Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see 'classical memories' as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural 'exports' in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like 'adaptation' and 'reception' could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

The terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 have had a profound impact on contemporary American literature and culture. With chapters written by leading scholars, 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature is a wide-ranging guide to literary responses to the attacks and its aftermath. The book covers the most widely studied texts, from Don DeLillo's Falling Man, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom to responses in contemporary American poetry and graphic narratives such as Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. Including annotated guides to further reading, this is an essential guide for students and readers of contemporary American literature.

With the supposed shortening of our attention spans, what future is there for fiction in the age of the internet? Contemporary Fictions of Attention rejects this discourse of distraction-crisis which suggests that the future of reading is in peril, and instead finds that contemporary writers construct 'fictions of attention' that find some value in states or moments of inattention. Through discussion of work by a diverse selection of writers, including Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, this book identifies how fiction prompts readers to become peripherally aware of their own attention. Contemporary Fictions of Attention locates a common interest in attention within 21st-century fiction and connects this interest to a series of debates surrounding ethics, temporality, the everyday, boredom, work, and self-discipline in contemporary culture.

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

In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo lets his protagonist say, "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness." DeLillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take DeLillo's literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique. This book departs from existing works on DeLillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent DeLillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on DeLillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.

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.

No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. They claimed that the USSR perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction amplified by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the popular American refrain used to refer to Marxism: "It was no accident, Comrade").
By reading an expansive range of American novels published between 1947-2005, alongside nonfiction texts by the likes of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Bell, Ian Hacking, and mid-century game theorists, No Accident, Comrade explains how associations of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War America. Chance became tied to the liberties of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny. With works by Nabokov, Ellison, Pynchon, Didion, DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and many others, Steven Belletto shows how writers developed innovative strategies for dealing with and incorporating these ever-present beliefs about chance and its role in their culture. These newly developed narrative techniques allowed them to theorize, satirize, and make sense of the constantly changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict.

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.

After the Fall presents a timely and provocative examination of the impact and implications of 9/11 and the war on terror on American culture and literature. * Presents the first detailed interrogation of U.S. writing in a time of crisis * Develops a timely and provocative arguement about literature and trauma * Relates U.S. writing since 9/11 to crucial social and historical changes in the U.S. and elsewhere * Places U.S. writing in the context of the transformed position of the U.S. in a world characterized by political, economic, and military crisis; transnational drift; the resurgence of religious fundamentalism; and the apparent triumph of global capitalism

What do we watch when we watch war? Who manages public perceptions of war and how? Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict is the first publication to examine how theatre in the UK has staged, debated and challenged the ways in which spectacle is habitually weaponized in times of war. The 'battle for hearts and minds' and the 'war of images' are fields of combat that can be as powerful as armed conflict. And today, spectacle and conflict - the two concepts that frame the book - have joined forces via audio-visual technologies in ways that are more powerful than ever. Clare Finburgh's original and interdisciplinary interrogation provides a richly provocative account of the structuring role that spectacle plays in warfare, engaging with the works of philosopher Guy Debord, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, visual studies specialist Marie-Jose Mondzain, and performance scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann. She offers coherence to a large and expanding field of theatrical war representation by analysing in careful detail a spectrum of works as diverse as expressionist drama, documentary theatre, comedy, musical satire and dance theatre. She demonstrates how features unique to the theatrical art, namely the construction of a fiction in the presence of the audience, can present possibilities for a more informed engagement with how spectacles of war are produced and circulated. If we watch with more resistance, we may contribute in significant ways to the demilitarization of images. And what if this were the first step towards a literal demilitarization?

An interdisciplinary study of the Impressionist/early Modernist works of Conrad and Ford, this book aims to show how the represented temporalities (whether to do with past, present, future experience within and without the novels, or logical/structural relations of 'before' and 'after') are at the core of the won effects of both authors' oeuvres. Looking at such well-known works as "Nostromo, The Good Soldier, The Fifth Queen, Parade's End," the study makes use of philosophy (historical and contemporary), theology, psychoanalysis, and other sources, to re-describe, unlock and display the fertile ways in which time and historical experience are both manumitted within the tales analysed, and, recursively, within their reading experience. Ultimately, the two senses of 'making you see', from Conrad's iconic Preface, are used as gambits to understand the ways in which these novels are metaphysically vibrant, symbolically hopeful- as against the more common interpretation of metaphysical dissolution and (over-determined) failure.

Hailed by critics during the 1980s as the decade's 'Great American Playwright', Sam Shepard continued to produce work in a wide array of media including short prose, films, plays, performances and screenplays until his death in 2017. Like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams in their autumnal years, Shepard relentlessly pressed the potentialities and possibilities of theatre. This is the first volume to consider Shepard's later work and career in detail and ranges across his work produced since the late 1980s. Shepard's motion picture directorial debut Far North (1988) served as the beginning of a new cycle of work. He returned to the stage with the politically engaged States of Shock (1991) which resembled neither his earlier plays nor his family cycle. With both Far North and States of Shock, Shepard signaled a transition into a phase in which he would experiment in form, subject and media for the next two decades. Skelton's comprehensive study includes consideration of his work in films such as Hamlet (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Brothers (2009); issues of authenticity in the film and screenplay Don't Come Knocking (2005) and the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007); of memory and trauma in Simpatico, The Late Henry Moss and When the World was Green, and of masculine and conservative narratives in States of Shock and The God of Hell. Lauded by critics in his lifetime and since his death in July 2017 as 'one of the most important and influential writers of his generation' (NY Times), Shepard 'excelled as an actor, screenwriter, playwright and director' (Guardian); this is a timely and important assessment of his work spanning the last three decades of his life.

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.

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.

A group of mostly Jewish German-speaking writers, the Prague Circle included some of the most significant figures in modern Western literature. Its core members, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Egon Erwin Kisch, are renowned for their seminal dramas, lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and essays on aesthetics. The writers of the Prague Circle were bound together not by a common perspective or a particular ideology, but by shared experiences and interests. From their vantage point in the Bohemian capital during the early decades of the twentieth century, they witnessed first-hand the collapse of the familiar and predictable, if not entirely comfortable, monarchical old order and the ascent of an anxious and uncertain modern era that led inexorably to fascism, militarization, and war. In order to deal with their new challenges, they considered strategies as diverse and oppositional as the members of the Prague Circle themselves. Their responses were shaped to various degrees by Catholicism, Zionism, expressionism, activism, anti-activism, international solidarity with the working class, and transcendence. Stephen Shearier explores how these authors aligned themselves on the spectrum of the Activism Debate, which preceded the much studied Expressionist Debate by a generation. This study examines the critical reception of these influential literary figures to determine how their legacies have been shaped.

The Man Who Crucified Himself is the history of a sensational nineteenth-century medical case. In 1805 a shoemaker called Mattio Lovat attempted to crucify himself in Venice. His act raised a furore, and the story spread across Europe. For the rest of the century Lovat's case fuelled scientific and popular debates on medicine, madness, suicide and religion. Drawing on Italian, German, English and French sources, Maria Boehmer traces the multiple readings of the case and identifies various 'interpretive communities'. Her meticulously researched study sheds new light on Lovat's case and offers fresh insights on the case narrative as a genre - both epistemic and literary.

Both literary author and celebrity, Bret Easton Ellis represents a type of contemporary writer who draws from both high and the low culture, using popular culture references, styles and subject matters in a literary fiction that goes beyond mere entertainment. His fiction, arousing the interest of the academia, mass media and general public, has fuelled heated controversy over his work. This controversy has often prevented serious analysis of his fiction, and this book is the first monograph to fill in this gap by offering a comprehensive textual and contextual analysis of his most important works up to the latest novel Imperial Bedrooms. Offering a study of the reception of each novel, the influence of popular, mass and consumer culture in them, and the analysis of their literary style, it takes into account the controversies surrounding the novels and the changes produced in the shifty terrain of the literary marketplace. It offers anyone studying contemporary American fiction a thorough and unique analysis of Ellis's work and his own place in the literary and cultural panorama.

A popular sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. While often considered solely through the lens of literature, steampunk is, in fact, a complex phenomenon that also affects, transforms, and unites a wide range of disciplines, such as art, music, film, television, fashion, new media, and material culture. In Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology, Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller have assembled a collection of essays that consider the social and cultural aspects of this multi-faceted genre. The essays included in this volume examine various manifestations of steampunk-both separately and in relation to each other-in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on-and interrelationship with-popular culture and the wider society. This volume expands and extends existing scholarship on steampunk in order to explore many previously unconsidered questions about cultural creativity, social networking, fandom, appropriation, and the creation of meaning. With a foreword by popular culture scholar Ken Dvorak, and an afterword by steampunk expert Jeff VanderMeer, Steaming into a Victorian Future offers a wide ranging look at the impact of steampunk, as well as the individuals who create, interpret, and consume it.

Writing Remains brings together a wide range of leading archaeologists and literary scholars to explore emerging intersections in archaeological and literary studies. Drawing upon a wide range of literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present, the book offers new approaches to understanding storytelling and narrative in archaeology, and the role of archaeological knowledge in literature and literary criticism. The book's eight chapters explore a wide array of archaeological approaches and methods, including scientific archaeology, identifying intersections with literature and literary studies which are textual, conceptual, spatial, temporal and material. Examining literary authors from Thomas Hardy and Bram Stoker to Sarah Moss and Paul Beatty, scholars from across disciplines are brought into dialogue to consider fictional narrative both as a site of new archaeological knowledge and as a source and object of archaeological investigation.

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives - ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic - the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry. The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of "official verse culture," refers to as "frame lock" and "tone jam." While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with "screen memory" (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of "found" materials.

Modern Minority presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with the everyday. Lee argues that it is through the elements of the everyday, which she defines as the 'quantifiable' attention to familiar objects and 'quasi-statistical' repetitions of ordinary acts, that Asian American writers negotiate their vexed relationship to modernity. Lee draws on Lukacs, Jameson, de Certeau, and other cultural critics to show how portraits of the everyday articulate Asian American writers' participation in the project of literary realism. The study participates in a new trend in Asian American criticism that sees form as crucial to the construction of minorness. The book covers most of the 20th century and spans a range of Asian ethnic groups and literary styles. Authors examined include Carlos Bulosan, Lan Samantha Chang, Frank Chin, Ha Jin, Younghill Kang, Nora Okja Keller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Chang-rae Lee, Mine Okubo, Monica Sone, Jade Snow Wong, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Thi Diem Thuy Le, and Toshio Mori. The manuscript contributes a new direction in a field in which the criticism has been preoccupied with the politics of recognition and identity; it will interest scholars in Asian American, ethnic American, and American literary and cultural criticism.

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, providing a widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity.