The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka examines the full length of Baraka's discography as a poet recording with musicians as well as his contributions to jazz and R & B, beginning with his earliest studio recordings in 1965 and continuing to the last year of his life, 2014. This recorded history traces his evolution from the era of Beat poetry and "projective verse," through the period of the Black Arts Movement and cultural nationalism, and on to his commitments to "third world Marxism," which characterized the last decades of his life. The music enfolding Baraka's recitations ranges from traditional African drumming, to doo wop, rhythm and blues, soul and the avant garde jazz that was his great love and the subject of so much of his writing, and includes both in-studio sessions and live concert performances. This body of work offers a rare opportunity to think about not only jazz/poetry, but the poet in the recording studio and the relations of text to score.

A study of the British science fiction and mystery author S. Fowler Wright, analyzing the author's strengths and weaknesses and discussing his varied fictional output.

Born to Polish parents in what is now known as the Ukraine, Joseph Conrad would become one of the greatest writers in the English language. With works like Lord Jim, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," and Heart of Darkness, he not only solidified his place in the panethon of great novelists, but also established himself as a keen-eyed chronicler of the social and political themes that animated the contemporary world around him. The original essays assembled here by John G. Peters showcase the abundance of historical material Conrad drew upon to create his varied literary corpus. Essays show how the author mined his early life as a sailor to pen gripping, realistic tales of nautical life while issuing scathing indictments of colonialism and capitalist cupidity in works like Almayer's Folly and Heart of Darkness. His unique sense of himself as an outsider is explored in relation to his pointed political novels that critiqued corruption and terrorism, most notably in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. In addition to his major works, essays consider Conrad's contributions as an innovative modernist and his unique role in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Complete with an up-to-date bibliography and illustrated chronology, A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad provides an invaluable resource to the life and work of the major novelist.

This book examines how the Irish environmental movement, which began gaining momentum in the 1970s, has influenced and been addressed by contemporary Irish writers, artists, and musicians. It examines Irish environmental writing, music, and art within their cultural contexts, considers how postcolonial ecocriticism might usefully be applied to Ireland, and analyzes the rhetoric of Irish environmental protests. It places the Irish environmental movement within the broader contexts of Irish national and postcolonial discourses, focusing on the following protests: the M3 Motorway, the Burren campaign, the Carnsore Point anti-nuclear protest, Shell to Sea, the turf debate, and the animal rights movement.

T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was the author of a small number of poems and some genuinely innovative critical and philosophical writings. From this modest output his influence on later writers was considerable: T. S. Eliot described his poems as 'beautiful' and Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were both inspired by his work." T.E. Hulme and Modernism" explores his impact on key modernist figures, and also shows where this influence has been misplaced or misinterpreted. Oliver Tearle also here suggests that Hulme's significance goes beyond his influence on modernism, and that his work provides new ways of thinking about creative and critical writing in the 21st century. What is poetry? What is the purpose of literary criticism? And how might the strange phenomenon of the fragment offer new ways of theorising such issues? In exploring these and other important matters this book pushes at the boundaries of literary criticism and of writing itself.

Sciences of Modernism examines key points of contact between British literature and the human sciences of ethnography, sexology and psychology at the dawn of the twentieth century. The book is divided into sections that pair exemplary scientific texts from the period with literary ones, charting numerous collaborations and competitions occurring between science and early modernist literature. Paul Peppis investigates this exchange through close readings of literary works by Claude McKay, E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Rebecca West and Wilfred Owen, alongside science books by Alfred Haddon, Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Bernard Hart and William Brown. In so doing, Peppis shows how these competing disciplines participated in the formation and consolidation of modernism as a broad cultural movement across a range of critical discourses. His study will interest students and scholars of the history of science, literary modernism, and English literature more broadly.

During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers) through the denial, annulment, and curtailment of citizenship and its rights. The island, ceasing to represent the iconic ideal of immigrant America, came to symbolize its very limits. Unbecoming Americans sets out to recover the shadow narratives of un-American writers forged out of the racial and political limits of citizenship. In this collection of Afro-Caribbean, Filipino, and African-American writers-C.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard Wright-Joseph Keith examines how they used their exclusion from the nation, a condition he terms "alienage," as a standpoint from which to imagine alternative global solidarities and to interrogate the contradictions of the United States as a country, a republic, and an empire at the dawn of "The American Century." Building on scholarship linking the forms of the novel to those of the nation, the book explores how these writers employed alternative aesthetic forms, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship. Ultimately they produced a vital counter-discourse of freedom in opposition to the new formations of empire emerging in the years after World War II, forms that continue to shape our world today.

There is growing awareness of the tremendous impact Latino writers have had on the recent literary scene, yet not all readers have the background to fully appreciate the merits and meanings of works like House on Mango Street, Line of the Sun, Bless Me Ultima, and In the Time of Butterflies. Offering analysis of their most important, popular, and frequently assigned fictional works, this book surveys the contributions of eight notable Latino writers: Julia Alvarez, Rodolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Christina Garia, Oscar Hijuelos, Ortiz Cofer, and Ernesto Quinonez. Each chapter gives biographical background on the author and clear literary analysis of the selected works, including a concise plot synopsis. Delving into the question of cultural identity, each work is carefully examined not only in terms of its literary components, but also with regard to the cultural background and historical context. This book illuminates such themes as acculturation, generational differences, immigration, assimilation, and exile. Language, religion, and gender issues are explored against the cultural backdrop, along with the social impact of such historical events as Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico, the early days of Castro's Cuba, and the Trujillo Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Students and teachers will find their reading experiences of U.S. Latino works enriched with the literary and cultural perspectives offered here. A list of additional suggested reading is included.

"The Novel Now" is an intelligent and engaging survey of contemporary British fiction.
Discusses familiar names such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter and compares them with more recent authors, including David Mitchell, Ali Smith, A.L. Kennedy, Matt Thorne, Nicola Barker, and Toby Litt
Incorporates original coverage of subgenres such as chick lit, lad lit, gay fiction, crime fiction, and the historical novel
Discusses the ways in which notions of regional identity and tribalist views have surfaced in UK and Irish fiction, and how post-Imperial sensibility has become a feature of the 'British' novel
Situates contemporary fiction within its socio-cultural and literary contexts.

The Influence of the European Culture on Hemingway's Fiction is an essential companion to all those who study Hemingway. The study deals with how Hemingway depicts Europe in his fiction, not necessarily from a biographical point of view, as most critical books have dealt with, but how he assimilates to the culture of Europe, how he portrays the different aspects of that culture in food, music, customs, architecture, and literature. This study views Hemingway's stories and novels through a new lens by applying new critical developments, emergent approaches, and transnational studies to aid in a fuller understanding of Hemingway. Europe for Hemingway was a land of discovery, and one cannot study his major novels without analyzing this passion for these lands. The Europe that Hemingway experienced and recorded in his writing serves as an important element in his fiction, becoming "the other," an alien culture that was sufficiently different from his American roots. Yet this otherness serves first to fulfill his psychological needs to learn and become one of the initiated through suffering-whether it involves himself or the loss of other people around him.

Mary Butts was an important figure in inter-war modernist circles and one who reviewed and associated with some of the major literary figures of the era, from T.S. Eliot to Gertrude Stein. Despite her importance and the varied nature of her writing, she has been a neglected figure in modernist scholarship. Providing a new analysis of the interwar literary period, Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism revisits her work - vividly experimental writings spanning memoir, poetry, polemic and fiction - through the lens of mid-20th-century British neo-Romanticism. The book argues that behind Butts's eco-feminist writings lies an intricate political and philosophical commentary.

This book examines the modes of representation of the East in Argentinean literature since the country's independence, in works by canonical authors such as Esteban Echeverria, Juan B. Alberdi, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Pastor S. Obligado, Eduardo F. Wilde, Leopoldo Lugones, and Roberto Arlt. The East, which has always fascinated intellectuals and artists from the Americas, inspired the creation of imaginary elements for both aesthetic and political purposes, from the depiction of purportedly despotic rulers to a genuine admiration for Eastern history and millennial cultures. These writers appropriated the East either through their travels or by reading chronicles, integrating along the way images that would end up being universalized by the Argentinean dichotomy between civilization and barbarism, all the while assigning the negative stereotypes of the exotic East to the Pampa region. With time, the exoticism of the Eastern world would shed its geopolitical meaning and was ultimately integrated into the national literature, thus adding new elements into the Argentinean imaginary.

Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera's place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of "period pieces" that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera's fiction. Building on theorist Rene Girard's notion of "triangular desire," he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive-and bitterly funny-understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera's novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found "the One" at last-or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera's novels and a witty introduction to Girard's mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author.

This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death. Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while others trace her influence on a surprising variety of different kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no announced or obvious debt to her. In so doing they also inevitably shed light on Austen herself. Austen is often considered romantic and not often considered political, but both those perceptions are challenged her, as is the idea that she is primarily a writer for and about women. Her books are comic and ironic, but they have been reworked and drawn upon in very different genres and styles. Collectively these essays testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance of Austen's books.

In Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, Emily Dalgarno examines Woolf's engagement with notions of the visible. Dalgarno examines how Woolf's writing engages with visible and nonvisible realms of experience, and draws on ideas from the diverse fields of psychoanalytic theory, classical Greek tragedy, astronomy, photography and photojournalism. Dalgarno offers textual analyses of Woolf's individual works, including To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Three Guineas arguing for the importance of her ongoing interest in Greek translation.

Industrial modernity takes it as self-evident that there is a difference between people and machines, but the corollary of this has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical. Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Daly begins with Victorian railway melodramas in which an individual is rescued from the path of the train just in time, and ends with J.G. Ballard's novel Crash in which people seek out such collisions. Daly argues that these collisions dramatize the relationship between the individual and modern industrial society, and suggests that the pleasures of fictional suspense help people to assimilate the speeding up of everyday life. This book will be of interest to scholars of moderinism, literature and film.

This concise introduction to American drama gives readers an overview of how American drama developed from the end of the Second World War to the turn of the twenty-first century.
Provides a balanced assessment of the major plays and playwrights of the period.
Shows how these dramatists broke new ground in their contribution to political, economic, social and cultural debates, as well as in their dramaturgical strategies.
Organized chronologically, with plays, playwrights and movements clustered around different movements such as realism and experimentalism.
Gives readers a sense of the development of American drama over time.

In this engaging book David Clark guides the reader through the theology of CS Lewis and illuminates the use and understanding of scripture in the works of this popular author.
Examines his life, work, world view, and the implications of his theology in relation to his other writings
Looks at Lewis' beliefs on the topics of redemption, humanity, spiritual growth, purgatory, and resurrection
Examines the different perspectives on Lewis and his work: as prophet, evangelist, and as a spiritual mentor
Explores the range and influence of Lewis' work, from the bestselling apologetic, "Mere Christianity," to the world-famous "Chronicles of Narnia"
Features specially-commissioned artwork throughout
Written in an accessible style for general readers, students, and scholars, and will introduce Lewis' theology to a wider audience.

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.

Women were hugely important to Henry James, both in his vividly drawn female characters and in his relationships with female relatives and friends. Combining biography with literary criticism and theoretical inquiry, Victoria Coulson explores James's relationships with three of the most important women in his life: his friends, the novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, and his sister Alice James, who composed a significant diary in the last years of her life. These writers shared not only their attitudes to gender and sexuality, but also their affinity for a certain form of literary representation, which Coulson defines as 'ambivalent realism'. The book draws on a diverse range of sources from fiction, autobiography, theatre reviews, travel writing, private journals, and correspondence. Coulson argues, compellingly, that the personal lives and literary works of these four writers manifest a widespread cultural ambivalence about gender identity at the end of the nineteenth century.

American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold new reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker offers the first comprehensive overview of Wertenbaker's playwriting career which spans more than thirty years of stage plays. It considers the contexts of their initial productions by a range of companies and institutions, including the Royal Court, the Arcola and the Women's Theatre Group. While examining all of Wertenbaker's original stage works, Sophie Bush's companion focuses most extensively on the frequently studied plays Our Country's Good and The Love of the Nightingale, but also draws attention to early unpublished works and more recent, critically neglected pieces, and the counterpoints these provide. The Companion will prove invaluable to students and scholars, combining as it does close textual analysis with detailed historical and contextual study of the processes of production and reception. The author makes comprehensive use of previously undiscussed materials from the Wertenbaker Archive, including draft texts, correspondence and theatrical ephemera, as well as original interviews with the playwright. A section of Performance and Critical Perspectives from other scholars and practitioners offer a range of alternative approaches to Wertenbaker's most frequently studied play, Our Country's Good. While providing a detailed analysis of individual plays, and their themes, theatricalities and socio-historical contexts, The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker also examines the processes and shape of Wertenbaker's career as a whole, and considers what the struggles and triumphs that have accompanied her work reveal about the challenges of theatrical collaboration. In its scope and reference Sophie Bush's study extends to encompass a wealth of additional information about other individuals and institutions and succeeds in placing her work within a broad range of concerns and resonances.

Len Platt charts a new approach through one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Using original archival research and detailed close readings, he outlines Joyce's literary response to the racial discourse of twentieth-century politics. Platt's account is the first to position Finnegans Wake in precise historical conditions and to explore Joyce's engagement with European fascism. Race, Platt claims, is a central theme for Joyce, both in terms of the colonial and post-colonial conflicts between the Irish and the British, and in terms of its use by the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce's engagement with race, while certainly a product of colonial relations, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity. This political analysis of Finnegans Wake will change the way this key modernist text is read, and will provide a fresh and fascinating historical context for all scholars of Joyce and Modernism.

This is a unique essay collection on Jim Crace, locating his writing within contemporary philosophical, cultural and political debates. This timely first critical collection of essays on Crace's work provides a retrospective on his work to date, locating his work within a number of contemporary interdisciplinary critical and cultural perspectives and concerns, including post-humanism, post-millennial pastoralism, post-post feminism and gender, intersections between science and literary theory, environmental politics, the symbiotics of authorial and critical archival work, and the context of the burgeoning world of literary prizes. It includes additional contextual material in the form of an interview with Jim Crace and the re-publication of a seminal critical essay on "Craceland" by Adam Begley. As such this critical essay collection will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary fiction, and Crace's unique writing.