In the bestselling tradition of Harold Kushner and Robert Fulghum, this inspiring little volume uses sailing as a metaphor for embarking upon the journey of life. Sailors and non-sailors alike will be enchanted by this simple yet compelling book which sheds a magical new light on the age-old search for self.

This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher Rene Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this 'sacred violence' through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction is a study of all of Ellroy's key works, from his debut novel Brown's Requiem to the epic Underworld USA trilogy. This book traces the development of Ellroy's writing style and the importance of his Demon Dog persona to carving out his unique place in American crime fiction.

Called the King of the Pulps, Frederick Schiller Faust, aka Max Brand, wrote nearly 400 Westerns from The Untamed to Destry Rides Again-a total of more than 220 books in this genre. Yet Max Brand also created Dr. Kildare (of books, films, and television) and wrote under twenty-one pseudonyms, in another dozen genres. This book removes the mask, with deeply personal memoirs from family, friends and fellow writers, taking us through his orphaned boyhood on the brutal ranches of California, his frustrating decades in Italy, as both a classical poet and a fast-action pulpist, to his heroic death as a war correspondent on the World War II battlefields. Faust's life story is augmented by a complete bibliography of his work-over a thousand books, stories, and films-plus the first listing of works about Faust.

Martinez should be the first choice as a reference guide to writers in Cuba or in exile therefrom. "Choice"

This one-volume dictionary is designed to acquaint the English-speaking public with creative writers who contributed significantly to Cuban literature between 1900 and the mid-1980s. Emphasizing literary figures who achieved some measure of international recognition, it presents alphabetically arranged profiles of approximately 120 authors, together with information on literary genres, selected magazines and journals, and influential critics.

Each entry begins with a biographical sketch of the author, followed by a discussion of the writer's work and references to relevant critical commentary. A bibliography of major works and secondary sources is supplied for each writer. Essays on literary genres provide an overview of trends, styles, and characteristic features of the genres that have been of particular importance in Cuba since 1900. Written by a distinguished group of critics and scholars in the field, this dictionary will be a useful resource for studies in modern Latin American and Cuban literature.

The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet.

This book considers the shifts in aesthetic representation over the period 1885-1930 that coincide with both the rise of literary Modernism and imperialism's high point. If it is no coincidence that the rise of the novel accompanied the expansion of empire in the eighteenth-century, then the historical conditions of fiction as the empire waned are equally pertinent. Peter Childs argues that modernist literary writing should be read in terms of its response and relationship to events overseas and that it should be seen as moving towards an emergent post-colonialism instead of struggling with a residual colonial past. Beginning by offering an analysis of the generational and gender conflict that spans art and empire in the period, Childs moves on to examine modernism's expression of a crisis of belief in relation to subjectivity, space, and time. Finally, he investigates the war as a turning point in both colonial relations and aesthetic experimentation. Each of the core chapters focuses on one key writer and discuss a range of others, including: Conrad, Lawrence, Kipling, Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Conan Doyle and Haggard.

Commonwealth of Letters complicates the traditional understanding of the relationship between elite, aging modernists like T.S. Eliot and the generation of colonial poets and novelists from Africa and the Caribbean- Kamau Brathwaite, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, and others-who rose to prominence after World War Two. Rather than a mostly one-sided relationship of exploitation, Kalliney emphasizes how both groups depended on-and thrived off-one another. The modernists, dispirited by the turn to a kind of bland, welfare-state realism in literature and the rise of commercial mass culture, sought rejuvenation and kindred spirits amongst a group of emigre writers from the Caribbean and Africa who had been educated in the literary curriculum exported to the colonies in the years before 1945. For their part, the postcolonial writers, ambitious for literary success and already skeptical of the trend toward corruption and philistinism among their compatriot anticolonial politicians, sought the access to cultural capital and the comforting embrace of literature provided by metropolitan modernists. As a result, modernist networks became defined by the exchange between metropolitan and colonial writers. In several chapters, Kalliney provides compelling analyses of colonial writers in postwar cultural institutions, such as the BBC, literary anthologies, and high profile English publishers such as Faber & Faber and Heinemann, developer of the African Writers Series. Throughout, Kalliney acknowledges the elements of cultural imperialism, and paternalism involved in these relationships; however, he broadens our perspective on postcolonial writers by emphasizing the strategic ways they manipulated these elite modernist networks to advance their own cultural agendas.Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers-including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, T.S. Eliot's notion of impersonality could help recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

A study of the 30-year collaboration between playwright Samuel Beckett and director Alan Schneider, Bianchini reconstructs their shared American productions between 1956 and 1984. By examining how Beckett was introduced to American audiences, this book leads into a wider historical discussion of American theatre in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Conversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen's authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen's development as a novelist and cultural critic. Jen's insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen's sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.

Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism details a variety of functionalities of the mode of magical realism, focusing on its capacity to construct sociological representations of belonging. This usage is traced closely in the novels of Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Cristina Garcia, and Helen Oyeyemi.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

This title offers a new critical approach to E.M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers. This is a unique and fresh addition to the changing field of postcolonial studies and offers new insight into the controversial relationship between colonial and postcolonial writing.

Examining novelists, bloggers, and other creators of new media, this study focuses on autobiography by American black women since 1980, including Audre Lorde, Jill Nelson, and Janet Jackson. As Curtis argues, these women used embodiment as a strategy of drawing the audience into visceral identification with them and thus forestalling stereotypes.

Navigate the fascinating world of mainstream fiction! With emphasis on award-winning fiction, this companion guide to Now Read This: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1978-1998, features more than 500 novels published between 1990 and 2001. Using the same easy-access organization that made the original so popular, this book includes more than 400 new entries and several features that enable you to discover new reads and read-alikes based on an appeal-characteristics approach to the literature. Never again shy of an answer to "Can you recommend a good book?" you will find this to be an indispensable resource and tool.

This book addresses the connection between political themes and literary form in the most recent Argentine poetry. Ben Bollig uses the concepts of "lyric" and "state" as twin coordinates for both an assessment of how Argentinian poets have conceived a political role for their work and how poems come to speak to us about politics. Drawing on concepts from contemporary literary theory, this striking study combines textual analysis with historical research to shed light on the ways in which new modes of circulation help to shape poetry today.

This book examines the striking resurgence of the literary letter at the end of the long twentieth century. It explores how authors returned to epistolary conventions to create dialogue across national, linguistic and cultural borders and repositions a range of contemporary and postcolonial authors never considered together before, including Monica Ali, John Berger, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker. Through a series of situated readings, the book shows how the return to epistolarity is underpinned by ideals relating to dialogue and human connection. Several of the works use letters to present non-anglophone material to the anglophone reader. Others use letters to challenge policed borders: the prison, occupied territory, the nation state. Elsewhere, letters are used to connect correspondents in different cultural and linguistic contexts. Common to all of the works considered in this book is the appeal that they make to us, as readers, and the responsibility they place on us to respond to this address. By taking the epistle as its starting point and pursuing Auerbach's speculative ideal of weltliteratur, this book turns away from the dominant trend of 'distant reading' in world literature, and shows that it is in the close situated analysis of form and composition that the concept of world literature emerges most clearly. This study seeks to re-think the ways in which we read world literature and shows how the literary letter, in old and new forms, speaks powerfully again in this period.

White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature charts the late twentieth-century development of reactionary emotions commonly felt by resentful, yet often goodhearted white men. Examining an eclectic array of literary case studies in light of recent work in critical whiteness and masculinity studies, history, geography, philosophy and theology, Tim Engles delineates five preliminary forms of white male nostalgia-as dramatized in novels by Sloan Wilson, Richard Wright, Carol Shields, Don DeLillo, Louis Begley and Margaret Atwood-demonstrating how literary fiction can help us understand the inner workings of deluded dominance. These authors write from identities outside the defensive domain of normalized white masculinity, demonstrating via extended interior dramas that although nostalgia is primarily thought of as an emotion felt by individuals, it also works to shore up entrenched collective power.

Among the most commercially successful female playwrights of all times, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) is best remembered as the author of "The Women" (1936), a biting social comedy. Beginning in 1942, she spent less of her time writing plays and turned instead to the wider stage of politics and world affairs. She was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a congresswoman, and an ambassador to Italy during the Eisenhower administration.

This book traces her transition from playwright to politician to Catholic apologist. It uncovers for the first time plays, both early and late, that dramatize her spiritual and artistic journey. A comprehensive survey of her plays and the world's reception to them, the book provides a thorough treatment of Luce's published and unpublished work. For each play, the volume includes a plot summary, critical commentary, and production information. The book also includes an exhaustive and generously-annotated bibliography of both popular reviews and scholarly criticism.

Best-known for the cruel moral vision of such novels as "Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire, Close Quarters, ""and Fire Down Below," William Golding expressed a view of humanity that was essentially religious, torn between the brutal realities of good and evil. A Nobel Laureate, he also won the Booker Prize for "Rites of Passage." Distinguished critic Virginia Tiger argues that his writings explore themes of human destiny and vision. Drawing upon her own personal recollections of conversations with Golding and quoting from her correspondence with him, she shows how structure supports content in this extraordinary body of work. The only book to offer a complete commentary on his entire literary oeuvre.

This innovative monograph focuses on a contemporary form of computer-based literature called 'literary hypertext', a digital, interactive, communicative form of new media writing. Canonizing Hypertext combines theoretical and hermeneutic investigations with empirical research into the motivational and pedagogic possibilities of this form of literature. It focuses on key questions for literary scholars and teachers: How can literature be taught in such a way as to make it relevant for an increasingly hypermedia-oriented readership? How can the rapidly evolving new media be integrated into curricula that still seek to transmit traditional literary competence? How can the notion of literary competence be broadened to take into account these current trends? This study, which argues for hypertexts integration in the literary canon, offers a critical overview of developments in hypertext theory, an exemplary hypertext canon and an evaluation of possible classroom applications.

The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor.
In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Valles and la blague; exaggeration in Valles and Cd'eline (Mort a credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Meteores).
Five interleaved "riffs" on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

A first of its kind, The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature provides an overview of Comparative North American Literature, a cutting-edge discipline. Contributors make important interventions into multiculturalism in North America and into U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border literatures.

Building on the formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. The notes enable students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. Key features include: study methods; an 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; and glossary of literary terms.