As a young man, Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century, translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo, a tome by a Portuguese missionary about the country now known as Ethiopia. Far from being a potboiler, this translation left an indelible imprint on Johnson. Demonstrating its importance through a range of research and attentive close readings, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson highlights the lasting influence of an African people on Johnson's oeuvre.
Wendy Laura Belcher uncovers traces of African discourse in Johnson's only work conceived for the stage, Irene; several of his short stories; and, of course, his most famous fiction, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Throughout, Belcher provides a much needed perspective on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. Most pointedly, she illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced, developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to suggest that some texts in the European canon are best understood as energumens--texts that are spoken through. Her model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe's others have co-constituted European representations. Drawing on sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Ge'ez, this study challenges the conventional wisdom on Johnson's work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson's religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.
A rich monograph that fuses eighteenth-century studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial theory, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson adds a fresh perspective on and a wealth of insights into the great, enigmatic man of letters.

This book is an introduction to and interpretation of the world of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), one of the most fascinating and complex figures in European literary modernism and the avant-garde. Raised in South Africa and writing much of his literary work in English, Pessoa nevertheless almost never left the city of Lisbon after returning in 1905. Pessoa is known for abolishing the authorial self and for dividing his writings among a large number of other personalities - the heteronyms - who wrote through him, each in a completely different style. The theory of 'adverse genres' introduced in this book aids understanding of his paradoxical and contradictory use of genres. Through the invented 'coterie of authors,' Pessoa explored mixed writing by changing the relationship between form and content, authorship and text. Adverse Genres describes how Pessoa selected genres from the European tradition (Ricardo Reis' 'Horatian' odes, Alvaro de Campos' worship of Whitman, Alberto Caeiro's pastoral and metaphysical, Bernardo Soares' philosophical diary), into which he put a different and incongruent content taken from modernist, contemporary themes. By creating anomalies between form and content, or authors and texts, Pessoa gives new life and definition to traditional historical genres for a modernist age. In doing so, he enhances the normal expressive potential of each genre by incorporating uncharacteristic content and questioning authorship. Pessoa uses this procedure in his 1907 short story, 'A Very Original Dinner' in the 'Cancioneiro' or collected poems written under the name Fernando Pessoa; in his love letters to Ophelia Queiros; in his 1922 story 'The Adventure of the Anarchist Banker;' in his collection of quatrains derived from Portuguese popular verse; and, finally, in his problematic non-existence as 'the man who never was,' in Jorge de Sena's expression, who exchanged a normal life for an entirely literary world of the imagination. This book addresses Pessoa's desire to be an entire literature, a new literary history, as it were, full of diverse authors and styles, as if they were characters or roles in a dramatic theater of the self in literary modernism.

Surviving Images explores the prominent role of cinema in the development of cultural memory around war and conflict in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwinas personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwinas geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themesathe Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalismato bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.

Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the place and significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces - such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway - have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, the book also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.

This volume contains interviews with fourteen contemporary South African authors: Mariam Akabor, Sifiso Mzobe, Fred Khumalo, Futhi Ntshingila, Niq Mhlongo, Zukiswa Wanner, Nthikeng Mohlele, Mohale Mashigo, Lauren Beukes, Charlie Human, Yewande Omotoso, Andrew Salomon, Imraan Coovadia and Fred Strydom. The conversations with the writers are accompanied by vignettes of the authors' lives and summaries of their works. In curating this book, Danyela Dimakatso Demir and Olivier Moreillon step beyond pure literary theory and analysis by allowing the authors to speak to and assess the literary landscape, of which they form a part and which they co-create. However, Demir and Moreillon also trace concepts and terms that describe the current moment of South African literature, such as post-transitional literature and literature beyond 2000. By adopting a world-literary approach to (post)apartheid literature, this book makes an important contribution to debates on contemporary South African writing. In addition, Tracing the (Post)Apartheid Novel beyond 2000 seeks to raise awareness of the imbalance in both critical and public attention between literary 'big names', such as Andre P. Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Zakes Mda, who are nationally and internationally celebrated, and the younger and newer generation of South African writers, who go largely unnoticed.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from a number of fields across the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and consider why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period. This deep cultural need should be seen as a reaction to the rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even method of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism, why it has so often led to unusual, challenging projects and formal innovation, and why poetry, in particular, might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the variety of forms this preoccupation takes, and examines its aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring the use of innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important strain at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Koch's A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature, Part 2 is an extensive and thorough study of the development of Afrikaans literature during the first three decades of the 20th century. It follows Part 1, in which the earlier origins of Afrikaans and Afrikaans literature as well as the local Dutch writings tradition were discussed. Koch uses the metaphor of mapping to describe the work of the historiographer, and it becomes clear that his study analyses the literary texts within the context of space and time. Accordingly, it includes information on the authors' lives and times as well as the developments in Afrikaans literature, criticism and literary historiography. The exposition starts with the origin and development of the Afrikaans language during the so-called 'Second Language Movement'. Koch also describes the polemics between historians emphasising the 'spontaneous development' of Afrikaans from Dutch and those regarding it as a creole language; his balanced conclusion is that neither of the two groups can lay absolute claim to the truth. The interest of the book is heightened by the inclusion of texts written in Dutch, as Koch discussed in Part 1, and also works which are not 'literary' in the strict sense of the word, like war diaries. These are discussed not primarily for their literary value but for the insights they provide into the effect of the Anglo-Boer War on the formation of Afrikaner identity. It confirms that this literary history does not isolate the development of Afrikaans literature from the development of Afrikaner ideology and identity. This is followed by the two main parts of the study: a discussion of the literary works of the 'first generation' (Celliers, Totius and Leipoldt) and those of the 'writers of the twenties' (Toon van den Heever, A G Visser, C J Langenhoven and Eugene Marais). Jerzy Koch is professor in the Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, research fellow at the Free State University, Bloemfontein, and extraordinary professor at Stellenbosch University. He is an acclaimed translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature into Polish and has published widely on Dutch and post-colonial literature.

Ends of Assimilation compares sociological and Chicano/a (Mexican American) literary representations of assimilation. It argues that while Chicano/a literary works engage assimilation in complex, often contradictory ways, they manifest an underlying conviction in literature's productive power. At the same time, Chicano/a literature demonstrates assimilation sociology's inattention to its status as a representational discourse. As twentieth-century sociologists employ the term, assimilation reinscribes as fact the fiction of a unitary national culture, ignores the interlinking of race and gender in cultural formation, and valorizes upward economic mobility as a politically neutral index of success. The study unfolds chronologically, describing how the historical formation of Chicano/a literature confronts the specter of assimilation discourse. It tracks how the figurative, rhetorical, and lyrical power of Chicano/a literary works compels us to compare literary discourse with the self-authorizing empiricism of assimilation sociology. It also challenges presumptions of authenticity on the part of Chicano/a cultural nationalist works, arguing that Chicano/a literature must reckon with cultural dynamism and develop models of relational authenticity to counter essentialist discourses. The book advances these arguments through sustained close readings of canonical and noncanonical figures and gives an account of various moments in the history and institutional development of Chicano/a literature, such as the rise and fall of Quinto Sol Publications, asserting that Chicano/a writers, editors, and publishers have self-consciously sought to acquire and redistribute literary cultural capital.

No aspect of modernist literature has attracted more passionate defenses, or more furious denunciations, than its affinity for the idea of autonomy. A belief in art as a law unto itself is central to the work of many writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. But is this belief just a way of denying art's social contexts, its roots in the lives of its creators, its political and ethical obligations?
Fictions of Autonomy argues that the concept of autonomy is, on the contrary, essential for understanding modernism historically. Disputing the prevailing skepticism about autonomy, Andrew Goldstone shows that the pursuit of relative independence within society is modernism's distinctive way of relating to its contexts. Goldstone examines an expansive modernist field in fiction, poetry, and theory--Oscar Wilde, J.-K. Huysmans, Henry James, Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man--in order to reveal an ever-shifting preoccupation with autonomy. Drawing on Bourdieu's sociology, formalist reading, and historical contextualization, this book demonstrates the importance of autonomy to modernist themes as varied as domestic service, artistic aging, expat life, and non-referentiality.
Nothing less than an argument for a wholesale revision of the assumptions of modernist studies, Fictions of Autonomy is also an intervention in literary theory. This book shows why anyone interested in literary history, the sociology of culture, and aesthetics needs to take account of the social, stylistic, and political significance of the problem, and the potential, of autonomy.

Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney's lifelong study of visionary aspirations of the American avant-garde cinema. Sitney's earlier book and critical essays defined the field of serious criticism of the American film avant-garde. He supplies a unique approach, critical, formal and intellectual, rather than sociological, ideological or institutional. Like his earlier book, Eyes Upside Down is a dense, sustained blast of convincing criticism which unfolds through a compelling personal vision. It makes a serious contribution to cinema studies and it is sure to remain in circulation for many years to come.

The Great American Songbooks shows how popular music shapes and permeates a host of modernism's hallmark texts. Austin Graham begins his study of 20th-century texts with a discussion of American popular music and literature in the 19th century. He posits Walt Whitman as a proto-modernist who drew on his love of opera to create the epic free-verse poetry that would heavily influence his bardic successors. One can witness this in T. S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land relies on Whitman's verse style to emphasize how 19th-century structures of feeling regarding music persist into the 20th century. From opera and standards of the Victorian musical hall, Graham moves to the blues to reveal the multifaceted ways it shaped works in the Harlem Renaissance, most notably in the verse of Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Cane. The second half of Songbooks advances an argument for a musical eclecticism that arose alongside rapid industrialization. Writers like Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, Graham argues, developed a notion of musical eclecticism to help them process-or cope-with the unprecedented invasiveness of popular music, particularly in major cities. This eclecticism runs counter to critics like Adorno who equate popular music with mass produced mechanisms such as the phonograph and radio, and thus with degraded, cultural forms. In conclusion, Graham suggests how modernist writers experienced, and sometimes theorized, a more nuanced, sophisticated, and fluid mode of interaction with popular music.

When the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, it precipitated a nuclear age that shaped the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. States of suspense is about the representation of this nuclear age in United States literature from 1945-2005. The profound psychological and cultural impact of living in anticipation of the Bomb is apparent not only in end-of-the-world fantasies, but also in mainstream and postmodern literature. This book traces the ways in which key motifs - the fragility of reality; the fear of closure; the inadequacies of language to represent the world - move between nuclear and postmodern cultures of the Cold War era. Taking three symbolically threatened environments - the home, the city, the planet - the book explores their recasting as 'nuclear places' in literature, and shows how these nuclear concerns resonate with those of other cultures. States of suspense will be of interest to students and scholars of American literature, and postmodern and technological culture. It will also be interest to those more generally intrigued by the cultural fallout of the nuclear age. -- .

This is the first study of May 68 in fiction and in film. It looks at the ways the events themselves were represented in narrative, evaluates the impact these crucial times had on French cultural and intellectual history, and offers readings of texts which were shaped by it. The chosen texts concentrate upon important features of May and its aftermath: the student rebellion, the workers strikes, the question of the intellectuals, sexuality, feminism, the political thriller, history, and textuality. Attention is paid to the context of the social and cultural history of the Fifth Republic, to Gaullism, and to the cultural politics of gauchisme. The book aims to show the importance of the interplay of real and imaginary in the text(s) of May, and the emphasis placed upon the problematic of writing and interpretation. It argues that re-reading the texts of May forces a reconsideration of the existing accounts of postwar cultural history. The texts of May reflect on social order, on rationality, logic, and modes of representation, and are this highly relevant to contemporary debates on modernity.

The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial. This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might turn her illness to less negative ends. As she put it, 'One must be ... continually giving & receiving, and shedding & renewing, & examining & trying to place'. For all the grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time.

Digital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities, and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy. Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form, and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's "Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]" (2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. In sum, the study situates contemporary digital literature in a literary genealogy in ways that rewrite literary history and reflect back on literature's past, modernism in particular, to illuminate the crucial role that media played in shaping the ambitions and practices of that period.

Judy Blume is one of the most popular authors of children's and young adult fiction in American history. For over 30 years, her books and career have withstood the test of time and she continues to resonate with new generations of young readers. While she is arguably one of the most important authors of the twentieth century, she is also one of the most banned. What is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Blume's career is that despite today's proliferation of cable channels and easy Internet access, books of hers written decades ago about every day life events that all teenagers experience still manage to find themselves at the center of censorship debates. Rather than change her style, the efforts to censor her books turned Blume into an activist and champion for the First Amendment. Inside this biography Kathleen Tracy explores the life and career of Judy Blume, one of the most successful-and most controversial-authors of twentieth century.

In addition to tracing the events of BlooM's life, this engaging biography discusses historic and current censorship issues in classrooms and libraries across the country. Her association with the National Coalition Against Censorship, a group that Blume says changed her life, as did her friendship with the organization's longtime director, Leanne Katz, is examined in detail as well as how libraries, teachers, publishers and grass-roots activists have responded to the ever-growing attempts to censor children's reading material. In-depth chapters are supplemented with a bibliography of print and electronic sources that provide suggested readings for students and general readers alike. Also included is a timeline, photos, and an appendix of free speech resources.

The 1990s have seen a renaissance in short fiction studies. Today's short story writers are testing the boundaries of short fiction through minimalist works; extended short story cycles; narrative nonfiction forms, such as histories, memoirs, and essays; and even stories created interactively with readers on the computer. Short story critics, in turn, are viewing the short story from the perspective of genre, history, cultural studies, and even cognitive science. This volume brings together the opinions, theories, and research of many of today's best-known short story writers, theorists, and critics. Contributors include some of the most widely read contemporary authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Gay Talese, W. P. Kinsella, Robert Coover, Barry Hannah, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

The authors and scholars who have contributed to the volume provide an entertaining and informative exploration of modern short fiction. The volume traces the origins of the short story back to Chaucer, the joke, and the instinct for play, and follows the development of the form through today's hyper-stories created interactively in cyberspace. Along the way, it presents essays on miminalism in short fiction, on the transformation of short stories into films, and even on AIDS and the short story. The broad scope of the volume includes a wide variety of critical approaches brought to bear on literature from around the world, including short stories from Africa, Australia, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

The writers of Gothic literature reflect in their works the concerns and fears of the times in which they were created. These fears, in turn, destabilize the reader; that is, they create within the reader a sense of uneasiness characteristic of the Gothic genre, an uneasiness that comes from the challenging of social and cultural conventions or cherished beliefs. In doing so, these works are also cultural artifacts, for they reflect issues central to society at a given point in time. This book examines the process of destabilization in the modern American Gothic. The volume focuses on the works of three popular 20th-century Gothic writers: H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. It argues that science and technology are central to the destabilization process in works by these authors, and it demonstrates how, as cultural artifacts, their writings reflect the fears and concerns of contemporary society. Thus the volume demonstrates how the works of these authors remain within the Gothic literary tradition, while they simultaneously adapt that tradition for a modern audience.

Ireland has a rich mythological tradition that stretches back for centuries, and much of this folklore tells tales of the fantastic. During the Irish Renaissance, authors such as William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory resurrected Irish folklore in their literary and dramatic works, thus restoring the popularity of Irish myth and legend. Since the Irish Renaissance, many Irish authors have continued to incorporate Celtic folklore in their novels. This book examines how various conventions from Irish folklore have been subsumed in twelve Irish novels published between 1912 and 1948, including works by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Mervyn Wall, Darrell Figgis, Eimar O'Duffy, and James Stephens. The volume explores how these writers have incorporated in their own works such conventions as heroic obligations, metamorphoses, and the blending of pagan and Christian myths.

In an episodic overview of Joyce's "Ulysses," specific Irish source works are discussed, including the Irish "imram" or sea voyage, and the "bruidhean" adventure, or entrapment episode. The conventions of "geis," metamorphosis, and the Ossianic tradition are studied in "Finnegans Wake," alongside a traditional Irish ballad, "The Annals of the Four Masters," and the "Acallamh na Senorach" In Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds, /i> and "The Third Policeman," an innovative approach to parody is shown. Mervyn Wall operates as a sometimes unwitting commentator on Irish hero tales, via comic irony and inverted motifs, while Darrell Figgis recalls the passing of Celtic heroic traditions in his bitter satire of Saint Patrick and Ois DEGREESD'in's legendary dispute, in "The Return of the Hero." Eimar O'Duffy's satire of modern Ireland mourns the end of Celtic heroic values in a fantasy that is overwhelmingly pessimistic in tone, while James Stephens extols the virtues of the imagination in "The Crock of Gold" and "The Demi-Gods."

Writers of imperial fiction in the period 1840-1914 created a strong image of the British Empire that was often confused with the empire as it actually existed. Even in the 1940s, many people in Britain and the British Dominions still accepted the stereotypical view that the British Empire was a highly moral creation. This book studies the literature of imperialism in the Victorian and Edwardian periods to show how this image of empire was created and how it developed such strength. The volume concentrates on the works of major writers of imperialism, such as Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, John Buchan, and G. A. Henty, but also looks extensively at the writings of less familiar figures, such as Robert Ballantyne and W.H.G. Kingston.

Many of the texts produced by these writers were books for boys, and they were very popular. They were often given as gifts and were awarded as prizes in schools. The books created a portrait of the British Empire as a place for settlement, the finding of treasure, the strengthening of religious beliefs and moral training, and the operation of codes of behavior for gentlemen. They emphasized courage and the willingness to face death in the service of Britain, and they suggested that the qualities of good citizens were the same as those of good imperialists. This was a comforting and influential concept during a period of imperial acquisition.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle over Kafka's legacy: as a writer in German, should his papers come to rest with those of the other great German writers, in the country where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as Kafka was also a great Jewish writer, should they be considered part of the cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time he died in 1924? Alongside an acutely observed portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial also provides a gripping account of the recent series of Israeli court cases - cases that addressed dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the final fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It tells of a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed to Jews; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in the Israeli courts. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question not only whether Kafka's legacy belongs by right to the country of his language, that of his birth, or that of his cultural and religious affinities - but also whether any nation state can lay claim to writers who belong more naturally to the international republic of letters.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Robert Lowell has left a prodigious literary legacy that includes several verse plays as well as numerous volumes of poetry. His private papers and other unpublished materials provide an illuminating record of a distinguished career and cast light on personal and creative issues of interest to both readers and scholars. The Robert Lowell collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard University comprises some 2,916 items. These include family and literary correspondence, poetic notebooks, and manuscripts covering a period of more than thirty-five years. This annotated guide to the collection is the product of detailed study of Lowell's work, both published and unpublished, and benefits from the poet's own review of some of the papers. Researchers will appreciate the index to the poems, which offers a key to the various drafts of each work. This book will be of interest to all Lowell scholars and to students of twentieth-century American poetry.