Since its publication in 1959, " A Separate Peace" has acquired the reputation of a minor classic of American literature. This insightful analysis helps young readers relate to the themes of disillusionment, guilt and betrayal, and the fear of failure and intergenerational conflicts experienced by the teenaged characters in the novel. This casebook also situates "A Separate Peace" against the backdrop of World War II, enabling students to see the connections between the fictional world of the novel and the real World as it existed for young people. Moving well beyond a standard literary treatment, this interdisciplinary casebook provides a collection of historical primary documents drawn from official records, War Department orders, institutional histories, personal memoirs and letters, and poignant interviews.

With commentary by Knowles himself, the casebook takes readers from the prep school setting of the novel to the impact of wartime on American students and their schools. You're in the Army Now explores the difficult transitions through induction and military training. The Combat Zone graphically confronts the realities of war with interviews of two former P.O.W.'s who experienced firsthand the terrors and tragedies of WWII. The volume also examines some of the contemporary issues of the novel including current controversies in athletic programs, gender issues in education, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Teachers and librarians will find helpful suggestions for oral discussion, research projects, and further suggested readings on these important topics.

With the backdrop of new global powers, this volume interrogates the state of writing in English. Strongly interdisciplinary, it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of postcolonial literary theory. An insistence on fieldwork and linguistics makes it scene-changing in its approach to understanding and reading emerging literature in English. Beyond The Postcolonial interrogates the current state of emerging writing in English from four African countries, and from Malaysia, Singapore and India, through fieldwork and textual analysis.

Tracing the changing conceptions of nationality in the work of traveling writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and Claude McKay, Modernism and Mobility argues that the passport system is an indispensable segue into discussions of literary modernism.

"Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century" considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. "Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century" will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.

Utopia and the Rural in South Asian Literatures provides a searching exploration of twentieth-century literatures of the Indian subcontinent by refocusing attention on works that engage with the village and the rural as a trope. Mohan breathes new life into Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia and continues a conversation with thinkers of utopia about the need for recuperating the utopian potential in postcolonial writings. The book provides provocative readings of some of the most important works of the 20th century in India and Sri Lanka (in English as well as in translation) and, in its conceptual sweep, presents a novel way of theorizing the intersecting but also distinct literary histories of India and Sri Lanka. Authors examined for their unique visions of the rural include Mohandas Gandhi, Leonard Woolf, Martin Wickramasinghe, O. V. Vijayan, Amitav Ghosh, and Michael Ondaatje. For both the novice and the scholar, this is a book that will truly define the horizons for understanding South Asian literatures and cultures, and their broader significance within postcolonial scholarship.

Modernist Nowheres explores connections in the Anglo-American sphere between early literary modernist cultures, politics, and utopia. Foregrounding such writers as Conrad, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, it presents a new reading of early modernism in which utopianism plays a defining role prior to, during and immediately after the First World War.

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Winner of the 2006 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary Studies, presented by the Western Literature Association

"Offers an eloquent and compelling account of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural production--one that resituates Mexicanos at the center of thinking about U.S. nation-making during the nineteenth century and beyond. . . . This stunning new text promises to reshape literary and theoretical work in American Studies."
--Mary Pat Brady, author of "Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographics: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space"

"Discussions of Latino cultural citizenship and public culture have a distinguished and stimulating lineage in the work of major figures such as Renato Rosaldo, Rina Benmayour, and William Flores. With his new book that introduces literary history into the discussion, we must now add the name of John-Michael Rivera." --JosA(c) E. LimA3n, author of "American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture"

In The Emergence of Mexican America, John-Michael Rivera examines the cultural, political, and legal representations of Mexican Americans and the development of US capitalism and nationhood. Beginning with the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 and continuing through the period of mass repatriation of US Mexican laborers in 1939, Rivera examines both Mexican-American and Anglo-American cultural production in order to tease out the complexities of the so-called "Mexican question." Using historical and archival materials, Rivera's wide-ranging objects of inquiry include fiction, non-fiction, essays, treaties, legal materials, politicalspeeches, magazines, articles, cartoons, and advertisements created by both Mexicans and Anglo Americans. Engaging and methodologically venturesome, Rivera's study is a crucial contribution to Chicano/Latino Studies and fields of cultural studies, history, government, anthropology, and literary studies.

Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

Though Doris Lessing never explicitly refers to spirituality in her works, she nonetheless explores spiritual issues throughout her texts. This book examines the prominence of spirituality in her writings. The volume provides both close readings of individual works and sweeping surveys of her nearly fifty year career. The contributors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives such as systems theory, feminist studies of the body and of androgyny, postcolonial theories, mythic prophecy, and intersubjective psychology. The contributors reveal that Lessing's presentation of spirituality is neither rigid nor orthodox neither the product of the split between the body and the soul nor anchored in formal systems of the past or present.

The volume is divided into three sections. The first, on spirituality manifested in everyday life, examines individual works in which ordinary experiences such as growing old or struggling to adopt to the difficulties of married life comment on spiritual concerns. Included are chapters on "The Diaries of Jane Somers" and "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five." The second section contains chapters on the formation and dissolution of individual identity for characters at different stages of the life cycle and the parallel changes within societies at different stages of cultural collapse. The third part presents chapters on the larger patterns that inform many of Lessing's works, with attention either to individual texts or to clusters of her writings.

Although the fiction of Joseph Conrad has been studied extensively from a psychological perspective, a major theme seemingly neglected is that of ambivalence in the relations between fathers and sons. This volume contains Rising's Freudian and post-Freudian analysis of father/son interactions, at either the family or the social level, in Conrad's work. Defining the father as any older male with power and influence over a younger one, Rising examines wide thematic variations that show Conrad's obsessive concern with paternity-- as an object either of fear and hatred or of longing--and in turn addresses the theme of Conrad's most successful fiction: the protagonist's struggle to find (or keep) his place in a world of men. In his fiction, Conrad uses an array of fathers and paternal types to achieve a constantly shifting perspective on filial relationships. In a panorama of actual or potential conflict, the author provides portraits of Conrad's father and son, and shows what chance of accommodation he offers. In chapters on the prototype of the father, the jeaopardy of the son on land, and the immunity of the son at sea, the book discusses Conrad's use of an Oedipal compromise, a solution he abandoned in later works. Ultimately, although he appears to have sought new avenues of reconciliation in his last novels, the author demonstrates that the father/son antagonism is never fully resolved in his fiction. In addition to the primary chapters and epilogue, the work contains a bibliography and an index. This book will be an important reference tool for courses in English and psychology, as well as an important addition to academic and public libraries.

This volume contains a selection from the proceedings of a conference organised by the International Feuchtwanger Society titled 'To Stay or not to Stay? German-speaking Exiles in Southern California after 1945'. The conference, held in September 2011 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, explored the decision faced by all German-speaking exiles in Southern California at the end of World War II whether to return to Europe or stay in the United States. The volume opens with an analysis of the experiences of post-1945 remigrants as reflected in a major exile publication, Der Aufbau. Six chapters focus on the particular case of Lion Feuchtwanger, illuminating the circumstances which led him to remain in California after 1945. Subsequent chapters throw fresh light on other members of the German-speaking literary community in California. Studies focusing on remigration from the UK and the Soviet Union widen the discussion, as do chapters on the problems faced by professional musicians exiled in East Asia and in Palestine. The volume concludes with the experience of remigrants in the media and film industry during the early post-war years. Der vorliegende Band enthalt ausgewahlte Vortrage, die auf der von der Internationalen Feuchtwanger Gesellschaft organisierten Konferenz "Bleiben oder Zuruckkehren? Deutschsprachige Exilanten in Sudkalifornien nach 1945" gehalten wurden. Die Konferenz, die im September 2011 an der Universitat von Sudkalifornien in Los Angeles und in der Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades stattfand, beschaftigte sich mit der weitreichenden Entscheidung, die die deutschsprachigen Exilanten in Sudkalifornien nach Ende des zweiten Weltkrieges treffen mussten: Sollten sie nach Europa zuruckkehren oder in den Vereinigten Staaten bleiben? Der Band beginnt mit einer Analyse der in der wichtigen Exil-Publikation Der Aufbau beschriebenen Erfahrungen von Remigranten nach 1945. Sechs Kapitel haben den speziellen Fall Lion Feuchtwangers zum Thema und untersuchen die Umstande, welche zu seiner Entscheidung fuhrten, nach 1945 in Kalifornien zu bleiben. Die darauffolgenden Kapitel eroertern neue Erkenntnisse uber andere Mitglieder des deutschsprachigen Literatenkreises in Kalifornien. Untersuchungen zur Remigration aus England und aus der Sowjetunion sowie zu den Problemen exilierter Musiker in Ostasien und Palastina erweitern und erganzen die Diskussion. Der Band schliesst mit Beitragen zu den Erfahrungen der Remigranten in den Bereichen Medien und Film im Deutschland der fruhen Nachkriegszeit.

This new book examines how a range of authors today perpetuate Virginia Woolf's literary legacy, by creating new forms adapted to their new ages and audiences. Addressing questions about the current penchant for refashioning our canon in order to update, this book will be valuable reading for both students and scholars of Woolf.

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns. Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand's foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

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.

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This text answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

This is the most extensive account of Moore's fiction to date that considers his many works from the early stories to the recent novel, No Other Life. Moore, who was born in Ireland but is a Canadian citizen and resides predominantly in the United States, has earned an international reputation as an important novelist. This book sets out to demonstrate a discernible pattern of concerns that cut across Moore's fictive output over the last 40 years. It argues that the concerns of love and faith (and the interplay between them) form the backbone of Moore's oeuvre. Sullivan draws from interviews with Moore and presents a study that convincingly demonstrates how Moore's fictions, from first to last, take their place in a larger thematic and formal masternarrative.

A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an exchange that asks readers to think carefully about the ethical demands of reading texts as a reflection of how we metaphorically "read" the world around us and the persons, places, and things in it. His survey focuses on poems that foreground scenes of conversation, teaching, and debate involving a strong-willed lyric speaker and another self, bent on resisting how the speaker imagines the world.

Containing over 500 annotated entries for individual poets and several anthologies, this work presents a substantial collection of poems that have been inspired by blues and jazz. Thousands of poems written between 1916 and the present are included. References to individual jazz figures addressed in the poetry are cross-referenced. The range of poems includes homages to jazz musicians and work written primarily to be read with jazz accompaniment. This wide selection of poetry offers a unique guide to the poetry inspired by jazz musicians and their music.

Of interest to scholars and jazz enthusiasts alike, this substantial bibliography, annotated by author and cross-referenced by musician, presents a wealth of information previously unavailable in a single source. The jazz-related poetry identified will attract a range of writers and musicians. Furthermore, the broad variety of poets and anthologies presented crosses many boundaries and will also interest scholars of 20th century poetry, African American literature, and American literature.

A collection of ten original essays forging new interdisciplinary connections between crime fiction and film, encompassing British, Swedish, American and Canadian contexts. The authors explore representations of race, gender, sexuality and memory, and challenge traditional categorisations of academic and professional crime writing.

This selection of letters from James Schuyler to legendary poet Frank O'Hara reconstruct a friendship that lay at the heart of the New York school - a convocation of poets including Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, with whom Schuyler later wrote a novel. It is an encapsulation of a friendship, a mind and a life.

Using the idea of 'parability, 'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramon Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forche, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner

Presenting the first English-language collection of essays on Jorge Semprun, this volume explores the life and work of the Spanish Holocaust survivor, author, and political activist. Essays explore his cultural production in all its manifestations, including the role of testimony and fiction in representations of the Holocaust.

William Shenstone, 18th-century poet and landscape architect, was also an important arbiter of English literary taste. His ideals of poetry were simplicity, pastoral elegance, and an accent on the innocent pleasures of country life. Shenstone's Miscellany was carefully chosen to illustrate his theories of poetry. It contains the verse of Horace Walpole, Jonathan Swift, and many members of Shenstone's circle.