This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exchanges and the influence of canonical Irish writers; and ideas of exile in the work of diasporic women writers.

Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of "memory work" that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.

A multiple award-winning author, Sarah Waters is one of the most critically and commercially successful novelists writing today. In such novels as Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and The Night Watch, her writing has played compellingly with popular and generic forms and narrative techniques and covered a number of important contemporary themes. This critical guide is the first book to offer a wide range of current critical perspectives on Waters' work. With chapters written by leading established and emerging scholars the book explores issues such as gender, sexuality, class, time and space in Waters' fiction, as well as her appropriation of a range of genres from the historical and neo-victorian novel to the gothic. The book also includes a new interview with Waters herself, a timeline of her life, chapter summaries and guides to further reading, making this an essential guide to the work of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is undoubtedly one of the defining voices of our age. Since the Second World War, his work has had an enormous impact on generations of writers, philosophers and literary theorists. This clear and accessibly written guide offers a close reading of ten of Borges' greatest short stories, seeking to bring out the logic that has made his work so influential. The main section of the guide offers an analysis of such key terms in Borges' work as "labyrinth" and the "infinite" and analyses Borges' particular narrative strategies. This guide also sets Borges' work within its wider literary, cultural and intellectual contexts and provides an annotated guide to both scholarly and popular responses to his work to assist further reading.

This book examines the representation of masculinities in contemporary texts written by women who have immigrated into France or Canada from a range of geographical spaces. Exploring works by Leonora Miano (Cameroon), Fatou Diome (Senegal), Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Ananda Devi (Mauritius), Ying Chen (China) and Kim Thuy (Vietnam), this study charts the extent to which migration generates new ways of understanding and writing masculinities. It draws on diverse theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, affect theory and critical race theory, while bringing visibility to the many women across various historical and geographical terrains who write about (im)migration and the impact on men, even as these women, too, acquire a different position in the new society.

This volume offers students and book club members a handy and insight-filled guide to Morrison's works and their relation to current events and popular culture. One of the few authors to attain both commercial success and literary acclaim, Toni Morrison, a longstanding member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is widely read by high school students and general readers. Her books have been adapted into highly extolled films such as Beloved, largely because, even when set in the past, they grapple with issues and emotions relevant to contemporary society. Designed for students and general readers, Reading Toni Morrison is a handy introduction to Morrison's works and their place in the world. The book begins with a look at Morrison's life and writing. Chapters overview the plots of her novels and discuss their themes, characters, and contexts. The book then examines Morrison's treatment of social issues and the presence of her works in popular culture. Chapters provide sidebars of interesting information along with questions to promote student research and book club discussion. Provides questions that can be used to generate book club discussion Includes sidebars to highlight interesting information about the author and her work Offers a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources to facilitate further study Film adaptations of the author's works, such as Beloved, are discussed and their impact explored

This book studies a selection of works of Philippine literature written in Spanish during the American occupation of the Philippines (1902-1946). It explores the place of Filipino nationalism in a selection of fiction and non-fiction texts by Spanish-speaking Filipino writers Jesus Balmori, Adelina Gurrea Monasterio, Paz Mendoza Guazon, and Antonio Abad. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from Anthropology, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Analysis and World Literature, this book offers a comparative analysis of the position of these authors toward the cultural transformations that have taken place as a result of the Philippines' triple history of colonization (by Spain, the US, and Japan) while imagining an independent nation. Engaging with an untapped archive, this book is a relevant and timely contribution to the fields of both Filipino and Hispanic literary studies.

Featuring close readings of selected poetry, visual texts, short stories and novels published for children since 1945 from Naughty Amelia Jane to Watership Down, this is the first extensive study of the nature and form of ethical discourse in British children's literature. Ethics in British Children's Literature explores the extent to which contemporary writing for children might be considered philosophical, tackling ethical spheres relevant to and arising from books for young people, such as naughtiness, good and evil, family life, and environmental ethics. Rigorously engaging with influential moral philosophers, from Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, to Arno Leopold, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and Lars Svendsen, this book demonstrates the narrative strategies employed to engage young readers as moral agents.

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Mere Reading argues for a return to the foundations of literary study established nearly a century ago. Following a recent period dominated by symptomatic analyses of fictional texts (new historicist, Marxist, feminist, identity-political), Lee Clark Mitchell joins a burgeoning neo-formalist movement in challenging readers to embrace a rationale for literary criticism that has too long been ignored-a neglect that corresponds, perhaps not coincidentally, to a flight from literature courses themselves. In close readings of six American novels spread over the past century-Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Road, and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao-Mitchell traces a shifting strain of late modernist innovation that celebrates a species of magic and wonder, of aesthetic "bliss" (as Barthes and Nabokov both coincidentally described the experience) that dumbfounds the reader and compels a reassessment of interpretive assumptions. The novels included here aspire to being read slowly, so that sounds, rhythms, repetitions, rhymes, and other verbal features take on a heightened poetic status-in critic Barbara Johnson's words, "the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language"-thwarting pressures of plot that otherwise push us ineluctably forward. In each chapter, the return to "mere reading" becomes paradoxically a gesture that honors the intractability of fictional texts, their sheer irresolution, indeed the way in which their "literary" status rests on the play of irreconcilables that emerges from the verbal tensions we find ourselves first astonished by, then delighting in.

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe's C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world where not believing in truth was unthinkable to the present, where it is common to believe that objective truth is a remnant of a simpler, more naive time. Examining detective stories both literary and popular including hard-boiled, postmodern, and twenty-first century novels, the book establishes that examining detective fiction allows for a unique view of this progression to post-truth since the detective's ultimate job is to take the reader from doubt to belief. David Riddle Watson shows that objectivity is intersubjectivity, arguing that the belief in multiple worlds is ultimately what sustains the illusion of relativism.

In Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, Kristin Mahoney argues that the early twentieth century was a period in which the specters of the fin de siecle exercised a remarkable draw on the modern cultural imagination and troubled emergent avant-gardistes. These authors and artists refused to assimilate to the aesthetic and political ethos of the era, representing themselves instead as time travellers from the previous century for whom twentieth-century modernity was both baffling and disappointing. However, they did not turn entirely from the modern moment, but rather relied on decadent strategies to participate in conversations concerning the most highly vexed issues of the period including war, the rise of the Labour Party, the question of women's sexual freedom, and changing conceptions of sexual and gender identities.

William Scott's Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of mechanization and assembly-line labor from the 1890s to the 1930s, these laborers found that they had been transformed into a class of "mass" workers who, since that time, have been seen alternately as powerless, degraded victims or heroic, empowered icons who could rise above their oppression only through the help of representative organizations located outside the workplace. Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle , Ruth McKenney's Industrial Valley , and Jack London's The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actions-sit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file "troublemaking" on the job-often carried out independently of union leadership. The novel of the mass industrial worker invites us to rethink our understanding of modern forms of representation through its attempts to imagine and depict workers' agency in an environment where it appears to be completely suppressed.

This book is a collection of nine essays exploring the Irish-American experience in the New Jersey and New York metropolitan area, both historically and today. The essays place the local Irish-American experience in the wider context of immigration studies, assimilation, and historical theory. Using case studies, interviews, scholarly research in primary historical documents and theory, and first-hand experience, the authors delve into what it has meant, and means, to be Irish American in the New Jersey and New York area, projecting what this ethnic identity will signify in years to come. Representing a variety of scholarly and professional disciplines, from archivists; to historians; to lawyers; to scholars of literature and theology; the authors share their own unique perspectives on the significance of the contributions of Irish-Americans to American life in various arenas. Each chapter is interdisciplinary, revealing the interconnections among cultural history, biography, contemporary events, and literary appreciation. It is through these intersections of disciplines, of past and present, of individual and community, that we can best analyze and appreciate the ways that Irish-Americans have shaped life in the New Jersey/New York area over the past two centuries.

State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship foregrounds the literary, sociological, and political structures of urban literature in France. It uses postcolonial theory, sociology, and political philosophy to investigate the modalities surrounding the question of citizenship in a country where citizens of African descent are not only considered a threat to national identity, but also caught between inclusion and exclusion. By examining the literary, sociological, and political structures of urban literatures produced after the 2005 riots, this book interrogates the questions of citizenship, belonging, and coexistence in a context where literature from the "periphery" has become a site where "central" political power and "mainstream" French literary canons are contested. Moreover, these productions clearly reveal an unexplored correlation between geo-aesthetics and contemporary French national geopolitics. Ultimately, this book is a plea for a serious approach to social formation in postcolonial France in a way that transcends skin color, and instead is based on a shared colonial past, as well as current social disqualifications.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.

Each volume of the Platinum Vignettes series presents 50 ultra-high-yield case scenarios of frequently tested topics to give you a clear advantage on the vignette-based Step 1 exam. Plus, the case discussions provide a wealth of tips, insights, buzzwords, advice on handling distractors, and guidance on just what the boards will ask and how to answer.

Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of "natural" disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as "natural" disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a "natural" disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points. Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortazar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Albert Camus, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories -- Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa -- the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas.

This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.

A valuable reference and collection development tool designed to assist readers' advisors in helping readers find modern "detective" mysteries they will enjoy. In this follow-up and companion to the author's previous title, Make Mine a Mystery: A Reader's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction, renowned expert on the mystery and detective genre Gary Warren Niebuhr brings readers' advisors and librarians a new resource guide that categorizes and describes recently published mystery novels. Make Mine a Mystery II examines works by prominent established authors and includes books from new writers not in the previous edition. Organizing some 700 titles in popular mystery series, the books within are divided into the broader types-amateur, public, and private detective. Each of the selections within these groups is further categorized by the type of protagonist: classic, eccentric, lone wolf, police, lawyer, and so on. The author even notes whether each detective is of the "hardboiled," "softboiled" (cozy), or traditional type, enabling users to easily identify read-alikes for mystery fans. This book will be especially helpful for collection development specialists seeking to create a balanced collection of titles. Covers authors that represent best contributors to the mystery series fiction genre Provides a broad bibliography of mystery series fiction Includes an index that references authors, titles, characters, settings, and locations

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers' reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans' stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

This book investigates the representation of the Axis War - the wars of aggression that Fascist Italy fought in North Africa, Greece, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans, from 1940 to 1943 - in three decades of Italian literature. Building on an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology, which combines memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, this book explores the main topoi, themes, and masterplots of an extensive corpus of novels and memoirs to assess the contribution of literature to the reshaping of Italian memory and identity after the end of Fascism. By exploring the influence that public memory exercises on literary depictions and, in return, the contribution of literary texts to the formation and dissemination of a discourse about the past, the book examines to what extent Italian literature helped readers form an ethical awareness of the crimes committed by members of their national community during World War II.

"All-Electric" Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the "all-electric" home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to "give back" time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or "return" them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

Jean-Loup Trassard has published more than forty books over the past 50 years. Despite the diverse generic and stylistic diversity of his work, he has remained constant in his effort to depict the rural way of life. Himself a lifelong inhabitant of an agricultural area in the northwest of France, his fiction, nonfiction and photography bear witness to the many changes that have affected our relationship to the earth over the same period. The global significance of the ecological themes that traverse his writings is presented here in English for the first time. More specifically, this ecocritical study examines the ecological implications of Trassard's literary and photographic production through the lens of science. Unexpected convergences between disciplines foster a deeper appreciation of the endeavors of each and their capacity for mutual enrichment.

Drawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences. The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.