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.

This book translates recent scholarship into pedagogy for teaching Edith Wharton's widely celebrated and less-known fiction to students in the twenty-first century. It comprises such themes as American and European cultures, material culture, identity, sexuality, class, gender, law, history, journalism, anarchism, war, addiction, disability, ecology, technology, and social media in historical, cultural, transcultural, international, and regional contexts. It includes Wharton's works compared to those of other authors, taught online, read in foreign universities, and studied in film adaptations.

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.

Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People explores how, over the past four decades, fiction and film have transformed our perceptions and representations of contemporary air travel. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of a wide range of international cultural productions, and elucidates the paradigms and narratives that constitute our current imaginary of air mobility. Erica Durante advances the hypothesis that fiction and film have converted the Airworld-the world of airplanes and airport infrastructures-into a pivotal anthropological place that is endowed with social significance and identity, suggesting that the assimilation of the sky into our cultural imaginary and lifestyle has metamorphosed human society into "Cloud People." In its examination of the representations of air travel as an epicenter of today's world, the book not only illustrates a novel perspective on contemporary fiction, but fills an important gap in the study of globalization within literary and film studies.

This book, the first in-depth study of authorship in translation, explores how authorial identity is 'translated' in the literary text. In a detailed exploration of the writing of East German author Christa Wolf in English translation, it examines how the work of translators, publishers, readers and reviewers reframes the writer's identity for a new reading public. This detailed study of Wolf, an author with a complex and contested public profile, intervenes in wide-ranging contemporary debates on globalised literary culture by examining how the fragmented identity of the 'international' author is contested by different stakeholders in the construction of a world literature. The book is interdisciplinary in its approach, representing new work in Translation Studies and German Studies that is also of interest and relevance to scholars of literature in other languages.

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.

Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of 'exceptionality' as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.

York Notes Advanced offer 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 intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Runner-up of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award 2017 Winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth & Fantasy Studies 2019 This book examines the creative uses of "Celtic" myth in contemporary fantasy written for children or young adults from the 1960s to the 2000s. Its scope ranges from classic children's fantasies such as Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain and Alan Garner's The Owl Service, to some of the most recent, award-winning fantasy authors of the last decade, such as Kate Thompson (The New Policeman) and Catherine Fisher (Darkhenge). The book focuses on the ways these fantasy works have appropriated and adapted Irish and Welsh medieval literature in order to highlight different perceptions of "Celticity." The term "Celtic" itself is interrogated in light of recent debates in Celtic studies, in order to explore a fictional representation of a national past that is often romanticized and political.

As one of the first English novelists to employ "stream of consciousness" as a narrative technique, Dorothy Richardson ranks among modernism's most important experimentalists, yet her epic autobiographical novel "Pilgrimage" has rarely received the kind of attention given to the writings of her contemporaries James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.

Kristin Bluemel's study explores the relationship between experimental forms and oppositional politics in "Pilgrimage," demonstrating how the novel challenged the literary conventions and cultural expectations of the late-Victorian and Edwardian world and linking these relationships to the novel's construction of a lesbian sexuality, its use of medicine to interrogate class structures, its feminist critique of early-twentieth-century science, and Richardson's short stories and nonfiction.

This volume examines the ways that writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. theorize and employ postcolonial memory in ways that expose or challenge colonial narratives of the past, and shows how memory assumes particular forms and values in post/colonial contexts in twenty and twenty-first-century works. The problem of contested memory and colonial history continues to be an urgent and timely issue, as colonial history has served to crush, erase and manipulate collective and individual memories. Indeed, the most powerful mechanism of colonial discourse is that which alters and silences local histories and even individuals' memories in service to colonial authority. Johnson and Brezault work to contextualize the politics of writing memory in the shadow of colonial history, creating a collection that pioneers a postcolonial turn in cultural memory studies suitable for scholars interested in cultural memory, postcolonial, Francophone and ethnic studies. Includes a foreword by Marianne Hirsch.

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.

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.

From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism, Science, and Technology surveys the scientific contexts of writers from H.G. Wells and Gertrude Stein to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the ways in modernist writers responded to these paradigm shifts. Introducing key concepts from science studies and their implications for the study of modernist literature, the book includes chapters covering the physical sciences, mathematics, life sciences, social sciences and 'pseudosciences'. Including a timeline of key developments and guides to further reading, this is an essential guide to students and researchers studying the topic at all levels.

This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes's poetry reflects his environmental awareness. Hughes's understanding of environmental issues is placed within the context of twentieth-century developments in 'green' ideology and politics, challenging earlier scholars who have seen his work as apolitical. The unique strengths of this book lie in its combination of cutting-edge insights on ecocriticism with extensive work on the British Library's new Ted Hughes archive. It will appeal to readers who enjoy Hughes's work, as well as students and academics.

Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the 'War on Terror', this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The plays are written by some of the most significant writers of this century and the last including Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous and Tony Kushner. Anti-war Theatre After Brecht grapples with the problem of how to make theatre that protests the policies of democratically elected Western governments in a post-Marxist era. It shows how the Internet has become a key tool for disseminating anti-war play texts and how online social media forums are changing traditional dramatic aesthetics and broadening opportunities for spectator access, engagement and interaction with a work and the political alternatives it puts forward.

This study explores the relationship between humans and machines during an age when technology became increasingly domesticated and accepted as an index to the American dream. The marriage between dramatic art and dramatic technology stems from the physical realities of staging and from the intimate connection of technology with human labor inside and outside the household. This book examines how American dramatists of the 1920s drew upon European Expressionism and innovative staging techniques to develop their characters and themes, and how later playwrights, such as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, established the American dramatic canon when technology had become a conventional and integral component of domestic life.

"Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950," explores the relationship between humans and machines during an age when technology became increasingly domesticated and accepted as an index to the American dream. The marriage between dramatic art and dramatic technology stems from both the physical realities of staging and the intimate connection of technology with human labor inside and outside the household. Technology shapes and defines the values of the soul, individually and collectively, in addition to producing the external environment in which people live. This book studies how playwrights of the era reflected the changing role of technology in American society.

Drawing on the experiments of European Expressionism, American dramatists of the 1920s found new techniques for developing character and theme, along with innovative staging devices, such as the threatening machines in Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine," Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal," and Eugene O'Neill's "Dynamo." By the time Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller established the canon of American drama, technology was no longer an impersonal force to be resisted, but a conventional and integral component of domestic life. In examining these dramatists and their works, this book provides an insightful analysis of a largely neglected topic.

The success of The Shipping News and the film of Brokeback Mountain brought Proulx international recognition, but their success merely confirms what literary critics have known for some time: Proulx is one of the most provocative and stylistically innovative writers in America today. She is at her best in the short story format, and the best of these are to be found in her Wyoming trilogy, in which she turns her eye on America's West--both past and present. Yet despite the vast amount of print expended reviewing her books, there has been nothing published on the Wyoming Stories. There is appetite for such a work; the plethora of critical work on McCarthy's Border Trilogy indicates that the reinvention of the West is a subject for serious academic study. Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories fills this critical void by offering a detailed examination of the key stories in the trilogy: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way it Is (2008). The chapters are arranged according to western archetypes--the Pioneer, Rancher, Cowboy, Indian, and, arguably, the most important character of them all in Proulx's fiction: Landscape. Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories offers students a clear sense of the novelist's early life and work, stylistic influences and the characteristics of her fiction and an understanding of where the Wyoming Stories, and Annie Proulx's work as a whole, fits into traditional and contemporary writing about the American West.

In 1989, Steven Moore published the first scholarly study of all three of William Gaddis's novels and since then it has been generally regarded as the best book on this difficult but major writer's work. This revised and expanded edition includes new chapters on the novels Gaddis published after 1989, the National Book Award-winning A Frolic of His Own and the posthumous novella Agape Agape, along with updated introductory and concluding chapters. This introduction offers a clear discussion of all five of Gaddis's novels, providing essential biographical information, two chapters each on his most significant novels, The Recognitions and J R, and a chapter each devoted to his later three novels. A concluding chapter locates his place in American literature and notes his influence on younger writers. Each chapter focuses on the main themes of each novel and discusses the literary techniques Gaddis deployed to dramatize those themes. Since Gaddis is an erudite, allusive novelist, Moore clarifies his references and explains how they enhance his themes.

In this timely new study, Catherine Davies provides a critical analysis of post-Franco Spain's most successful women novelists. Delving first into the development of feminism and women's writing and its critical reception in Spain since 1970, the author then focuses on two of the most popular and influential feminist novelists: Barcelona's Montserrat Roig (1946-1991) and Madrid's Rosa Montero (b. 1951). These writers' works share woman-centered themes such as family relationships, the search for self-fulfillment in a restrictive society, and the hope for the construction of a new world order. Catherine Davies provides a critical analysis of their complete oeuvre and a fascinating overview of contemporary women's writing in Spain.

2013 Honorable Mention, Asian American Studies Association's prize in Literary Studies Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters appear in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? Interracial Encounters attempts to answer this rather straightforward literary question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity. In this nuanced study, Julia H. Lee argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, Interracial Encounters foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation's pervasive pairing of the figure of the "Negro" and the "Asiatic" in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.

This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers from the 1890s to the present. George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan are only some of the many Irish women writers who have made lasting contributions to the genre of the modern short story - yet their achievements have often been marginalized in literary histories, which typically define the Irish short story in terms of its oral heritage, nationalist concerns, rural realism and outsider-hero. Through a detailed investigation of the short fiction of fifteen prominent writers, this study aims to open up this critical conceptualization of the Irish short story to the formal properties and thematic concerns women writers bring to the genre. What stands out in thematic terms is an abiding interest in human relations, whether of love, the family or the larger community. In formal terms, this book traces the overall development of the Irish short story, highlighting both the lines of influence that connect these writers and the specific use each individual author makes of the short story form.

Although there are several annotated bibliographies of contemporary Spanish novelists, this book covers critical works published on the post civil war Spanish novel as a literary form. The volume cites books and articles, and each citation is accompanied by a descriptive and evaluative annotation. The work contains a section of entries on books and another on articles. Entries within each section are arranged alphabetically. Included are entries primarily for studies published in English or Spanish, though some in Catalan, French, Galician, and Italian are also cited. In the last decades, there has been an explosion of critical works on the post civil war Spanish novel. This proliferation of material causes serious problems for scholars conducting research on the subject. While there are bibliographies of particular novelists, this book deals with general studies of trends, topics, and comparative approaches. The volume primarily cites works published in English or Spanish, but it also includes some in Catalan, French, Galician, and Italian. The volume is divided into two sections-books and articles. Within each section, entries are arranged alphabetically. Each citation is accompanied by a descriptive and evaluative annotation. The annotations provide information about the topic, content, and methodology of the works cited and express an opinion of the works' value. The length of the annotations varies according to the importance of the topic. Author and title indexes add to the utility of the work.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Robert Lowell has left a prodigious literary legacy that includes several verse plays as well as numerous volumes of poetry. His private papers and other unpublished materials provide an illuminating record of a distinguished career and cast light on personal and creative issues of interest to both readers and scholars. The Robert Lowell collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard University comprises some 2,916 items. These include family and literary correspondence, poetic notebooks, and manuscripts covering a period of more than thirty-five years. This annotated guide to the collection is the product of detailed study of Lowell's work, both published and unpublished, and benefits from the poet's own review of some of the papers. Researchers will appreciate the index to the poems, which offers a key to the various drafts of each work. This book will be of interest to all Lowell scholars and to students of twentieth-century American poetry.