Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of "memory work" that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.

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

Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary growth in the richness and diversity of Irish fiction, with the publication of highly original and often challenging work by both new and established writers. Contemporary Irish Fiction provides an invaluable introduction to this exciting but largely uncharted area of literary criticism by bringing together twelve accessible, stimulating essays by critics from Ireland, Britain and North America.

The weather in Moscow is good, there's no cholera, there's also no lesbian love...Brrr Remembering those persons of whom you write me makes me nauseous as if I'd eaten a rotten sardine. Moscow doesn't have them--and that's marvellous."
--"Anton Chekhov," writing to his publisher in 1895

Chekhov's barbed comment suggests the climate in which Sophia Parnok was writing, and is an added testament to to the strength and confidence with which she pursued both her personal and artistic life. Author of five volumes of poetry, and lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the only openly lesbian voice in Russian poetry during the Silver Age of Russian letters. Despite her unique contribution to modern Russian lyricism however, Parnok's life and work have essentially been forgotten.

Parnok was not a political activist, and she had no engagement with the feminism vogueish in young Russian intellectual circles. From a young age, however, she deplored all forms of male posturing and condescension and felt alienated from what she called patriarchal virtues. Parnok's approach to her sexuality was equally forthright. Accepting lesbianism as her natural disposition, Parnok acknowledged her relationships with women, both sexual and non-sexual, to be the centre of her creative existence.

Diana Burgin's extensively researched life of Parnok is deliberately woven around the poet's own account, visible in her writings. The book is divided into seven chapters, which reflect seven natural divisions in Parnok's life. This lends Burgin's work a particular poetic resonance, owing to its structural affinity with one of Parnok's last and greatest poetic achievements, the cycle of love lyrics Ursa Major. Dedicated to her last lover, Parnok refers to this cycle as a seven-star of verses, after the seven stars that make up the constellation. Parnok's poems, translated here for the first time in English, added to a wealth of biographical material, make this book a fascinating and lyrical account of an important Russian poet. Burgin's work is essential reading for students of Russian literature, lesbian history and women's studies.

In this first full-length study of Emecheta's fiction, Fishburn highlights the difficulties inherent in reading across cultures. She challenges the notion that all we need to understand African texts is a willingness to be open to them, arguing that too many of the cultural and critical preconceptions we bring to these texts interfere with our ability to understand them. Directly responding to Western feminist criticism written about Emecheta, this study argues that Emecheta herself is not a feminist in the Western sense and that her novels should not be construed as reflecting this political interest. In close readings of eight of her best known works, this study reveals a complex narrative voice which is far more supportive of Emecheta's own African culture and its tradition than has been recognized previously.

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.

Langston Hughes was the first black writer to be taken seriously by the general literary public, and with the current resurgence of interest in the evolution of black American writing, he continues to be a primary subject of study for scholars and students throughout the world. This bio-bibliography is the first annotated collection of materials on Hughes's life and work, and compiler Thomas Mikolyzk has made the work even more valuable by verifying the relative availability of each item cited and noting where certain materials can be found. The up-to-date listings provide both primary and secondary sources, and focus on works by Hughes as well as those written about him. The work begins with a chronology of events in Hughes's life, followed by a brief biography. The annotations are then divided into four major sections: books by Hughes, shorter works by Hughes, books about Hughes, and articles about Hughes. Each citation is given an alphanumeric code to denote its category and entry number. All collectable published works by Hughes are cited here, as is virtually every critical piece published throughout the world, including contemporary reviews, scholarly articles, essays and book-length commentaries, and dissertations. In addition to these annotated citations, two appendixes are included. The first provides an alphabetical listing of Hughes's works, including place and date of publication, and the second describes special collections in America of Hughes's personal material as well as detailing The Langston Hughes Review, the official journal of The Langston Hughes Society. Three indexes, covering author, title, and subject, conclude the work. This book will be an important resource for courses in American literature and African-American history, and a significant addition to high school, public, and academic libraries.

Best known as a revolutionary playwright of the 1930s, Clifford Odets may have reached his zenith when four of his plays were produced on Broadway in 1935: "Waiting for Lefty," "Till the Day I Die," "Awake and Sing ," and "Paradise Lost." His plays, however, also show a romantic strain and are at least as much inimate and personal as they are political, often reflecting the isolation and loneliness of individuals in family settings. Never achieving the acclaim of Eugene O'Neill, who came before, or Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, who followed, Odets bridged the gap between earlier melodramatic theatre and the mature post-World War II drama on the American stage, creating rich and varied drama well into the 1950s. That his plays continue to be appraised and performed is clearly evident in this detailed and carefully articulated sourcebook.

A near-exhaustive resource for both literary and theatrical research materials on Odets's dramatic career, the volume is organized and indexed for quick reference. Included are a biographical essay; critical overview, production history, and plot summary of each dramatic product; annotated primary and secondary bibliographies and information on archival sources; and production credits. Essential for research libraries and theatre collections, the volume will be useful to theatre scholars and practitioners and to anyone interested in the work of this significant modern American playwright.

This is an original contribution to understanding of an important but overlooked aspect of modern poetry, offering a comparative approach to the topic.This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so.The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. The chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.

Focusing on the mythological narratives that influence Irish children's literature, this book examines the connections between landscape, time and identity, positing that myth and the language of myth offer authors and readers the opportunity to engage with Ireland's culture and heritage. It explores the recurring patterns of Irish mythological narratives that influence literature produced for children in Ireland between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. A selection of children's books published between 1892, when there was an escalation of the cultural pursuit of Irish independence and 2016, which marked the centenary of the Easter 1916 rebellion against English rule, are discussed with the aim of demonstrating the development of a pattern of retrieving, re-telling, remembering and re-imagining myths in Irish children's literature. In doing so, it examines the reciprocity that exists between imagination, memory, and childhood experiences in this body of work.

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. "

Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory is the first survey of the poet's published work since his death and the first to draw on the edited diaries and letters. We learn how Sassoon's family background and Jewish inheritance, his troubled sexuality, his experience of war - in particular his public opposition to it - his relationship to the Georgian poets and other writers, and his eventual withdrawal to country life shaped his creativity. Sassoon's status as a war poet has overshadowed his wider achievements and the complex personality behind them. This critical evaluation of Sassoon's work is long overdue and will provide a valuable starting-point for future reappraisals of a writer for whom life and art were fused.

At the cusp of literary and cultural studies, this wide-ranging critical anthology reevaluates Victorian culture in the light of the literature of the period and vice versa. Also, essays by eminent and emerging Victorianists offer a reassessment, explicit and implicit, of Victorian studies and its methodologies.

Addressed to all readers of poetry, this is a book about the poet's role throughout the last three centuries. The Modern Poet shows how many successive generations of poets across the English-speaking world have had to collaborate and to battle with the culture of the universities.

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.

The Vietnam War was one of the most painful and divisive events in American history. The conflict, which ultimately took the lives of 58,000 Americans and more than three million Vietnamese, became a subject of bitter and impassioned debate. The most dramatic--and frequently the most enduring--efforts to define and articulate America's ill-fated involvement in Vietnam emerged from popular culture. American journalists, novelists, playwrights, poets, songwriters, and filmmakers--many of them eyewitnesses--have created powerful, heartfelt works documenting their thoughts and beliefs about the war. By examining those works, this book provides readers with a fascinating resource that explores America's ongoing struggle to assess the war and its legacies.

This encyclopedia includes 44 essays, each providing detailed information on an important film, song, or literary work about Vietnam. Each essay provides insights into the Vietnam-era experiences and views of the work's primary creative force, historical background on issues or events addressed in the work, discussion of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work, and sources for further information. This book also includes an appendix listing of more than 275 films, songs, and literary works dealing with the war.

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

Gide's Bent investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of Andre Gide, one of the first "out" modern writers. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political interests. Provocative examination of one of the first openly homosexual writers, Andre Gide.

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a 'heritage industry' during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade's own set of fundamental crises.

IN THE DIM VOID: SAMUEL BECKETT

This book considers Samuel Beckett's 1980-83 trilogy of short texts, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Wortstward Ho, otherwise known as the Company or Nohow Trilogy. These are dense, complex, allusive, highly lyrical and emotional pieces which contain many of Beckett's key philosophies and approaches to writing.

Includes photographs of Beckett and his plays, and a bibliography.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE

The emotional core of Company is a nostalgic yearning, manifested in those vignettes or memories, which some see as having correlations with Beckett's own life, so that Company is the closest thing in the Beckett canon to autobiography. Certainly many of the sections in Company have the whiff of autobiography, but these are memories mediated, edited, shaped, compressed and transformed by Samuel Beckett's various voices. For in Company we find a narrator, a voice, a remembering self, in fact a complex hierarchy of various levels of consciousness and self-consciousness. Some of the passages are Beckett at his most lyrical, his most self-indulgently lyrical, one might add, for no sooner is lyricism evoked than it is stamped out. Ornamental writing is detested by Beckett, yet he can be as poetic in the ecstatic sense as any other poet. Here is a powerful sequence from Company:

the light there was then. On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. A nook in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of high mountain. Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For the third or fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and were derided. All you had seen was clod. So now you heard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water until they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light. (20)

This memory sequence is a kind of ecstasy. An everyday sort of ecstasy, perhaps, but even Beckett's rigorous control of language and his hyper-realist outlook on life cannot hide the joy in this passage. For there is joy in Beckett's art, though always, as in Thomas Hardy's fiction, very brief joy, soon smothered by all manner of other concerns.