Her vision and politics have set her at the forefront of contemporary poetry and her work has a far-reaching impact on all poets and readers of poetry today. A dedicated and inspired teacher, her innovative and highly successful poetry program, Poetry for the People, has recently emerged as a national phenomenon.

Poet, dramatist, writer of short fiction, translator, activist, and social critic, Langston Hughes was a major figure in American letters of the 20th century and an important component of the Harlem Renaissance with Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and others.
In March 1992, to mark the 25th anniversary of Hughes's death, a NEH series of public programs was presented at Hughes's alma mater, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. The articles here provide an in-depth exploration of many facets of the writer's life and work. The majority of the contributors knew Hughes, and this adds a personal dimension to their work.
This book will be of great interest to students of American literature, cultural and gay and lesbian studies, and American social history in general.

Post-Colonial Drama is the first full-length study to address the ways in which performance has been instrumental in resisting the continuing effects of imperialism. It brings to bear the latest theoretical approaches from post-colonial and performance studies to a range of plays from Australia, Africa, Canada, New Zealand, the Caribbean and other former colonial regions. Some of the major topics discussed include:
* the interactions of post-colonial and performance theories
* the post-colonial re-stagings of language and history
* the specific enactments of ritual and carnival
* the theatrical citations of the post-colonial body
Post-Colonial Drama combines a rich intersection of theoretical approaches with close attention to a wide range of performance texts.

eBook available with sample pages: 020342106X

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.

"Visualisation in English Popular Fiction" explores the important yet often neglected tradition of illustrated fiction in English. Author Stuart Sillars suggests new analytical approached for the study of illustrated fiction by offering detailed discussions of a range of representative texts.
Sillars provides an in-depth account of the growth of the illustrated text in 19th century England, and discusses also some of the implications of Roland Barthes' ideas of narratology as they may be applied to this compound form. Following studies in the book explore a range of issues raised by texts of various kinds, such as the visual sense in popular fiction without illustrations, the use of visual narrative in comic strips, and the precise nature of the relocation which occurs when a novel is translated to film.
The author brings to the subject extensive experience of lecturing and writing on the relations between visual and verbal texts. The intersection between art and literature is of ever increasing interest, and this insightful and cross-disciplinary text is a valuable contribution to the debate.

Utilizing recent trends in literary and language theory, "Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context" makes new theoretical insights available to its audience. Contributors to this volume employ analytical and interpretive strategies which are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation.
The collection's essays, which are arranged into three groups focusing on the textual level, narrative and context, explore a number of 20th century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this user-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading.
Designed not only for native English speakers, but also for those who read English as a foreign or second language, "Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context" provides an indispensable introduction which is both sensitive and enabling.

By applying recent trends in literary and language theory to a range of 20th Century fiction, the contributors to this text make new theoretical insights available to student readers. The analytical and interpretive strategies examined in this book are not intended to be prescriptive, rather they are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation.
The essays, which are arranged into three groups and which focus on the textual level, narrative and context, look at a wide range of Twentieth Century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this student-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading.
Aimed at beginning students of English Language and Literature and Applied Linguistics, and advanced students of English as a Foreign or Second Language, 20th Century Fiction provides an essential introduction to the subject which is both sensitive and enabling.

This book explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive "encyclopaedia". He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. The book includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney. Damien Broderick is an award-winning freelance writer who published his first collection of stories as an undergraduate, has since written eight SF novels, and recently completed a PhD in the semiotics of SF writing.

The great religious poetry of R. S. Thomas and the poetry of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is rooted in a remarkable late-twentieth-century tradition of spiritual poetry in Wales that includes figures as different as Saunders Lewis and Vernon Watkins, Waldo Williams and Bobi Jones. This study examines this body of work in detail, demonstrating how the different theological outlooks of the poets was reflected in their choice of form, style and vocabulary. It thereby highlights a literary culture that was highly unusual in its rejection of the secularisation that prevailed during that period in the UK, Western Europe and the USA.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Merce Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.

Christopher J. Knight's Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 - 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare's late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald's ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimism notwithstanding, seeks (with the aid of her own religious understandings), in each of her novels, to wrestle meaning, consolation and even comedy from circumstances not noticeably propitious. Or as she herself memorably spoke of her own "deepest convictions": "I can only say that however close I've come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions-I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?" The recipient of Britain's Booker Prize and America's National Book Critics Circle Award, Penelope Fitzgerald's reputation as a novelist, and author more generally, has grown, since her death, significantly, to the point that she is now widely judged one of Britain's finest writers, comparable in worth to the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Until fairly recently, the 'Authorized Version' of cultural modernism stated that the secularizing trends of liberal modernity - and the resultant emphasis on irony, parody and dissolution in modernist artforms - had pushed religion to the edges of early twentieth-century culture. This Companion complicates this 'Authorized Version' by furnishing students and academic researchers with more nuanced and probing assessments of the intersections - and tensions - between religion, myth and creativity during this half century of geopolitical ferment. The Companion addresses the variety and specificity of modernist spiritualities; as well as the intricately textured and shifting standpoints that modernist figures have occupied in relation to theological traditions, practices, creeds, and institutions. What emerges is a multi-textured account of modernism's deep-rooted concern with the historical and established forms of religion as well as new engagements with 'occulture' and indigenous traditions. In short, this Companion supplies a lively and original introduction to the aesthetic, publishing, technological and philosophical trends that shape debates about spirituality, community and self from the 1890s to the 1940s and beyond.

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities to the patterns of thought which characterized the Victorian's views of race. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialized thinking of the past, "Colonial Desire" illustrates how we are operating "in complicity" with historical ways of viewing "the other," both sexually and racially.
"Colonial Desire" is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and "culture." Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. "Englishness," Young argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

Representations of violence surround us in everyday life - in news reports, films and novels - inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence that they represent? This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence

This volume brings together work by established and emerging scholars to consider the work and impact of Bhai Vir Singh. Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957) was a major force in the shaping of modern Sikh and Punjabi culture, language, and politics in the undivided colonial Punjab, prior to the Partition of the province in 1947, and in the post-colonial state of India. The chapters in this book explore how he both reflected and shaped his time and context, and address some of the ongoing legacy of his work in the lives of contemporary Sikhs. The contributors analyze the varied genres, literary and historical, that were adopted and adapted by Bhai Vir Singh to foreground and enhance Sikh religiosity and identity. These include his novels, didactic pamphlets, journalistic writing, prefatory and exegetical work on spiritual and secular historical documents, and his poems and lyrics, among others. The book will be of particular interest to those working in Sikh studies, South Asian studies and post-colonial studies.

This is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, the book illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity's relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.

George Orwell is a writer who has been appropriated by very different political regimes and opinions, pressed into service as his various critics have seen fit. Though a polemicist and satirist at heart, his anti-totalitarian ideals are expounded with deft story-telling and a simplicity that belies the ultimately complex debates to which he gave voice. The changing responses to his two classic novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), provide an illuminating account of the developing preoccupations of the second half of the 20th century. In this Readers' Guide, Daniel Lea takes a decisive path through the maze of interpretations that has accumulated around Orwell's best-known novels, examining critical reactions from the beginning of the Cold War through to the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe, and at the same time placing Orwell within a long tradition of dystopian writings. In exploringthe artistic, cultural and social contexts of Orwell's work, it is an essential resource for students and general readers alike.

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce's writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce's works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce's innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce's writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce's lesser-known works-critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections-to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.

This is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children's historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of almost forty books - novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic novel. The first three chapters focus on texts about the complex process of becoming Ukrainian Canadian, ones showcasing the experiences of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, including encounters with Indigenous Peoples and the First World War Internment. The last two chapters are devoted to the significance of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the Second World War for Ukrainian Canadians. All of the chapters demonstrate the entanglements of Ukrainian and Canadian history and point to the role Anglophone children's literature can play in preventing the symbolical seeds of memory from withering. This volume argues that reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory. Such memory created through reading is multi-dimensional as it involves the interpretation of both the present and the past by an individual whose reality has been directly or indirectly shaped by the past over which they have no influence. Next-generation memory is of anticipatory character, which means that authors of historical fiction anticipate the readers - both present-day and future - not to have direct links to any witnesses of the events they discuss and have little knowledge of the transcultural character of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora.

At Home With Ivan Vladislavic is the first comprehensive analysis of the works of Ivan Vladislavic. Bringing a flaneur's "internal GPS" to postcolonial Johannesburg, Vladislavic established a critical sense of home via an intimate knowledge of geography and history. This sense of belonging can have positive ecological effects as we tend to protect what we know. The flaneur's deep word hoard also helped him to develop a minimalist style, which was not only a means of living sustainably in the city, but in its humour and close attention to detail a way to make greening the city more of a joy than a duty. In this way, Vladislavic created a culture of sustainability.

In this groundbreaking book, the editors have assembled a group of distinguished practitioners to reveal the breadth and scope of adult art therapy. Drawing from work with physically disabled adults, the chapters cover philosophies for clinical art therapy; suicide as an abortive life stage of development; treatment approaches to borderline adults; treatment of women with eating disorders; mothers of incestuously abused children, and termination with clients.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukacs, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of "hotel modernisms" as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

This book considers the evolution and characteristics of Nigeria's third-generation literature, which emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s and is marked by expressive modes and concerns distinctly different from those of the preceding era. The creative writing of this period reflects new sensibilities and anxieties about Nigeria's changing fortunes in the post-colonial era. The literature of the third generation is startling in its candidness, irreverence as well as the brutal self-disclosure of its characters, and it is governed by an unusually wide-ranging sweep in narrative techniques. This book examines six key texts of the oeuvre: Maria Ajima's The Web, Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc., Teju Cole's Open City, Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters Street, Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The texts interpret contemporary corruption and other unspeakable social malaise; together, they point to the exciting future of Nigerian literature, which has always been defined by its daring creativity and inventive expressive modes. Even conventional storytelling strategies receive revitalizing energies in these angst-driven narratives. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of contemporary African literature, Sociology, Gender and women's studies, and post-colonial cultural expression more broadly.

The House of the Prophet is Louis Auchincloss's searching novel of Felix Leitner, one of the most influential men of his time. Political philosopher, columnist, adviser to American presidents, Leitner will doubtless bring to many readers' minds the late Walter Lippmann, portrayed in the fine biography by Ronald Steel. Indeed, in his new introduction, Auchincloss makes plain that "the idea of writing a novel inspired by, though by no means based upon, the life of Walter Lippmann was unlike any fictional idea that I have had before or since." He candidly adds, "I was always perfectly aware the Felix Leitner, the protagonist of The House of the Prophet, would be instantly related to Walter Lippmann, and I had no objection to this." Whether considered on its own merits or as a major statement on Lippmann, this volume deserves close scrutiny.

- The first truly global study of adaptation - a rapidly growing area in courses and research so there is a market waiting for this book - Interdisciplinary focus means the book will appeal to a variety of area - literature, film studies, performance, media studies - Contemporary approach draws on the latest research so will appeal to researchers in the field