One of today's most important novelists, Cormac McCarthy is at the peak of a long and productive career. The film adaptation of his "No Country for Old Men" is a major motion picture, and his fiction is widely read in book clubs. This volume looks at his works, characters, themes, and contexts and relates his writings to current events and popular culture. Chapters include sidebars of interesting information, along with questions to stimulate book club discussions and student research.

One of today's most important novelists, Cormac McCarthy is at the peak of a long and productive career. He won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Road" in 2007 and the National Book Award for "All the Pretty Horses" in 1992. This book is a guide to his works and their relevance.

The volume begins with a look at his life and his use of the novel as a means of expressing his ideas. The book then looks at his works, themes, characters, and contexts. It then discusses his exploration of current events and the presence of his fiction in popular culture. Chapters include sidebars of interesting information and provide questions to stimulate book club discussion and student research.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of 20th-century America's foremost fiction and folklore writers. Though she was criticized by some of her contemporaries, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, her works are now frequently taught in literature courses and are widely admired for their style and substance. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to the large body of work written about her in the last 75 years. Included are annotated entries for books, dissertations, and theses written about Hurston's life and literary career. The volume also looks at hundreds of articles, book chapters, conference papers, reviews, children's books, and web sites. The bibliography additionally points the reader to guides and biographical sources and to anthologies where her works are collected. Finally, an exhaustive list of works by Hurston is provided, along with a catalog of the special collections where her manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera are stored.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of 20th-century America's foremost fiction and folklore writers. One of the most important authors of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the first black anthropologists, she received little recognition during her lifetime. She was criticized by some of her contemporaries, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and her works were largely neglected until the early 1970s. Her works are now frequently taught in literature courses and are widely admired for their style and substance. Her anthropological study, "IMules and Men" (1935), is a pioneering examination of Voodoo and related folklore. As a novelist, she is best known as the author of "Jonah's Gourd Vine" (1934) and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937). In addition, she was a prolific journalist who contributed to the most popular magazines and newspapers of her time.

Though long neglected, Hurston has become firmly established in the literary canon, and scores of books and articles have been written about her. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to the large body of work written about her in the last 75 years. Included are annotated entries for books, dissertations, and theses written about Hurston's life and literary career. The volume also looks at hundreds of articles, book chapters, conference papers, reviews, children's books, and web sites. The bibliography additionally points the reader to guides and biographical sources and to anthologies where her works are collected. Finally, an exhaustive list of works by Hurston is provided, along with a catalog of the special collections where her manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera are stored.

From 1888 to 1915 Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London were uniquely placed to witness and record the imperial struggle for the South Pacific. Engaging the major European colonial empires and the USA, the struggle questioned ideas of liberty, racial identity and class like few other arenas of the time. Exploring a unique moment in South Pacific and Western history through the work of Stevenson and London, this study assesses the impact of their national identities on works like The Amateur Emigrant and Adventure; discusses their attitudes towards colonialism, race and class; shows how they negotiated different cultures and peoples in their writing and considers where both writers are placed in the Western tradition of writing about the Pacific. By contextualizing Stevenson's and London's South Pacific work, this study reveals two critical voices of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century colonialism that deserve to stand beside their contemporary Joseph Conrad in shaping contemporary attitudes towards imperialism, race, and class.

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.

Nicolas Guillen and Aime Cesaire are considered by many critics and literary historians to be the foremost Caribbean poets of the 20th century, yet they are rarely treated together. This work deals with the two writers within a comparative framework, exploring their poetry as the exemplification of Negritude art and writing from the Caribbean. Josaphat Kubayanda uses non-canonical theories of literary and cultural analysis to discuss the relationships between creative writing, the idea of Africa, and the rediscovery of African values in the Caribbean, and to propose and demonstrate an original Caribbean poetics, anchored in Africa's cultural systems and linked to Afro-American protest thought. Each of the book's chapters focuses on an aspect of the literary development of the African heritage and of the black condition illustrated by Guillen and Cesaire. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to the genesis of Caribbean rhetorical interest in Africa, from the 1920s onward, and places Guillen and Cesaire in the context of Negritude. Chapter 2 addresses the European othering of Africa, and the Negritude critique of this within the non-African traditions. Guillen's and Cesaire's response to the European concept of the universal is discussed in chapter 3, while chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which blackness is caught between racial otherness and trying to integrate into the Caribbean social order. The final two chapters provide an analysis of the polyrhythmic unity of the African cultural system that allows Guillen and Cesaire to make technical innovations, and a conclusion acknowledges the writers' place in Caribbean creative writing. The volume also contains an updated bibliography on Caribbean literature and the African element. This work will be a valuable reference source for courses in Caribbean and African literary studies, Latin American literature, and Afro-American and African culture, and an important addition to both public and academic libraries.

London's adventure tale The Call of the Wild explores the complex relationships between man and nature, and animals' struggle with their own nature in man's world. In this interdisciplinary study, a rich collection of primary documents point out the many issues that make this story as poignant and pertinent today as when it was written nearly a century ago. Compiled here for the first time is documentation from sources as varied as century-old newspaper accounts, legislative materials, advertisements, poetry, journals, and other startling firsthand accounts. The story's historical setting, the Yukon Gold Rush, is brought vividly into focus for readers, with firsthand accounts of the unimaginable hardships faced by the prospectors in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields. Central to their story and to their very survival were the dogs that served man's ambitions. Tribute to the sled dog is given in an historical 1879 piece The Value of Dogs from the Sketches of Life in the Hudson Bay Territory. This casebook also investigates endangered species legislation and the history of animal welfare concerns, focusing on the treatment of dogs in particular, surveying over a century of public sentiment. Students are introduced to The Call of the Wild with an insightful literary analysis exploring a mythological interpretation and a discussion of its main thematic premise, the fundamental struggle for freedom. Each subsequent chapter of this casebook focuses on an important topic, such as animal welfare, contextualizing these issues with primary documents. Students will find these materials and the related essays invaluable in understanding not only The Call Of the Wild but also the historical and pertinent social issues it addresses. Each topic section of this casebook offers ideas for thought-provoking class discussions, debates, and further research. Suggestions for further reading on these topics are also given.

The late 19th and early 20th century was a key period of cultural transition in Ireland. Fiction was used in a plainly partisan or polemical fashion to advance changes in Irish society. Murphy explores the outlook of certain important social classes during this time frame through an assessment of Irish Catholic fiction. This highly original study provides a new context for understanding the works of canonical authors such as Joyce and George Moore by discussing them in light of the now almost forgotten writing from which they emerged--the several hundred novels that were written during the period, many of them by women writers.

This book is a compact study of Kafka's inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thought-his nonhuman form-that proceeds through original close readings of Kafka's oeuvre. With select engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses Kafka's literary, "nonhuman" form and the way it unsettles the notion of a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose, including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka's works and engaging with Kafka's original legal and social thought in his novels and short stories, this book renders Kafka's sometimes impossibly enigmatic work legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the "Kafkaesque".

This book explores the idea of a new cosmopolitan Japanese identity through a socio-cultural analysis of contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It is the first monograph to apply the idea of cosmopolitanism to this writer's global popularity widely known as the "Haruki phenomenon".By pioneering an enquiry into Murakami's cosmopolitanism, this book aims to overcome the prevailing myth of "Japaneseness"(Nihonjinron) as a form of self-identification for Japanese, and propose an alternative approach for contemplating contemporary Japanese cultural identity. Socio-cultural analysis of this author and his works shall establish Murakami's cosmopolitan qualities and how they contribute to the cultural phenomenon of globalization. Furthermore, this book will introduce the idea of "everyday cosmopolitanism" as a relevant concept to address an emergent global cultural sphere. Unlike the traditional model of cosmopolitanism, which is sometimes regarded as idealist and elitist, "everyday cosmopolitanism" encompasses the everyday spheres of ordinary people. Tomoki Wakatsuki argues that the Haruki phenomenon, as a global and local event, echoes this important social trend today. Murakami's departure from conventional notions of Japanese identity offers an alternative perception of identity and belonging that is useful for situating Japanese identity within a global context. This text will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, global literature, contemporary Japanese literature, cultural cosmopolitanism and the global cultural sphere.

This book provides an overview of basic syntactic categories, analytical methods and theoretical frameworks that are needed for a comprehensive and systematic description and analysis of the syntax of English as it is spoken and written today. It is therefore useful for students of the English language but also for teachers who are looking for an overview of traditional syntactic analysis. In addition, the book explores various related aspects, such as syntactic variation, the relation between syntax and semantics, and psycholinguistic approaches to syntax. One focus throughout is to introduce the reader to the 'art' or science of syntactic argumentation. Almost all of the examples that are found in this book are drawn from language corpora - each syntactic concept, therefore, is exemplified by authentic language data.

National Cultures and Foreign Narratives charts the pathways through which foreign literature in translation has arrived in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. To show the contribution translations made to shaping an Italian national culture, it draws on a wealth of archival material made available in English for the first time.

This is a fine edition of Jospeh Conrad's most acclaimed novel, printed on cream, acid-free paper. As the narrator Marlow journeys ever deeper into the Congo's 'heart of darkness', so he also penetrates deeper into the folly of western corruption and absurdity that characterises both the collision of European and African cultures, and the conflicts in his own inner nature. The story that tells of Marlow's mission to find the mysterious but missing Mr Kurtz, as he travels along the Congo River into the interior of the 'dark continent', tells also a second dark story of what happens when white westerners intrude into, and try to dominate, the continent of Africa without understanding either its people or their culture; but at its most penetrating level, Conrad's story reveals that the 'heart of darkness' lies at the core of human nature itself, that the journey to find Kurtz, is Marlow's journey to his own darkness that, viewed at its most bleak is the darkness that we all share.

Do you want a better understanding of the text? Do you want to know what the critics say? Do you want to know how to improve your grade? Whatever you want, York Notes can help. York Notes Advanced offers a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts. Key Features: Summaries with detailed commentaries Extended commentaries on key passages Discussion of themes and literary techniques Author biography Historical and literary background Check the net/film/book features Glossary of literary terms Self-test questions

In this first scholarly work on India's great modern poet, Laetitia Zecchini outlines a story of literary modernism in India and discusses the traditions, figures and events that inspired and defined Arun Kolatkar. Based on an impressive range of archival and unpublished material, this book also aims at moving lines of accepted genealogies of modernism and 'postcolonial literature'. Zecchini uncovers how poets of Kolatkar's generation became modern Indian writers while tracing a lineage to medieval oral traditions. She considers how literary bilingualism allowed Kolatkar to blur the boundaries between Marathi and English, 'Indian' and 'Western sources; how he used his outsider position to privilege the quotidian and minor and revived the spirit of popular devotion. Graphic artist, poet and songwriter, storyteller of Bombay and world history, poet in Marathi, in English and in 'Americanese', non-committal and deeply political, Kolatkar made lines wobble and treasured impermanence. Steeped in world literature, in European avant-garde poetry, American pop and folk culture, in a 'little magazine' Bombay bohemia and a specific Marathi ethos, Kolatkar makes for a fascinating subject to explore and explain the story of modernism in India. This book has received support from the labex TransferS: http://transfers.ens.fr/

This book explores the narratives of girlhood in contemporary YA vampire fiction, bringing into the spotlight the genre's radical, ambivalent, and contradictory visions of young femininity. Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bienkowska considers less-explored popular vampire series for girls, particularly those by P.C. and Kristin Cast and Richelle Mead, tracing the ways in which they engage in larger cultural conversations on girlhood in the Western world. Mapping the interactions between girl and vampire corporealities, delving into the unconventional tales of vampire romance and girl sexual expressions, examining the narratives of women and violence, and venturing into the uncanny vampire classroom to unmask its critique of present-day schooling, the volume offers a new perspective on the vampire genre and an engaging insight into the complexities of growing up a girl.

Lucid, ardent, and contemplative, May Sarton was one of America's best-loved writers. This comprehensive collection celebrated six decades of bold imagination and fifteen books of poetry, the creative output of a lifetime. Arranged chronologically, these poems reveal the full breadth of Sarton's creative vision. Themes include the search for an inward order, her passions, the natural world, self-knowledge, and in her latest poems, the trials of old age. Moving through Sarton's work, we see her at ease in both traditional forms and free verse, finding inspiration in snow over a dark sea, a cat's footfall on the stairs, an unexpected love affair. Here is the creative process itself, its sources, demands, and joys—a handbook of the modern poetic psyche.

This book offers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films, advancing ecocritical models for German Studies, and introducing environmental issues in German literature and film to a broader audience. This volume contextualizes the broad-ranging topics and authors in terms of the Anthropocene, beginning with Goethe and the Romantics and extending into twenty-first-century literature and film. Addressing the growing need for environmental awareness in an international humanities curriculum, this book complements ecocritical analyses emerging from North American and British studies with a specifically German Studies perspective, opening the door to a transnational understanding of how the environment plays an integral role in cultural, political, and economic issues.

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 book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people's agency.

This book is a radical re-appraisal of the poetry of Ted Hughes, placing him in the context of continental theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek to address the traumas of his work. As an undergraduate, Hughes was visited in his sleep by a burnt fox/man who left a bloody handprint on his essay, warning him of the dangers of literary criticism. Hereafter, criticism became 'burning the foxes'. This book offers a defence of literary criticism, drawing Hughes' poetry and prose into the network of theoretical work he dismissed as 'the tyrant's whisper' by demonstrating a shared concern with trauma. Covering a wide range of Hughes' work, it explores the various traumas that define his writing. Whether it is comparing his idea of man as split from nature with that of Jacques Lacan, considering his challenging relationship with language in light of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, seeing him in the art gallery and at the movies with Gilles Deleuze, or considering his troubled relationship with femininity in regard to Teresa Brennan and Slavoj Zizek, Burning the Foxes offers a fresh look at a familiar poet.

This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies. Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract.

This is a fine edition of Jospeh Conrad's most acclaimed novel, printed on cream, acid-free paper. As the narrator Marlow journeys ever deeper into the Congo's 'heart of darkness', so he also penetrates deeper into the folly of western corruption and absurdity that characterises both the collision of European and African cultures, and the conflicts in his own inner nature. The story that tells of Marlow's mission to find the mysterious but missing Mr Kurtz, as he travels along the Congo River into the interior of the 'dark continent', tells also a second dark story of what happens when white westerners intrude into, and try to dominate, the continent of Africa without understanding either its people or their culture; but at its most penetrating level, Conrad's story reveals that the 'heart of darkness' lies at the core of human nature itself, that the journey to find Kurtz, is Marlow's journey to his own darkness that, viewed at its most bleak is the darkness that we all share.

"Examining the global dimensions of Neo-Victorianism, this book explores how the appropriation of Victorian images in contemporary literature and culture has emerged as a critical response to the crises of decolonization and Imperial collapse. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire explores the phenomenon by reading a range of popular and literary Anglophone neo-Victorian texts, including Alan Moores Graphic Novel From Hell, works by Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood, the films of Jackie Chan and contemporary Steampunk science fiction. Through these readingsElizabeth Ho explores how constructions of popular memory and fictionalisations of the past reflect political and psychological engagements with our contemporary post-Imperial circumstances. "

Schor traces the development of Ralph Ellison's fiction from the earliest experiments to the major accomplishment of his novel Invisible Man, the mature prose of the Hickman stories and other published portions of his novel-in-progress. The study considers the two-fold obligation Ellison felt in committing himself to literature: to contribute at once to the growth of literature and also to the shaping of the culture as he would like it to be. His stories, read sequentially, reflect his struggle to encompass this aim in his writing. In describing that fragment of American experience he knew best, he learned to use the rich resources of his African-American heritage; from his passionate involvement with his craft came the discovery that, in literature, values turn in their own way, not in the service of politics or ideology. The early stories mark Ellison's "mazelike" route that developed the skill, talent, and imagination and personal vision needed to transform experience into art. The novel demonstrates the flowering of his talent, and the Hickman stories add a fine patina. In her discussion of Ellison's work, Professor Schor uses his essays and interviews as well as the insights of other critics to comment directly on his fiction. The study concludes with a bibliography of Ellison's fiction and nonfiction and a selective bibliography of criticism and related sources.