This volume of the "York Notes Companions "looks at the literature of our own times, shaped by recent experiences from millennial anxieties to the events of 9/11.

This volume of the "York Notes Companions "looks at the literature of our own times, shaped by recent experiences from millennial anxieties to the events of 9/11.

• Part of the first literature study guides to cover key literary periods and texts and combine them with historical and cultural contexts
• Contains essential information on relevant literary criticism
• Dr Fiona Tolan is an experienced lecturer who has also written extensively in the field
• Contains various helpful features such as extented commentaries, additional notes, timelines and annotated further reading
  

This volume in the "York Notes Companions "series looks back to the origins of Modernism and the traditions that shaped it, examining texts from France, America, England and Ireland to provide a stimulating and original take on this unique movement in literary history.

This volume looks back to the origins of Modernism and the traditions that shaped it, examining texts from France, America, England and Ireland to provide a stimulating and original take on this unique movement in literary history.

• Part of the first literature study guides to cover key literary periods and texts and combine them with historical and cultural contexts
• Contains essential information on relevant literary criticism
• Gary Day is an experienced lecturer who has also written extensively in the field
• Contains various helpful features such as extented commentaries, additional notes, timelines and annotated further reading
  

As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry). Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to-aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically-when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens?

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.

South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain is the first book to provide a historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary market place, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the twentieth century. Ranasinha shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the postcolonial writer of South Asian origin.
The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) with Tambimuttu (1915-83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V.S Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.

The literature of the second half of the twentieth century is characterised by a tension between conservatism and innovation. This volume examines the key writers and genres that explore this idea, including the postmodern novels of Julian Barnes, Angela Carter and Graham Swift, the modern lyrics of Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith, and the inventive dramas of Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard. Chapters focussing on "Nostalgia and Nationality," "Class and Education" and "Sex and Identity" provide important historical and social context, and combine with a range of key critical approaches to provide an indispensable guide to the era.

There has been an explosion of interest in Francophone studies, as postcolonial and diaspora literatures more generally have gained recognition both within and outside the academy. Identity, culture and history as well as issues relating to class, race, and colonialism, and the literary production itself have always been central to Caribbean Francophone culture and are matters currently of hot debate. From the growth of the negritude movement, principally associated with poetry, through to the rise of the novel, contributors to this book explore the theoretical, political and philosophical debates that have informed, and continue to inform, the rich and varied tradition of Caribbean Francophone literature.
In recent years, the number of Francophone Caribbean women writers has increased significantly and experimental writing has featured more prominently. Contributors explore these and other trends, mainly in the literatures of Guadeloupe and Martinique. In providing the only available overview of this important literature and in positioning it critically, this book makes an invaluable contribution to students and scholars alike.

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 provides a concise and highly readable reassessment of Iris Murdoch's engagement with philosophy throughout her life and proposes that she was, most importantly, a philosophical novelist. By investigating her use of philosophical argument in her fictional writing, it becomes clear that her narratives always depend upon a strong metaphysical underpinning. Leeson proceeds thematically through the philosophical phases of Murdoch's life and develops a clear argument that Murdoch reacts against the philosophies of Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger not only in her philosophical writings but also in her fiction. Indeed, it is in her fiction that her philosophical argument is most persuasive and accessible. This timely study provides new information regarding Murdoch's engagement with Martin Heidegger and also provides a detailed critique of critics who have overlooked Murdoch's engagement with philosophy within her fiction.

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

For decades now literary critics have universally praised Faulkner as one of the greatest writers of the modern era, yet students assigned to read his novels in university, college, and high school classes continue to struggle to make sense of his convoluted plots, prolix style, and complex characterizations. The broadest treatment to date of a topic of increasing concern, this book is designed to provide fresh strategies and practical suggestions for the classroom study of several of Faulkner's finest novels and stories, including "The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom , Light in August, The Unvanquished, " and "Go Down, Moses."

The contributors, all noted Faulkner scholars who regularly teach Faulkner works in their courses, employ a variety of critical theories and approaches. In each chapter, theory is subordinated to tested classroom methods that both motivate and assist students in reading the texts and in understanding why Faulkner remains relevant for contemporary readers. The teaching strategies described in this book draw upon such diverse matters as cultural and social analysis, historical context, reading and rhetorical theory, film and stage techniques, comparative studies, and race, class, and gender issues.

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.

In such novels as Hotel World and the Whitbread Prize winning The Accidental, Ali Smith has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction. Covering her complete oeuvre, from the short stories to her most recent novel There but for the, this is the first comprehensive critical guide to Smith's work. Bringing together leading scholars, Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives covers such topics as: * Language, truth and reality * Spectral presences and the uncanny * Gender and sexuality * Cosmopolitanism * Smith's place in the contemporary canon Including a new interview with the author, a chronology of her life and authoritative guides to further reading, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the best of contemporary fiction.

"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.

Robert Bly is the author of many books, including Jumping Out of Bed, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Iron John: A Book About Men. He has translated Neruda, Vallejo, and Lorca and received the National Book Award for his collection The Light Around the Body. His most recent book is The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, with Marion Woodman.

"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.

D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1914, 'Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depths of my religious experience.' Although he had broken with the Congregationalist faith of his childhood by his early twenties, Lawrence remained throughout his writing life a passionately religious man. There have been studies in the last twenty years of certain aspects of Lawrence's religious writing, but we lack a survey of the history of his developing religious thought and of his expressions of that thought in his literary works. This book provides that survey, from 1915 to the end of Lawrence's life. Covering the war years, Lawrence's American works, his time in Australia and Mexico, and the works of the last years of his life, this book provides readers with a complete analysis, during this period, of Lawrence as a religious man, thinker and artist.

At the Violet Hour argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. At the Violet Hour offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names "enchanted and disenchanted violence." In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of "violet hour," the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

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.

Winner of some of France's most prestigious literary prizes, Patrick Modiano is considered one of the most fascinating French novelists alive today. This is the first English literary critique of this best-selling French author, whose works are found increasingly in translation throughout the world and who is attracting considerable critical attention outside France.
In this lucid study, Alan Morris explores Modiano's fifteen major novels. He also traces Modiano's development as a writer and the tragedies which have influenced his works: the death of his younger brother, the neglect of his father and the horrors of the German occupation. Morris delves into Modiano's themes of time, memory, identity and the past, clearly demonstrating this intriguing writer's key place in French writing today.

Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress or redemption through art. Through a series of "interhistorical" readings that put literary and critical writers from the last 150 years in dialogue, Acquisto shows how these authors struggle to articulate both the metaphysical and esthetic consequences of attempting to move beyond a logic of salvation. Putting these writers into dialogue with Baudelaire highlights the way both literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a third option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather than seeking to redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism.

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is the first book to draw extensively from material in the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University to uncover the makings of the British-Indian writer's modernist poetics. Simultaneously connecting Rushdie with radical non-Western humanism and an essentially English-European sensibility, and therefore questions about world literature, this book argues that a true understanding of the writer lies in uncovering his 'genesis of secrecy' through a close reading of his archive. Topics and materials explored include unpublished novels, plays and screenplays; the earlier versions and drafts of Midnight's Children and its adaptations; understanding Islam and The Satanic Verses; the influence of cinema; and Rushdie's turn to earlier archives as the secret codes of modernism. Through careful examination of Rushdie's archive, Vijay Mishra demonstrates how Rushdie combines a radically new form of English with a familiarity with the generic registers of Indian, Arabic and Persian literary forms. Together, these present a contradictory orientalism that defines Rushdie's own humanism within the parameters of world literature.

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.
Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.