"Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1987, which led up to Toni Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and is the most-often taught novel by Morrison. It is a rich text, as well as a difficult one, in need of a student guide that can help undergraduates not only to understand the story but to develop sophisticated skills of critical analysis. Students who grapple successfully with "Beloved's" characters will also gain valuable insight into the major themes of the novel, Morrison's intricate narrative strategies, African American history and culture, and theories useful for interpreting literature.Character Studies aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts' themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.

Children's literature continues to receive growing scholarly attention, and this is due, in part, to the increased awareness of the complexity of these works and their importance in the curriculum. While some books may become classics and continue to be read long after their publication, others are the product of contemporary society and reflect the changing values of modern American culture. So, too, those titles that have been singled out for recognition reveal the standards of awards committees. This reference is a guide to works of American children's fiction that have won awards between 1995 and 1999.

Some of the books were published before that period, and thus their recent recognition affirms their enduring value. Included are more than 750 alphabetically arranged entries for authors, titles, characters, and settings related to nearly 250 books. Entries for novels provide plot summaries and critical commentary, while those for authors give biographical information. The volume demonstrates the growing number of multicultural novels and books about nontraditional families, while it also shows the continuing importance of historical fiction and the waning appeal of traditional adventure novels. While the volume will be valuable to librarians and teachers and to scholars of children's literature, it will also be useful to anyone interested in these works as a commentary on American culture at the close of the twentieth century.

This book investigates the intersection of Indian society, the encoding of post-millennial modernity and 'ways of seeing' through the medium of Indian graphic narratives. If seeing in Indian cultures is a mode of knowing then what might we decode and know from the Indian graphic narratives examined here? The book posits that the 'seeing' of post-millennial Indian graphic narratives revolves around a visuality of the inauspicious, complemented by narratives of the same. Examining both form and content across nine Indian, post-millennial graphic narratives, this book will appeal to those working in South Asian visual studies, cultural studies and comics-graphic novel studies more broadly.

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment. Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign - especially French - authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

George Kelly was a pioneer realist in the American theater who not only enjoyed popular and critical success, but also remained true to his own moral vision of theater as an art form despite what he considered vulgar influences that catered to the popular taste. Drawing upon the canon of Kelly's published plays as well as on manuscripts for four plays never before published or widely discussed by critics, this volume chronicles the evolution of this important craftsman and director from his earliest and most critically lauded examinations of America's upper middle-class family life to his often spartan commentary on changing American morals and tastes.

Calling into question the short-sighted assessments of scholars and critics who discount Kelly's achievements as formulaic and misogynistic, this reference reveals the broad spectrum of critical opinion which generally admired his theatrical skill and moral commitment. An opening biography surveys Kelly's career, while the chapters that follow give detailed information about his works. Included are plot synopses and production histories of his plays, along with an extensive annotated bibliography of reviews and scholarly studies.

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects. Looking at Woolf and armchairs, Mansfield and snack food, and Bowen and fashion accessories, it probes the aesthetic resonance between these stories' form and contents and also considers the modes of thinking they might promote. Conceiving of their short fiction as intrinsically radical and experimental even within a wider context of modernist innovation, this book shows how these important women writers brought quotidian objects to riotous life, in such a way that tasked readers with reevaluating their everyday existence. Overall, Modernist Short Fiction and Things argues that short fiction epitomises modernist aesthetics, functioning as a resonant source for investigation and complementing and expanding our understanding of modernist epistemology.

Ruskin Bond is known internationally as one of India's most prolific writers in English for children, young adults, and adults. This literary biography analyzes the impact of personal, social, geographical, political, and literary influences on Bond's worldview, aesthetic principles, and writings. Connecting the development of Bond's writing career over the past 50 years to the evolution of the publishing industry in India, Khorana details the author's pioneering work in the field of children's and young adult literature, and his contribution to diasporic and postcolonial/post-independence literatures. She concludes that it is Bond's versatile, original, and elegant writing in a variety of genres that continue to endear him to readers around the world. According to the author, despite Bond's British background, he does not write about India from a Eurocentric perspective. Having lived the majority of his life in India, he knows the country as an insider, writing with an authenticity and emotional engagement about the land and the people of the Himalayas and small-town India. Khorana analyzes his novels and short stores, and highlights his juxtaposition of his protagonists' individual dramas against larger social, moral, and metaphysical issues. In addition, she reveals how the autobiographical and regional elements in Bond's work provide insight into universal themes such as the tension between past and present, city life versus rural values, the dignity of ordinary folk, preservation of the environment, and living in harmony with nature.

This book examines how the cultural and ethical power of literature allowed writers and readers to reflect on the practice of capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US between 1890 and 1950. It explores how connections between 'high' and 'popular' culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake, analysing a range of forms including major works of canonical literature, detective fiction, plays, polemics, criminological and psychoanalytic tracts and letters and memoirs. The book addresses conceptual understandings of the modern death penalty, including themes such as confession, the gothic, life-writing and the human-animal binary. It also discusses the role of conflict in shaping the representation of capital punishment, including chapters on the Easter Rising, on World War I, on colonial and quasi-colonial conflict and on World War II. Ebury's overall approach aims to improve our understanding of the centrality of the death penalty and the role it played in major twentieth century literary movements and historical events.

This book explores the history of women's engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation-of style, mode, voice, genre and language-has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as 'other'. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

"Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Vritical Guide" is a comprehensive introduction to Winterson's writing. It brings together new essays by leading critics writing on key topics across her work from early successes like "Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" to recent works like "Lighthousekeeping". The guide provides students with an accessible and up-to-date critical guide to Winterson's most commonly studied texts, covering major themes and developments, and issues of style, technique and genre, from a range of contemporary critical and theoretical perspectives. Chapters identify and explore the key topics and debates including: story-telling; feminism and women's writing; historiographic metafiction; literary realism and postmodernism; religion and spirituality; masculinity; lesbian romance; queer theory; and psychoanalytic approaches. Each chapter includes an introductory overview outlining key themes, approaches and the texts covered. This is an ideal introduction to the variety of critical approaches to Winterson and her work.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Although best known for "The Thorn Birds," her blockbuster family saga set in her native Australia, Colleen McCullough is a versatile novelist who has written in a variety of genres. This is the first full-length examination of her work. It highlights her versatility and her refusal to be confined to any one genre or type of writing, even though that refusal has lost her part of the wide readership she gained with DEGREESIThe Thorn Birds DEGREESR. DeMarr discusses, analyzes, and evaluates each of McCullough's eight novels in turn, relates it to the genre to which it belongs, and compares it to her other work. This study also features a biographical chapter and a chapter which discusses the variety of genres in which McCullough has written.

DeMarr shows how McCullough's romances ("Tim" and "The Ladies of Missalonghi") and her other novels which make heavy use of romance elements ("The Thorn Birds" and "An Indecent Obession") differ dramatically from each other. She also compares McCullough's novels of ideas ("A Creed for the Third Millennium DEGREES" and the three recent historical novels set in ancient Rome, The Masters of Rome series). Each novel or series is discussed in a separate chapter, which contains sections on plot development and structure, character development, setting, style, and themes. Each novel is also examined from an alternate critical approach, such as feminist, allegorical, anti-generic, and deconstructionist criticism, to widen the reader's perspective. A complete bibliography of McCullough's work, general criticism, and listings of reviews of each novel complete the work. This work will be of particular interest to public and school libraries.

This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children's literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. It explores how this liminal figure - a boy operating within a man's world - addresses adult anxieties about boyhood and the boy's transition to manhood. It investigates the literary, social and ideological significance of a vast array of popular detective narratives appearing in 'penny dreadfuls' and story papers which were aimed primarily at working-class boys. This study charts the relationship between developments in the representation of the fictional boy detective and changing expectations of and attitudes towards real-life British boys during a period where the boy's role in the future of the Empire was a key concern. It emphasises the value of the early fictional boy detective as an ideological tool to condition boy readers to fulfil adult desires and expectations of what boyhood and, in the future, proper manhood should entail. It will be of particular importance to scholars working in the fields of children's literature, crime fiction and popular culture.

This book is a study of the literature and visual arts concerned with the many and diverse forms of slaveries produced by globalisation in Britain since the early 1990s. Starting from the sociological and political analyses of the issue, it combines postcolonial and Holocaust studies in a twin perspective based on the recurrent images of the ghost and the concentration camp, whose manifold shapes populate today's Britain. Discussions focuses on a wide range of works: novelists and crime writers (Chris Abani, Chris Cleave, Marina Lewycka, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell), film directors (Nick Broomfield), photographers (Dana Popa), playwrights (Clare Bayley, Cora Bissett and Stef Smith, Abi Morgan, Lucy Kirkwood) and dystopian artists such as Alfonso Cuaron, P. D. James and Salman Rushdie. The book will appeal to both students and scholars in English, postcolonial, Holocaust, globalisation and slavery studies. -- .

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by. In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature.

In the last twenty years, how has U.S.-American writing and the reading public responded to the complexity of an American culture resolutely situated in a larger, highly politicized, globalized world undergoing radical change? The 20th-century modes of realism and postmodernism have been succeeded by writerly practices that are that are invested in the idea of embodied 'authenticity' and that are relatable to neorealism, whether it be via outright affirmation or critical experimentation and appropriation. The individual case studies mark the ways in which postmillennial U.S.-American writing is marked by an ongoing awareness toward complexity and the entanglement of writers and the reading public with pressing political concerns, and, at times oppressive, social and economic discursive and structural formations. These contributions further attest to how narrative and structural complexity, grammatical and lexical sophistication, and social nuance endure as the main literary modes of confronting 21st-century political life. This volume is thus of interest for both the study of U.S.-American political culture and U.S.-American literature.

The effort to go beyond given knowledge in different domains - artistic, scientific, political, metaphysical - is a characteristic driving force in modernism and the avant-gardes. Since the late 19th century, artists and writers have frequently investigated their medium and its limits, pursued political and religious aims, and explored hitherto unknown physical, social and conceptual spaces, often in ways that combine these forms of critical inquiry into one and provoke further theoretical and methodological innovations. The fifth volume of the EAM series casts light on the history and actuality of investigations, quests and explorations in the European avant-garde and modernism from the late 19th century to the present day. The authors seek to answer questions such as: How have modernism and the avant-garde appropriated scientific knowledge, religious dogmas and social conventions, pursuing their investigation beyond the limits of given knowledge and conceptions? How have modernism and avant-garde created new conceptual models or representations where other discourses have allegedly failed? In what ways do practises of investigation, quest or exploration shape artistic work or the formal and thematic structures of artworks?

Magistrale discusses the themes that turn King's fiction into morality tales.

Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams uses the metaphor of mapping to examine the narrative strategies employed in popular twenty-first-century fairy tales. It analyzes the television shows Once Upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), the young-adult novel series The Lunar Chronicles, the Indexing serial novels, and three experimental short works of fiction by Kelly Link. Some of these texts reconfigure well-known fairy tales by combining individual tales into a single storyworld; others self-referentially turn to fairy tales for guidance. These contemporary tales have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and Williams argues that they both engage the fairy tale as a relevant genre and remake it to create a new kind of fairy tale. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes fairy-tale texts that collapse multiple distinct fairy tales so they inhabit the same storyworld, transforming the fairy-tale genre into a fictional geography of borderless tales. Williams examines the complex narrative restructuring enabled by this form of mash-up and expands postmodern arguments to suggest that fairy-tale pastiche is a critical mode of retelling that celebrates the fairy-tale genre while it critiques outdated ideological constructs. Part 2 analyzes the metaphoric use of fairy tales as maps, or guides, for lived experience. In these texts, characters use fairy tales both to navigate and to circumvent their own situations, but the tales are ineffectual maps until the characters chart different paths and endings for themselves or reject the tales as maps altogether. Williams focuses on how inventive narrative and visual storytelling techniques enable metafictional commentary on fairy tales in the texts themselves. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space argues that in remaking the fairy-tale genre, these texts do not so much chart unexplored territory as they approach existing fairy-tale space from new directions, remapping the genre as our collective use of fairy tales changes. Students and scholars of fairy-tale and media studies will welcome this fresh approach.

This volume brings together eminent Tagore scholars and younger writers to revisit the concepts of nation, nationalism, identity and selfhood, civilization, culture and homeland in Tagore's writings. As these ideas take up the centre-stage of politics in the subcontinent as also elsewhere in the world in the 21st century, it becomes extremely relevant to revisit his works in this context. Tagore's ambivalence towards nationalism as an ideology was apparent in the responses in his discussions with Indians and non-Indians alike. Tagore developed the concept of 'syncretic' civilization as a basis of nationalist civilizational unity, where society was central, unlike the European model of state-centric civilization. However, as the subterranean tensions of communalism became clear in the early 20th century, Tagore reflexively critiqued his own political position in society. He thus emerged as the critic of the nation/nation-state and in this he shared his deep unease with other thinkers like Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein. This volume for the first time covers the socio-political, historical, literary and cultural concerns relating to Tagore's efforts towards the 'de-colonization' of the Self. The volume begins with various perspectives on Tagore's 'ambivalence' about nationalism. It encompasses critical examinations of Tagore's literary works and other art forms as well as adaptations of his works on film. It also reads Tagore's nationalism in a comparative mode with contemporary thinkers in India and abroad who were engaged in similar debates.

At Macedonio Fernandez's funeral in 1952, Jorge Luis Borges delivered the following elegy: "In those years I imitated him to the point of transcription, to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, Macedonio is literature." This is the first book available in English that collects essays by the world's leading scholars on Macedonio Fernandez, one of Borges's most important mentors and a still enigmatic thinker of the early 20th century. Macedonio's philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and experimental writing laid the foundations for Borges's own theoretical and literary matrix. Nonetheless, Borges helped shape a myth of Macedonio as a thinker who could not translate his oratorial geniality into written intelligibility. So, despite the centrality of Macedonio to Borges's thought, his work has remained almost unknown to English-speaking readers. Contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, that this myth reduces the complexities of Macedonio's life and creative process, as each chapter shines new light on his texts. Conceived as both a companion for new readers of Macedonio's writings and an invitation for specialists to revisit his work through new perspectives, essays in this volume provide extensive background and bibliographical references, as well as English translations of Macedonio's original texts. This collection seeks to serve as a catalyst for the continued discovery and rediscovery of Macedonio Fernandez's texts and the ways they might help us to rediscover the singularities of our own present moment.

When it was initially published in 1939, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" instantly became a bestseller. Like many phenomenally popular works, it has elicited a wide range of critical responses. Some earlier reviewers faulted Steinbeck for his apparent sentimentality, while others were disturbed by his portrait of heartless, greedy Americans. Others, too, criticized his aesthetics. His novel became an important part of the American curriculum, many readers praised his epic vision, and modern critics have tended to respond favorably to his works. But despite the publication of four new editions of the book from 1989 to 1997, its place in the American literary canon is precarious.

Through reprints of early reviews and scholarly articles, along with original essays and reviews of the four most recent major editions, this volume traces the critical reception of Steinbeck's novel. The first part of the book looks back at the first 50 years of the novel's reception, from 1939 to 1989, while the second examines the response to Steinbeck during the 1990s. Some of these later essays reflect on the lasting significance of the novel, while others note that some scholars and educators have questioned its relevance. The volume includes a chronology and bibliography, and an extensive introductory essay overviews the major trends in Steinbeck scholarship.

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the 21st century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called "epiphanies." Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce's writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce's entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies-silence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity-as a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce's oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce's career. MacDuff compares Joyce's concept of epiphany to Classical, Biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce's epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature, and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce's contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter's attachment to her mother, and of both women's strength and resiliency. "I Remain in Darkness" recounts Annie's attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. "I Remain in Darkness" is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life's particular music.