This study offers new perspectives on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer too often consigned to the margins of post-1945 literary history. Examining the interaction of the personal and the social in Koeppen's writings, this book demonstrates that the politics of his works are inherent to their form. Through a series of close readings, the book explores the positive and negative aspects of liminality, a dominant trope in Koeppen's works. Stressing the thematic and formal continuities of his oeuvre, the first section illustrates how his protagonists perpetually establish a space for themselves 'in between' states. The second section examines how Koeppen negotiates with the discourse of 'nation' during two central periods of his career. It shows how his experiences in the Third Reich and his reappraisal of the years prior to 1933 determine his perspective on modernity, modernism and Germany after 1945. Having defined the location of culture in his works, the book concludes by resituating Koeppen's writings within post-war West German literary culture.

Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father's until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad's old photographs. For years in the 1940s and '50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back. How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths--her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author? This question sparked a journalist's quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little-known interest of Aldous Huxley. Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author's father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley's research and discussion circle. This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20th-century's foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.

'Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered and hidden in a horrible chamber by a monstrous husband, is hair-raising; yet its happy ending gives it a utopian force. Davies's book focuses on literature in German from the eighteenth century to the 1990s, and is the first full-length study of the history of Bluebeard published in any language.

Still the most popular book of Hemingway's to teach, The Sun Also Rises captures the quintessential romance of the expatriate Americans and Britains in Paris after World War I. As the international vacationers move from Paris to Pamplona for the bullfight festival, the characters wend their various narratives through the impressionistic colours of modern European life. The text provides a way for discussions of war, sexuality, personal angst, and national identity to be linked inextricably with the stylistic traits of modern writing. Both in theme and style, this novel has become synonymous with modernism and is often used as either a starting point for courses in modernism or as a representative modernist novel in broader survey courses. This volume, to be edited by one of Hemingway's most eminent scholars, will present the best in critical essays written about The Sun Also Rises.

An affective reading of twentieth-century Afro-Cuban literature focussing on a set of concerns ranging from the filial to the erotic. This book proposes an affective reading of twentieth-century Afro-Cuban literature through its focus on a set of concerns ranging from the filial to the erotic. Existing scholarship on black Cuban literature tends to privilege national political and economic discourses often focusing solely on the dynamics of race in the Revolution and the place of the black writer/artist within the nation's cultural institutions. And while there is substantial engagementwith feminist and queer articulations of desire within Cuban literary studies, there remains an urgent need for a sustained analysis of black Cuban writing which investigates its preponderant concerns with themes of family, love and erotic politics-a need fully addressed in this timely book. CONRAD MICHAEL JAMES is Associate Professor of World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston.

Darling of the Jazz Age, the globe-trotting diplomat and acclaimed writer Paul Morand and his literary and political careers underwent a radical shift following his collaboration with the Vichy government during the Occupation of France. Abandoning the terse, glittering portraits of the contemporary era that had garnered him early fame, he turned to the past and to historical fiction, biography and autobiography.Paul Morand: The Politics and Practice of Writing in Post-War France, the first full-length study of Morand in English and the first ever of his post-war works, traces Morand's politically charged explorations of history as he obsessively rewrites the Occupation in historical guise. From Napoleonic Spain to the court of Louis XIV, nineteenth-century California, Revolutionary France and Venice across the ages, Morand probes the limits of historiography and genre as he constructs a curiously Benjaminian model of redemption for his collaborationist heroes. This book analyses Morand's post-war project, placing it within the highly-politicized context of writing during the de Gaullian era. Many issues are at stake in Morand's late oeuvre, from the genres of historical fiction, biography and autobiography, to the very act of historicization itself in the context of the post-war era. Morand's handling of these issues suggests that literature furnishes perhaps the best space within which the complex and highly political question of our ties to the past may be most tellingly examined.

For the past twenty years, evangelical prophecy novels have been a powerful presence on American bestseller lists. Emerging from a growing conservative culture industry, the genre dramatizes events that many believers expect to occur at the end of the age - the rapture of the saved, the rise of the Antichrist, and the fearful tribulation faced by those who are "left behind."
Seeking the forces that drove the unexpected success of the Left Behind novels, Crawford Gribben traces the gradual development of the prophecy fiction genre from its eclectic roots among early twentieth-century fundamentalists. The first rapture novels came onto the scene at the high water mark of Protestant America. From there, the genre would both witness the defeat of conservative Protestantism and participate in its eventual reconstruction and return, providing for the renaissance of the evangelical imagination that would culminate in the Left Behind novels.
Yet, as Gribben shows, the rapture genre, while vividly expressing some prototypically American themes, also serves to greatly complicate the idea of American modernity-assaulting some of its most cherished tenets. Gribben concludes with a look at "post-Left Behind" rapture fiction, noting some works that were written specifically to counter the claims of the best-selling series. Along the way, he gives attention not just to literary fictions, but to rapture films and apocalyptic themes in Christian music. Writing the Rapture is an indispensable guide to this flourishing yet little understood body of literature.

Harvey J. Satty and Curtis C. Smith have painstakingly assembled a complete bibliographic description of the literary career of an author they rank among the giants of twentieth-century science fiction. Following a biographical preface, they have recorded all of Stapledon's independent English language publications. In addition to complete descriptions of all first editions, citations are given for later editions, omnibus volumes, and books to which Stapledon contributed chapters or poems. The dust jackets of all first editions and books to which Stapledon contributed are described in detail, giving the reader unique insight into the manner in which Stapledon's books have been presented. A previously unpublished Stapledon work, The Peak and the Town, is included in the bibliography. An allegorical autobiography, it depicts the author's view of his own life. A brief secondary bibliography concludes the book. The comprehensive author index provides further access to this bibliography of the intricate body of Stapledon's work.

This work studies in detail a heretofore much neglected aned aspect of German literature. This collection of twenty-three essays sets its sights on the points of queerness, marginality, and alterity already present within the German canon and introduces further difference and deviation in the form of openly gay Germanliterature in order to promote the always-ongoing shift in cultural representation. Queering the Canon provides new analyses, from queer perspectives, of texts by authors whose names are familiar to canonical lists, including Goethe, Schiller, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Reinig, and Elfriede Jelinek. It also makes welcome room for discussions of literary works that have seldom received scholarly attention.

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.

Axelsson provides an overview of American war and military novels set between 1945 and 1962. These are novels informed and inspired by the conditions and background of postwar occupation, the Korean War, and the early phases of the Cold War. More than 120 narratives are considered and evaluated from a literary point of view and discussed in terms of their contribution to the understanding of the period. The ultimate goal is a clear delineation of this period in American life and literature. In view of this orientation, the study will be useful to researchers and teachers of American history and literature as well as students of the Korean War. Of the books considered, 27 are given extended treatment; they were selected as being representative of socio-literary phenomena. The major part of the action in the novels takes place between V-E Day and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time in America characterized by restraint and measured response to unprecedented demands and dangers, accompanied by valiant efforts to rise to the occasion and find new ways of meeting new challenges to American values and ideals. Although the key concept throughout is American military experience, the wide field of civilian-military relations is used as an overlay to achieve a balanced perspective on the period. The book includes two appendices: the first is a list of key data and summaries of all works in the investigation; the second is a list of the works broken down by geographical settings and thematic considerations following categories outlined by chapters. A bibilography of secondary sources is also outlined.

This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real--their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering--and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.

The works at the center of this study--by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Muller--zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of "The Pathos of the Real." Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis.

Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order.

In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, "The Pathos of the Real" advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century.

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

The most supportive, easy-to-use and focussed literature guides to help your students understand the texts they are studying at GCSE and A Level

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol's absurdist masterpiece "The Nose". Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer's wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol's descriptions of St. Petersburg everyday life, familiar to the writer's contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical approaches to the story in Gogol scholarship.

Few people are so widely read within Commonwealth literature or are so knowledgeable about so many different cultures as Jean-Pierre Durix. . . . The first part of the book deals with general, theoretical themes (e.g., the writer as teacher), while the second contains studies of single novels by such writers as Patrick White, C.K. Stead, and Salmon Rushdie; here Durix is at his best. Choice Exploring the relationship between the writer and his craft, between the artist and society, between the creator and his conception of creation, this fascinating study takes up various key positions represented by major writers from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, and examines the practice of literature, which is frequently concerned with a search for problematic roots and authenticity in its relation with didacticism, social concern, language and myth. The distinctively comparative approach brings together a series of close textual studies and examines four examples of metafiction from which emerge a number of specific features characteristic of literatures born out of Colonialism and its aftermath. Seen in this perspective, literary scholarship provides an irreplaceable point of view from which to assess the role of the imagination in multi-cultural societies.

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.

How were Moroccan Muslim and Jewish cultures depicted in Spanish literature, journalism, and photography during the Rif War and what did this portrayal reveal about conflicting visions of Spanish identity? Runner-up for the 2017-18 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize This book examines how anxieties about colonial power and national identity are reflected in Spanish literature, journalism, and photography of Moroccan Muslim and Jewish cultures during the Spanish colonisation of Northern Morocco from 1909 to 1927. This understudied period, known as the Rif War, is highly significant because of its role in shaping the identities that came into conflict in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Furthermore, the book makes a key contribution to Spanish colonial studies by offering a comparative analysis of Spanish representations of the Iberian Peninsula's cultural and historical relationship with Moroccan Muslims and Jews in this context, showing how conflicting visions of Spanish identity are portrayed through and in relation to them.

This book traces the artistic trajectories of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, examining their literary representations of the nomadic ethic pervading the twentieth-century expatriate movements in and out of America. The book argues that these authors contribute to the nomadic aesthetic of American modernism: its pastoral ideographies, (post)colonial ecologies, as well as regional and transcultural varieties. Mapping the pastoral moment in different temporalities and spaces (Barnes representing the 1920s expatriation in Europe while Bowles comments on the 1940s exodus to Mexico and North Africa), this book suggests that Barnes and Bowles counter the critical trend associating American modernity primarily with urban spaces, and instead locate the nomadic thrust of their times in the (post)colonial history of the American frontier.

This is the first book to comprehensively examine Latin America's literary response to the deadly HIV virus. Proposing a bio-political reading of AIDs in the neoliberal era, Lina Meruane examines how literary representations of AIDS enter into larger discussions of community, sexuality, nation, displacement and globalization.

Shows how the experience of violence in Argentina shed light on a new sense of "being together" that goes beyond bloodline ties. Co-winner of the 2013 inaugural Publication Prize awarded by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland The aftermath of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983) has traditionally been associated with narratives of suffering, which recall the loss of the 30,000 civilians infamously known as the "disappeared". When democracy was recovered, the unspoken rule was that only those related by blood to the missing were entitledto ask for justice. This book both queries and queers this bloodline normativity. Drawing on queer theory and performance studies, it develops an alternative framework for understanding the affective transmission of trauma beyondtraditional family settings. To do so, it introduces an archive of non-normative acts of mourning that runs across different generations. Through the analysis of a broad spectrum of performances - including interviews, memoirs, cooking sessions, films, jokes, theatrical productions and literature - the book shows how the experience of loss has not only produced a well-known imaginary of suffering but also new forms of collective pleasure. Cecilia Sosa received a PhD in Drama from Queen Mary, University of London. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at School of Arts & Digital Industries, University of East London.

During the last decade, women's narrative has become a recognized force in Mexican letters. The essays in this collection explore the recent work of nine contemporary Mexican women writers. Many of the works have been translated into English; some, like Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate," have become international best sellers. The unprecedented commercial success of these novels has generated mixed reactions: at the same time that the secondary status afforded women's narrative has come to be questioned in many academic circles, some authors are dissociating themselves from women's writing. The essays in this volume address these issues, providing a much needed contribution to the study of women's narrative.