Since the tumultuous events of 1989/1990, writers, cultural practitioners and academics have responded to, reconstructed and reflected upon the process and enduring impact of German reunification. This bilingual volume provides a nuanced understanding of the literature and culture of the GDR and its legacy today. It explores a broad range of genres, combines perspectives on both lesser-known and more established writers, and juxtaposes academic articles with the personal reflections of those who directly experienced and engaged with the GDR from within or beyond its borders. Whether creative practitioners or academics, contributors consider the broader literary and intellectual contexts and traditions shaping GDR literature and culture in a way that enriches our understanding of reunification and its legacy. Contributors are: Deirdre Byrnes, Anna Chiarloni, Jean E. Conacher, Sabine Egger, Robert Gillett, Frank Thomas Grub, Jochen Hennig, Nick Hodgin, Frank Hoernigk, Therese Hoernigk, Gisela Holfter, Jeannine Jud, Astrid Koehler, Marieke Krajenbrink, Hannes Krauss, Reinhard Kuhnert, Katja Lange-Muller, Corina Loewe, Hugh Ridley, Kathrin Schmidt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

First published in 1937, Thomas Wolfe's The Lost Boy gives name to the theme of lost children that has permeated much of southern literature and provides a template for telling their stories. In Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature, which grew out of many years of teaching The Lost Boy and other works of southern literature, Paula Gallant Eckard uses Wolfe's novel as a starting point to trace thematic connections among contemporary southern novels that are comparably evocative in their treatment of lostness. Eckard explores six authors and their works: Fred Chappell's I Am One of You Forever, Mark Powell's Prodigals, Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster, Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, Bobbie Anne Mason's In Country, Robert Olmstead's Coal Black Horse, and Lee Smith's On Agate Hill. Though each novel is unique and a product of its own time period, all the novels explored here are cast against the backdrop of the South during eras of conflict and change. Like The Lost Boy, these novels reflect a sense of history, a sense of loss associated with that history, and an innate love of story and narrative, as well as representations of work that historically have defined the lives of individuals and families throughout the South. In its artistic treatment of lostness, The Lost Boy creates a significant literary legacy. As Eckard demonstrates, that legacy continues in the form of these six contemporary authors who, in writing about the South, perpetuate Wolfe's efforts as they also create or find the lost child in new ways.

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.

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.

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.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"Michael Cobb raises questions of both ethics and effectiveness that are deeply urgent. If you, too, want to know how the rhetorics of violence that swirl around queer people work, then read this book."
--Janet R. Jakobsen, co-author of "Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance"

aGod Hates Fags is an exciting, even exceptional, book, and it will contribute to an important and necessary conversation between queer studies and African American literary and cultural studies.a --Christopher Nealon, author of "Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall"

At the funeral of Matthew Shepard--the young Wyoming man brutally murdered for being gay--the Reverend Fred Phelps led his parishioners in protest, displaying signs with slogans like "Matt Shepard rots in Hell," "Fags Die God Laughs," and "God Hates Fags." In counter-protest, activists launched an "angel action," dressing in angel costumes, with seven-foot high wings, and creating a visible barrier so one would not have to see the hateful signs.

aI am moved by it, as by his practiced rhetorical sensibilitya
--"Journal of the American Academy of Religion"

Though long thought of as one of the most virulently anti-gay genres of contemporary American politics and culture, in God Hates Fags, Michael Cobb maintains that religious discourses have curiously figured as the most potent and pervasive forms of queer expression and activism throughout the twentieth century. Cobb focuses on how queers have assumed religious rhetoric strategically to respond to the violence done against them, alternating close readings of writings by JamesBaldwin, Tennessee Williams, Jean Toomer, Dorothy Allison, and Stephen Crane with critical legal and political analyses of Supreme Court Cases and anti-gay legislation. He also pays deep attention to the political strategies, public declarations, websites, interviews, and other media made by key religious right organizations that have mounted the most successful regulations and condemnations of homosexuality.

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.

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.

"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. "

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 is a study of the novels by and for middle-class women that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Agatha Christie, Nancy Mitford, Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm) and many others are considered alongside cultural products such as cookery books, child-care manuals and women's magazines. The middlebrow women's fiction of this period is argued to be richer, subtler, and more socially influential than has previously been recognised.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

This is a rich portrait of a complex period that has been long neglected. -Booklist This is a vital reappraisal. These essays compellingly return to the often-neglected period known in African American history as 'The Nadir' to ensure that it will never again be seen as a cultural disappointment. -Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love. Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction. Contributors include: Frances Smith Foster, Carla L. Peterson, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Barbara Ryan, Robert M. Dowling, Barbara A. Baker, Paula Bernat Bennett, Philip J. Kowalski, Nikki L. Brown, Koritha A. Mitchell, Margaret Crumpton Winter, Rhonda Reymond, and Andrew J. Scheiber. Barbara McCaskill is General Sandy Beaver teaching professor and associate professor of English at The University of Georgia. Caroline Gebhard is associate professor of English at Tuskegee University.

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.

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century - a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. In this study, Tate explores this apparent paradox through an examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history - a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history". Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. Instead, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative - a domestic allegory - about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into fictive consummations of civil liberty. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is cultural criticism, cutting across the traditional disciplines of history, sociology, literature, and ethnology. By examining lost works, this book recovers the domestic heroine as a signifier of citizenship for African Americans, and domesticity as a discourse ofblack political agency. With this important work, Tate joins the ranks of leading scholars of African-American culture. It is essential reading for those interested in the intersection of race, gender, and class in American, African-American, and women's studies.