A major contribution to James Joyce studies, as well as a historical review of the French intellectual climate since the 1960s.

This is a fully annotated edition of selected letters by (and in some cases to) Sir J. G. Frazer (1854-1941), the eminent anthropologist, classicist, and historian of religion. Frazer was read by virtually everyone working in those fields in the first third of the twentieth century. His great work, The Golden Bough, offered a grand vision of humanity's mental and spiritual evolution - from vain attempts to compel the gods to do our bidding (which Frazer called magic) through equally vain attempts to propitiate the gods through prayer and sacrifice (his characterization of religion) to rationality and science. His richly varied correspondence with prominent figures such as Edmund Gosse, A. E. Housman, and Bronislaw Malinowski, among others, offers an unparalleled insight into British intellectual life of the time, and also throws light upon the composition of The Golden Bough itself.

Locating Conrad's work in the context of the writer's life and cultural milieu, Professor Watts's study examines the main phase in Conrad's literary development. Drawing out the distinctive thematic preoccupations and technical devices in Conrad's writing, Watts explores Conrad's importance and influence as a moral, social and political commentator. He focuses in particular on Almayer's Folly, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo and Chance. The critical discussions address recent controversial developments in the evaluation of this magisterial, vivid, yet complex and problematic author.

How phony and real were defined and undermined in late twentieth-century literature and film? The epithet 'phony' was omnipresent during the postwar period in the United States. It was an easy appellation for individuals who appeared cynically to conform to codes of behavior for social approbation or advancement. Yet Holly Golightly 'isn't a phony because she's a real phony', says her agent in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In exploring this remark, Abigail Cheever examines the ways in which social influence was thought to deform individuals in mid century American culture. How could a person both be and not be herself at the same time? The answer lies in the period's complicated attitude toward social influence. If being real means that one's performative self is in line with one's authentic self, to be a real phony is to lack an authentic self as a point of reference - to lack a self that is independent of the social world. According to Cheever, Holly Golightly 'is like a phony in that her beliefs are perfectly in accordance with social norms, but she is real insofar as those beliefs are all she has'. ""Real Phonies"" begins in the postwar period to examine the twinned phenomena of phoniness and authenticity across the second half of the twentieth century - from adolescents like Holly Golightly and Holden Caulfield to sports agents like Jerry Maguire. Countering the critical assumption that, with the emergence of postmodernity, the ideal of 'authentic self' disappeared, Cheever argues that concern with the authenticity of persons proliferated throughout the past half-century despite a significant ambiguity over what that self might look like. Cheever's analysis is structured around five key kinds of characters: adolescents, the insane, serial killers, and the figures of the assimilated Jew and the 'company man'. In particular, she finds a preoccupation in these works not so much with faked conformity but with the frightening notion of real uniformity - the notion that Holly, and others like her, could each genuinely be the same as everyone else.

This book explores the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies. It shows how corpus methods can be used to compare literary texts to their translations, through the analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. The comparison focuses on stylistic features related to the major themes of Heart of Darkness. By combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, Mastropierro discusses how alterations to the original's stylistic features can affect the interpretation of the themes in translation. The discussion illuminates the manipulative effects that translating can have on the reception of a text, showing how textual alterations can trigger different readings. This book advances the multidisciplinary dialogue between corpus linguistics and translation studies and is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the application of corpus approaches to stylistics and translation.

Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi? Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate - an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age. Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.

Too often Eudora Welty is known to the general public as Miss Welty, a "perfect lady" who wrote affectionate portraits of her home region. Yet recent scholarship has amply demonstrated a richer complexity. Welty was an innovative artist with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, a woman who maintained close friendships with artists and intellectuals throughout the world, a writer as unafraid to experiment as she was to level her pen at the worst human foibles. The essays collected in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty seek to move Welty beyond a discussion of region and reflect new scholarship that remaps her work onto a larger canvas. The book offers ways to help twenty-first-century readers navigate Welty's challenging and intricate narratives. It provides answers to questions many teachers will have: Why should I study a writer who documents white privilege? Why should I give this "regional" writer space on an already crowded syllabus? Why should I teach Welty if I do not study the South? How can I help my students make sense of her modernist narratives? How can Welty's texts help me teach my students about literary theory, about gender and disability, about cultures and societies with which my students are unfamiliar?

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. He identifies influences and events central to the genre's growth, including the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

Flannery O'Connor may now be acknowledged as the "Great American Catholic Author," but this was not always the case. With Creating Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Moran explains how O'Connor attained that status, and how she felt about it, by examining the development of her literary reputation from the perspectives of critics, publishers, agents, adapters for other media, and contemporary readers. Moran tells the story of O'Connor's evolving career and the shaping of her literary identity. Drawing from the Farrar, Straus & Giroux archives at the New York Public Library and O'Connor's private correspondence, he also concentrates on the ways in which Robert Giroux worked tirelessly to promote O'Connor and change her image from that of a southern oddity to an American author exploring universal themes. Moran traces the critical reception in print of each of O'Connor's works, finding parallels between her original reviewers and today's readers. He examines the ways in which O'Connor's work was adapted for the stage and screen and how these adaptations fostered her reputation as an artist. He also analyses how-on reader review sites such as Goodreads-her work is debated and discussed among "common readers" in ways very much as it was when Wise Blood was first published in 1952.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Under what conditions does 'sensation' become 'sensational'? In the early nineteenth century murder was a staple of the sensationalizing popular press and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the sensations of the reader. By the end of the century, public concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was increasingly articulated in the language of sensation. Media sensationalism contributed to this process and magnified its impact, just as sensation was, in turn, taken up by literature, art and film. In the contemporary world the dramatization of these experiences in an era of media panics over terrorism and paedophilia has taken an overtly melodramatic form, in which battles of good and evil play out across the landscapes of our lives. Sensational Subjects develops an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to exploring these themes, their impact and their implications for understanding the modern world. A companion volume, Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury.

This is a concise and authoritative guide to Virginia Woolf's classic text "To the Lighthouse" (1927), including a brief plot summary and introduction to characters and a guide to critical reception. "To the Lighthouse" is one of Virginia Woolf's most widely read and commonly studied novels. Offering an authoritative, up-to-date guide for students, this guide introduces its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text. It is the ideal companion to reading and studying the novel, setting "To the Lighthouse" in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception. The book also includes a brief plot summary and guide to characters to enable students to progress quickly from early concerns about what is happening in the novel. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, and her morbid embrace of death and pain. No work until now, however, has shown how her poetry reflects a search for an alternative, feminized discourse, a discourse that engages in an imaginative dialogue with Ruben Dario's recourse to literary paternity and undertakes an audacious rewriting of social, sexual, and poetic conventions.

In the first major exploration of Agustini's life and work, Cathy L. Jrade examines her energizing appropriation and reinvention of modernista verse and the dynamics of her breakthrough poetics, a poetics that became a model for later women writers.

"I find myself talking to you about all the great joys, all the agonies, all my thoughts..." - Letter to Eva Konikova, 1946 Out of the thousands of letters Tove Jansson wrote a cache remains that she addressed to her family, her dearest confidantes, and her lovers, male and female. Into these she spilled her innermost thoughts, defended her ideals and revealed her heart. To read these letters is both an act of startling intimacy and a rare privilege. Penned with grace and humour, Letters from Tove offers an almost seamless commentary on Tove Jansson's life as it unfolds within Helsinki's bohemian circles and her island home. Spanning fifty years between her art studies and the height of Moomin fame, we share with her the bleakness of war; the hopes for love that were dashed and renewed, and her determined attempts to establish herself as an artist. Vivid, inspiring and shining with integrity, Letters from Tove shows precisely how an aspiring and courageous young artist can evolve into a very great one.

The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere.

"A highly intelligent and successful study exploring the uncanny features of Conrad's art that respond, and lend depth, to the concerns of theorists such as Bakhtin and Lyotard." -- Suresh Raval, University of Arizona

Whether we speak of queer bodies targeted for harassment, queer sensibilities derided as dangerous, or queer intimacies denied legitimacy, we acknowledge a close companionship between queerness and precariousness. Queerness remains continuously under threat; these threats to survival can be immediate, as in the AIDS crises, or more subtle and entrenched. Many queer lives thus end prematurely and drastically-but not all end in the physical expiration of life. Some terminate gradually and even unconsciously in the countless concessions to normativity demanded by dominant cultures that perceive, through a perverse set of projective identifications, their own survival as imperiled by queerness. The Modernist Art of Queer Survival explores an archive of modernist archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the five modernists examined in The Modernist Art of Queer Survival countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, humility, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and ecologically sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Authors and texts discussed include Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, E.M. Forster's Howards End and A Passage to India, and Willa Cather's "Consequences" and Lucy Gayheart.

This book presents the extraordinary life and writings of Maya Angelou. It examines the changing viewpoints in her six autobiographies within the context of women's and African American autobiographies, with specific reference to the slave narrative and to contemporary fiction and film. Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self examines this iconic artist's work as an autobiographer, offering an up-to-date assessment of Angelou's contributions to American literature and to American and international culture. This is the only book to interpret Angelou's autobiographies as unique experiments in the history of black narrative. It attests to Angelou's creativity in transforming the typical single-volume autobiography into a six-volume personal and cultural adventure that tells the truth but reads like fiction. The narratives cover the years from the Great Depression (1941) to the days following the assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968), emphasizing Angelou's roles as mother, daughter, granddaughter, wife, and friend. This revised edition also presents information about Maya Angelou's funeral and her continuing legacy since her death in 2014. The depth and scope of the book's observations regarding Angelou's autobiographies will be of great interest to readers seeking an analysis of the interconnections among Angelou's writings as well as serve students taking courses in women's studies or black culture studies. Examines each of Maya Angelou's six autobiographies, enabling readers to understand what growing up black and female in the United States was like Traces the development of black autobiography from its roots in the slave narrative to its presence in contemporary fiction and film Highlights the exclusive 1997 interview between Maya Angelou and the author Examines Maya Angelou's achievements as a poet Discusses all of Angelou's autobiographies regarding their settings, themes, plot development, and other narrative techniques Offers an alternate reading for each autobiography

Over the last decade, Samuel Beckett's popularity has rocketed around the world and he is increasingly recognised as one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century but there has been very little scholarly work on Beckett's reception outside Europe. This comprehensive volume brings together essays from leading critics on Beckett's international critical reception. Due to Beckett's linguistic and artistic abilities, he was intimately involved in the translation and production of his writings in German, French, English and Spanish; and consequently countries using these languages have sophisticated critical traditions. However, many other countries have adopted Beckett as their own, from places where he lived for lengthy periods of his life (England, France, Ireland and Germany), to those finding directly applicable political messages in his work (such as ex-Soviet states including the Czech Republic and Romania), and those countries whose national literary traditions bear heavily upon his work (e.g. Norway and Italy). This fascinating volume reveals Beckett's evolving critical reception from contemporary reviews to the present.

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." "David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining "Infinite Jest." These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, "The Pale King," which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.

Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood. In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war.

In this book, Author Katharine N. Harrington examines contemporary writers from the French-speaking world who can be classified as literary "nomads." The concept of nomadism, based on the experience of traditionally mobile peoples lacking any fixed home, reflects a postmodern way of thinking that encourages individuals to reconsider rigid definitions of borders, classifications, and identities. Nomadic identities reflect shifting landscapes that defy taking on fully the limits of any one fixed national or cultural identity. In conceiving of identities beyond the boundaries of national or cultural origin, this book opens up the space for nomadic subjects whose identity is based just as much on their geographical displacement and deterritorialization as on a relationship to any one fixed place, community, or culture. This study explores the experience of an existence between borders and its translation into writing that. While nomadism is frequently associated with post-colonial authors, this study considers an eclectic group of contemporary Francophone writers who are not easily defined by the boundaries of one nation, one culture, or one language. Each of the four writers, J.M.G. LeClezio, Nancy Huston, Nina Bouraoui, and Regine Robin maintains a connection to France, but it is one that is complicated by life experiences, backgrounds, and choices that inevitably expand their identities beyond the Hexagon. Harrington examines how these authors' life experiences are reflected in their writing and how they may inform us on the state of our increasingly global world where borders and identities are blurred.

Winner of the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan, Ellen Gilchrist has entertained audiences with her vivid fictional portraits of strong women, eccentric lives, and the difficulties of love and life. Known both for her short fiction and her novels, Gilchrist has been awarded several honors throughout her career, and her work continues to receive both critical and popular acclaim. This book examines her fiction, book by book, and offers an appreciation of her craft through a careful analysis of the stories themselves, their critical reception, and their lasting effect on the reader. Hooper offers the first complete evaluation of Gilchrist's entire fiction oeuvre. Author of such works as In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, The Annunciation, Go Hunting with My Daddy, and several other novels and collections of short stories, Ellen Gilchrist has transcended the bounds of Southern writing, appealing to audiences in all corners of the nation. Here, Hooper celebrates her fiction, focusing on the strong, feisty female characters that populate her works, exerting their will and independence regardless of traditional restraints on their activities. In addition, he pays special attention to her strengths and weaknesses as both a short fiction writer and a novelist, arguing that while her novels may entertain, her lasting contribution to American letters can more easily be found in her short fiction.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be so lauded for his prose and plays. Since relocating to France in 1987, in a voluntary exile from China, he has assembled a body of dramatic work that has best been understood neither as expressly Chinese nor French, but as transnational. In this comprehensive study of his post-exile plays, Mary Mazzilli explores Gao's plays as examples of postdramatic transnationalism: a transnational artistic and theatrical trend that is fluid, flexible and encompasses a variety of styles and influences. As such, this innovative interdisciplinary investigation offers fresh insights into contemporary theatre. Whereas other publications have considered Gao's work as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, Gao Xingjian's Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre is the first study to relate his plays to postdramatic theatre and to provide close textual and dramatic analysis that will help readers to better understand his complex work, and also to see it in the context of the work of contemporary playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Among the plays discussed are: The Other Shore, written just before he left China in 1987; Between Life and Death (1991) - compared in detail to Martin Crimp's Attempts on her life; Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), and its relationship to Beckett's Happy Days; Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), Weekend Quartet (1995), and the latest plays Snow in August (1997), Death Collector (2000) and Ballade Nocturne (2010).