taking place. No longer a spatial movement, the quest for the outside now seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference, a la Deleuze, by which the current subjectivity is transformed. In other words, the concept is taking a "temporal turn." Discussing eight novelists, including Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Paul Theroux, and Annie Proulx, each of whose works describe forces of given identities-masculine identity, historical temporality, and power, etc.-which block quests for the outside, Fujii shows how the outside in these texts ceases to be a spatial idea. With due attention to critical and social contexts, the book aims to reveal a profound shift in contemporary American fiction.

An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.

There have been many great and enduring works of literature by Caribbean authors over the last century. The Caribbean Contemporary Classics collection celebrates these deep and vibrant stories, overflowing with life and acute observations about society. Set in Belize City in the early 1950s, Beka Lamb is the record of a few months in the life of Beka and her family. Beka and her friend Toycie Qualo are on the threshold of change from childhood to adulthood. Their personal struggles and tragedies play out against a backdrop of political upheaval and regeneration as the British colony of Belize gears up for universal suffrage, and progression towards independence. The politics of the colony, the influence of the mixing of races in society, and the dominating presence of the Catholic Church are woven into the fabric of the story to provide a compelling portrait, 'a loving evocation of Belizean life and landscape'. Beka's vibrant character guides us through a tumultuous period in her own life and that of her country.

First published in 2006, Alek's Sierz's "The Theatre of Martin Crimp "provided a groundbreaking study of one of British theatre's leading contemporary playwrights. Combining Sierz's lucid prose and sharp analysis together with interviews with Martin Crimp and a host of directors and actors who have produced the work, it offered a richly rewarding and engaging assessment of this acutely satirical playwright. The second edition additionally explores the work produced between 2006 and 2013, both the major new plays and the translations and other work. The second edition considers "The City," the 2008 companion play to "The Country," "Play House" from 2012 and the new work for the Royal Court in late 2012. The two works that have brought Crimp considerable international acclaim in recent years, the updated rewrite of Th"e Misanthrope" which in 2009 played for several months in the West End starring Keira Knightley, and Crimp's translation of Botho Strauss's "Big and Small" (Barbican, 2012), together with Crimp's other work in translation are all covered. "The Theatre of Martin Crimp "remains the fullest, most readable account of Crimps's work for the stage.

This comprehensive overview of Julia Alvarez's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry offers biographical information and parses the author's important works and the intentions behind them. Reading Julia Alvarez reviews the author's acclaimed body of writing, exploring both the works and the woman behind them. The guide opens with a brief biography that includes the saga of the Alvarez family's flight from the Dominican Republic when Julia was ten, and carries her story through the philanthropic organic coffee farm that she and her husband now operate in that nation. The heart of the book is a broad overview of Alvarez's literary achievements, followed by chapters that discuss individual works and a chapter on her poetry. The book also looks at how the author's writings grapple with and illuminate contemporary issues, and at Alvarez's place in pop culture, including an examination of film adaptations of her books. Through this guide, readers will better understand the relevance of Alvarez's works to their own lives and to new ways of thinking about current events. Chapters on individual works to help the user understand the author's plots, themes, settings, characters, and style Discussion questions in each chapter to foster student research and facilitate book-club discussion Sidebars of interesting information An up-to-date guide to Internet and print resources for further study

British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcala argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcala offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.

Was Ezra Pound the first theorist of world literature? Or did he inaugurate a form of comparative literature that could save the discipline from its untimely demise? Would he have welcomed the 2008 financial crisis? What might he say about America's economic dependence on China? Would he have been appalled at the rise of the "digital humanities," or found it amenable to his own quasi-social scientific views about the role of literature in society? What, if anything, would he find to value in today's economic and aesthetic discourses? Ezra Pound in the Present collects new essays by prominent scholars of modernist poetics to engage the relevance of Pound's work for our times, testing whether his literature was, as he hoped it would be, "news that stays news."

American Fiction in Transition is a study of the observer-hero narrative, a highly significant but critically neglected genre of the American novel. Through the lens of this transitional genre, the book explores the 1990s in relation to debates about the end of postmodernism, and connects the decade to other transitional periods in US literature. Novels by four major contemporary writers are examined: Philip Roth, Paul Auster, E. L. Doctorow and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each novel has a similar structure: an observer-narrator tells the story of an important person in his life who has died. But each story is equally about the struggle to tell the story, to find adequate means to narrate the transitional quality of the hero's life. In playing out this narrative struggle, each novel thereby addresses the broader problem of historical transition, a problem that marks the legacy of the postmodern era in American literature and culture.