Proverbial language figures prominently in the works of Eugene O'Neill (1883-1953), the recipient of four Pulitzer prizes and a Nobel laureateship for literature. This book is a directory to the proverbs, proverbial expressions, and proverbial comparisons in O'Neill's 50 dramas and numerous letters, articles, diaries, and notebooks. Very little attention has been given to any aspect of O'Neill's language, to say nothing of the virtual disregard of him as a wielder of proverbial diction. This collection of 2,059 examples of O'Neill's proverbial usage is a first step towards remedying that situation and provides a foundation for future scholarship. The introduction shows how O'Neill used proverbs as a structural element of his dramas and places his proverbial usage in the context of international proverb scholarship, offers examples and generalizations about his manipulation of proverbs, and suggests fruitful areas of further investigation. The heart of the book is a key-word index to the proverbial texts that identifies the locations of the proverbial examples in the canon of O'Neill's works and facilitates comparisons of similar locutions. Each proverbial construction is dated so that the reader can immediately see the chronological range of the texts. For those interested in the history of particular proverbs, citations of standard proverb dictionaries are appended to most of the texts. Two appendices show the frequency with which proverbs appear and their distribution among the various dramas.

Martin McDonagh is one of the world's most popular dramatists. This is a highly readable and illuminating account of his career to date that will appeal to the legions of fans of his work for the stage and of his films Six Shooter and In Bruges. As a resource for students and practitioners it is unrivalled, providing an authoritative and enquiring approach to his work that moves beyond the tired discussions of national identity to offer a comprehensive critical exploration. Lonergan provides a detailed analysis of each of his plays and films, their original staging, critical reception, and the connections within and between the Leenane Trilogy, the Aran Islands plays and more recent work. It includes interviews with directors, designers and actors associated with his work and material from Druid Theatre Company, the RSC and the National Theatre relating to the original productions. It offers four critical essays on key features of McDonagh's work by leading international scholars and a series of further resources including a chronology, glossary, notes on McDonagh's use of language and a list of further reading.

"Passionate and revealing love letters from the iconic lesbian novelist . . . Radclyffe Hall is getting a fresh look. . . . Glasgow has chosen these letters well and provides helpful context."
"--Kirkus Review"

"Many assumptions have been made about the degree to which Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, "The Well of Loneliness," may be autobiographical. Your John dismisses such notions. This exhaustive collection of letters written between 1934 and 1942 to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian emigre with whom Hall fell deeply in love are detailed, intimate records of Hall's personal life and convictions. . . . the collection is a heart-wrenching record of how politics, money, and geography converged to undermine these women's dreams."
"--Publisher's Weekly"

This landmark book represents the first publication of original writing by Radclyffe Hall, author of "The Well of Loneliness," in over 50 years.

One of the most famous and influential lesbian novelists of the twentieth century, Hall became a cause clbre in 1928, upon the publication of her novel "The Well of Loneliness," when the British government brought action on behalf of the Crown to declare the book obscene. Probably the most widely read lesbian novel ever written, the book has been continuously in print since its first publication and remains to this day an important part of the literary landscape.

Expertly deciphered and edited by Hall scholar and biographer Joanne Glasgow, Your John is a selection of Hall's love letters to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian emigre with whom Hall fell completely and passionately in love in the summer of 1934. Written between this first meeting and the onset of Hall's last illness in 1942, these letters detail Hall's growing obsession, the pain to her life partner Una Troubridge of this betrayal, and the poignant hopelessness of a happy resolution for any of the three women. It was ultimately this relationship, Glasgow argues, which tragically precipitated the decline in Hall's creative work and her health. The letters also provide important new information about her views on lesbianism and take us well beyond the artistic limits she imposed on the characters in "The Well of Loneliness." They shed light on her views on religion, politics, war, and the literary and artistic scene. Illuminating both the nature of her relationships and her views on the current politics of the time, Your John will greatly extend the range of our knowledge about Radclyffe Hall."

The third volume of Auden Studies presents Auden in maturity, and includes much previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters. The book concentrates on the relatively unexplored area of Auden's post-1940 writings, and the letters, essay, and lectures here demonstrate the scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. Leading scholars and critics contribute discussions about many important aspects of the later career of this major poet and intellectual.

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."

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.

This book is about haunting in modernist literature. Offering an extended and textually-sensitive reading of modernist spectrality that has yet to be undertaken by scholars of either haunting or modernism, it provides a fresh reconceptualization of modernist haunting by synthesizing recent critical work in the fields of haunting studies, Gothic modernisms, and mourning modernisms. The chapters read the form and function of the ghostly as it appears in the work of a constellation of important modernist contributors, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford. It is of particular significance to scholars and students in a wide range of fields of study, including modernism, literary theory, and the Gothic.

Ralph Ellison's literary career began in 1937 with the publication of his review of Waters Edward Turpin's "These Low Grounds." Over the next 15 years he published 10 short stories and 37 essays on literary, cultural, and political topics. But when "Invisible Man" was published in 1952, Ellison received immediate acclaim from a wide variety of critics, scholars, and novelists. While his novel emerged as a major work of African American literature, it also engaged the European literary tradition and influenced an entire generation of post-World War II writers. Ellison is now one of the most studied African American writers, and the posthumous publication of his second novel, "Juneteenth, " in 1999 has drawn even more attention to his contribution.

Through previously published reviews and essays, and original material, this book charts the response to Ellison's writings. While the bulk of the volume focuses on "Invisible Man, " the book also includes sections devoted to Ellison's short fiction and nonfiction, as well as posthumous estimates of his work. A chronology highlights the most important events in his life and career, while an introductory essay overviews the broad trends in Ellison scholarship. The volume concludes with a selected bibliography of primary and secondary works.

After the publication in 1932 of Angela Thirkell's first Barsetshire novel, her fans eagerly awaited a new book in the series, and they were rewarded annually for the next 27 years. Drawing upon the entire body of Barsetshire novels (set in Trollope's imaginary county whose seat, Barchester, is a cathedral town), Laura Collins shows Angela Thirkell's larger purposes in chronicling the daily lives of the rural English. English Country Life demonstrates Thirkell's conviction that loyalty to family, county, and country is the essential bond that strengthens middle-class culture; her close acquaintance with the English countryside, her high regard for the wit and wisdom of its people, and her firm conviction that the strong family unit is the backbone of the nation, are recurrently illustrated in the Barsetshire series. Collins traces the development of representative county families and their responses to the forces of political and economic decline. The book conveys Thirkell's mastery of detail in recreating life on the county's estates and farms, and in towns and villages, reflecting the cultural changes forced upon all social classes by the two World Wars and their aftermath. Collins shows how Thirkell's own life is reflected in her county chronicles. Perhaps most significantly, Collins believes Thirkell's own experiences as a daughter and as a mother to three sons is reflected throughout the novels, revealing largely in hindsight the touching ironies as well as the comedy of these relations. In the course of these narratives, her sharp sense of human nature is seen at its best when she introduces readers to the many babies, toddlers, and adolescents who grow up in Barsetshire. Makingextensive use of the series, Collins demonstrates convincingly that Thirkell presents an authentic record of upper middle-class English country life. For public libraries and research collections where Angela Thirkell's novels are read, enjoyed, and studied.

In 1888 the name Jack the Ripper entered public consciousness with the brutal murders of women in the East End of London. The murderer was never caught, yet film and television depicts a killer with a recognisable costume, motive and persona. This book examines the origins of the screen presentation of the four key elements associated with the murders - Jack the Ripper, the victims, the detective and Whitechapel. Nineteenth-century history, art and literature, psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung and feminist film theory are all used to deconstruct the representation of Jack the Ripper on screen.

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 monograph explores the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors, writing in the late-colonial period (1945-1962), namely Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar, approached the representation of Algerian women through literature. The book initially argues that a masculine domination of public fields of representation in Algeria contributed to a postcolonial marginalization of women as public agents. However, it crucially also argues that the canonical writers of the period, who were mostly male, both textually acknowledged their inability to articulate the experiences and subjectivity of the feminine Other and deployed a remarkable variety of formal and conceptual innovations in producing evocations of Algerian femininity that subvert the structural imbalance of masculine symbolic hegemony. Though it does not shy from investigating those aspects of its corpus that produce ideologically conditioned masculinist representations, the book chiefly seeks to articulate a shared reluctance concerning representativity, a pessimism regarding the revolution's capacity to deliver change for women, and an omnipresent subversion of masculine subjectivity in its canonical texts.

Written in clear, accessible language, this guide challenges and encourages students to grapple with the difficult ideas and questions posed by Beckett's texts.Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is one of the most important twentieth century writers, seen as both a modernist and postmodernist, his work has influenced generations of playwrights, novelists and poets. Despite his notorious difficulty, Beckett famously refused to offer his readers any help in interpreting his work. Beckett's texts examine key philosophical-humanist questions but his writing is challenging, perplexing and often intimidating for readers. This guide offers students reading Beckett a clear starting point from which to confront some of the most difficult plays and novels produced in the twentieth century, texts which often appear to work on the very edge of meaninglessness.Beginning with a general introduction to Beckett, his work and contexts, the guide looks at each of the major genres in turn, analysing key works chronologically. It explains why Beckett's texts can seem so daunting and confusing, and focuses on key questions and issues. Giving an accessible account of both the form and content of Beckett's work, this guide will enable students to begin to get to grips with this fascinating but daunting writer."Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region's existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. ,br> Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, David A. Davis argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. In World War I and Southern Modernism, Davis examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. Davis also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.

Andre Gide, renowned French essayist, novelist, and playwright, was also a homosexual apologist whose sexuality was central to the whole of his literary and political discourse. This book by Patrick Pollard-the first serious study of homosexuality in Gide's theater and fiction-analyzes his ideas and traces the philosophical, anthropological, scientific, and literary movements that influenced his thought. Pollard begins by discussing Corydon, a defense of pederasty that Gide felt was his most important book. He then provided a historical and analytical survey of books that contributed to Gide's perception of homosexuality, including works on philosophy, social theory, natural history, and medicolegal questions. Pollard goes on to investigate works of fiction-ancient and modern, European and Oriental-in which Gide saw homosexual elements. He concludes by considering the homosexual themes in Gide's own works, analyzing the ways that Gide constantly tried to resolve conflicts between nature and culture, hypocrisy and honesty, corruption and sound moral judgment, anomaly and conformity, and sexual freedom and religious constraint. The book provides a new perspective on Gide's work, a reconstruction of the moral and intellectual climate in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a substantial contribution to the cultural history of homosexuality.

This is an up-to-date readers guide to Atwood's contemporary classic covering contexts, themes and criticism. Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel "A Handmaid's Tale", engages the reader with a broad range of issues relating to power, gender and religious politics. This guide provides an overview of the key critical debates and interpretations of the novel and encourages you to engage with key questions and readings in your reading of the text. It includes discussion of key themes and concepts including: representation of women's roles, gender, sexuality and power; language, style and form; dystopias and genre fictions; and, power, control and religious fundamentalism. Combining helpful guidance on reading Atwood's text with overviews of significant stylistic and thematic issues and an introduction to criticism, this is an ideal companion to reading and studying "A Handmaid's Tale". "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

This book is the first collection of essays dedicated to the work of C. H. Sisson (1915-2003), a major English poet, critic and translator. The collection aims to offer an overall guide to his work for new readers, while also encouraging established readers of one aspect (such as his well-known classical translations) to explore others. It champions in particular the quality of his original poetry. The book brings together contributions from scholars and critics working in a wide range of fields, including classical reception, translation studies and early modern literature as well as modern English poetry, and concludes with a more personal essay on Sisson's work by Michael Schmidt, his publisher.

This book not only discloses and examines different functions and concepts of authorship in fiction and theory from the 1950s and 1960s to the present but it also reveals, at least implicitly, a trajectory of some of the modes and functions of the novel as a genre in the last few decades. It argues that the explicit terms of much of the theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the concept of authorship in the moment of High Theory in the 1980s had already been engaged, albeit often more implicitly, in literary fictions by writers themselves. This book examines the fortunes of the authorship debate and the conceptualisations and functions of authorship before, during, and after the Death of the Author came to prominence as one of the key foci for the moment of High Theory in the 1980s.

In this groundbreaking book, Shireen Lewis gives a comprehensive analysis of the literary and theoretical discourse on race, culture, and identity by Francophone and Caribbean writers beginning in the early part of the twentieth century and continuing into the dawn of the new millennium. Examining the works of Patrick Chamoiseau, Rapha`l Confiant, AimZ CZsaire, LZopold Senghor, LZon Damas, and Paulette Nardal, Lewis traces a move away from the preoccupation with African origins and racial and cultural purity, toward concerns of hybridity and fragmentation in the New World or Diasporic space. In addition to exploring how this shift parallels the larger debate around modernism and postmodernism, Lewis makes a significant contribution by arguing for the inclusion of Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, and other women into the canon as significant contributors to the birth of modern black Francophone literature.

The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes's proposition that 'every child is nature's chance to correct culture's error.' Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments - political, as well as geographical - which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, 'the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live'.

From his World War I service in Italy through his transformational return visits during the decades that followed, Ernest Hemingway's Italian experiences were fundamental to his artistic development. Hemingway and Italy offers essays from top scholars, exciting new voices, and people who knew Hemingway during his Italian days, examining how his adopted homeland shaped his writing and his legacy. The collection addresses Hemingway's many Italys?the terrain and people he encountered during his life and the country he transposed into his fiction. Contributors analyze Hemingway's Italian works, including A Farewell to Arms, Across the River and into the Trees, lesser-known short stories, fables, and even a previously unpublished Hemingway sketch, "Torcello Piece." The essays provide fresh insights on Hemingway's Italian life, career, and imagination.

The debate over the concept of world literature, which has been taking place with renewed intensity over the last twenty years, is tightly bound up with the issues of global interconnectedness in a polycentric world. Most recently, critiques of globalization-related conceptualizations, in particular, have made themselves heard: to what extent is the concept of world literature too closely connected with the political and economic dynamics of globalization? Such questions cannot be answered simply through theoretical debate. The material side of the production of world literature must therefore be more strongly integrated into the conversation than it has been. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this volume demonstrates the concrete construction processes of world literature. To that purpose, archival materials have been analyzed here: notes, travel reports, and correspondence between publishers and authors. The Latin American examples provide particularly rich information about the processes of institutionalization in the Western world, as well as new perspectives for a contemporary mapping of world literature beyond the established dynamics of canonization.

The contributors to this volume use diverse critical techniques to identify how Carson McCullers' writing engages with and critiques modern social structures and how her work resonates with a twenty-first century audience. The collection includes chapters about McCullers' fiction, autobiographical writing, and dramatic works, and is groundbreaking because it includes the first detailed scholarly examination of new archival material donated to Columbus State University after the 2013 death of Dr. Mary Mercer, McCullers' psychiatrist and friend, including transcripts of the psychiatric sessions that took place between McCullers and Mercer in 1958. Further, the collection covers the scope of McCullers' canon of work, such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943), through lenses that are of growing interest in contemporary literary studies, including comparative transatlantic readings, queer theory, disability studies, and critical animal theory, among others.

This book is about one person's reading and what has been learnt about how the lives of other people, particularly authors, have been written in British literary biographies over the last fifty years. It is less interested in what happened in the lives of the people described in these biographies, and more concerned with how these stories have been told. It aims to have a conversation with British biographers, particularly Michael Holroyd, Richard Holmes, Hermione Lee and Claire Tomalin, to make their voices heard, to set them talking. It understands biography as an ongoing collaboration, not only between biographers and their subjects, but between biographers and their readers. This is also a study of haunting, in which we haunt the lives of others to help us come to a better understanding of our own.