Louise Erdrich has shaped the possibilities for Native American, women's and popular fiction in the United States during the late twentieth century. Louise Erdrich collects new essays by noted scholars of Native American Literature on three important novels that chart the trajectory of Erdrich's novelistic career, Tracks (1988), The Last Report on the Miracles At Little No Horse (2001) and The Plague of Doves (2007). The book illuminates Erdrich's multiperspectival representation of Native American culture and history. Focusing on such topics as humor, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Erdrich's explorations of Native American identities through her innovative fictions.

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes (paranoia, uncanniness, biomediation) as products of an overarching post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narrative paradigm, this concise study reveals unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand-such as the link between individual and collective traumatization-highlights the presence of epic elements in postmodern narratives, and identifies the influence of emerging psychiatric treatment on the post-WWII novels at hand. Performing a medical humanities reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), this book introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma. By examining the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD in the wake of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, this book argues that the perception of PTSD symptoms directly influenced aesthetic and literary tropes of the Cold War era.

Women writers have often felt alienated from both the Bible and the canonical literary tradition that has been built on its foundation. Yet contemporary American women writers seem to be as haunted by the Bible as their nineteenth-century predecessors. This study of feminist biblical revision argues that women writers' contentious dialogues with the Bible ultimately reconstruct the writers' own basis of authority. The author traces the evolution of this phenomenon from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and analyzes biblical revision in works by Emily Dickinson, H.D., Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison.

In this comprehensive work, Tyrone R. Simpson, II, explores how six American writers--Anzia Yezierska, Michael Gold, Hubert Selby Jr., Chester Himes, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman--have artistically responded to the racialization of U.S. frostbelt cities in the twentieth century. By using the critical tools of spatial theory, critical race theory, urban history, and urban sociology, Simpson accounts for how these writers imagine the subjective response to the race-making power of space.

Following the Formula in Beowulf, OErvar-Odds saga, and Tolkien proposes that Beowulf was composed according to a formula. Michael Fox imagines the process that generated the poem and provides a model for reading it, extending this model to investigate formula in a half-line, a fitt, a digression, and a story-pattern or folktale, including the Old-Norse Icelandic OErvar-Odds saga. Fox also explores how J. R. R. Tolkien used the same formula to write Sellic Spell and The Hobbit. This investigation uncovers relationships between oral and literate composition, between mechanistic composition and author, and between listening and reading audiences, arguing for a contemporary relevance for Beowulf in thinking about the creative process.

"The theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theater history and literary scholarship, offer a hybrid theater that integrates the popular with the formal, the mainstream with the experimental. Fahy examines the integration of and challenges to popular culture found in their works and offers new readings with an eye to American cultural studies and the impact of mass entertainment on modern life"--

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

This study explores the social functions of literature from the perspective of policymakers, writers, readers and residents in contemporary Cuba. It provides a new perspective on post-59 Cuban literature that underlines how cultural policy has made literature a hybrid activity between elite and mass culture, with inherent social, rather than aesthetic or political, value. Whilst many traditional studies of Cuban literature assume either its subjugation to politics and ideology or, conversely, its role in resisting political discourse via a rather naive notion of artistic freedom, this project explores the varied, dynamic and multiple ways in which literature works in Cuban society: as a catalyst for identity construction aimed at consensus and belonging, but also as an instrument of self-differentiation and self-definition, even in the more recent context of a more market-oriented system. The study reviews policy from 1959 to the present, and presents contemporary case studies exploring the social functions of literature for writers, readers and ordinary Havana residents.

This book explores several fundamental issues in postcolonial studies through the work of one of its most authoritative, if contentious, figures: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.It explores a number of issues, including the question of representing the other, strategies adopted to resist such representations, and the questions of identity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, subaltern studies and the English language within the context of Empire. Providing a critique of the paradoxes and conflicts which appear in Spivak's work, the book offers a new approach to postcolonial studies.

By examining the representation of urban space in contemporary British fiction, this book argues that key to the political left's strategy was a model of action which folded politics into culture and elevated disenfranchisement to the status of a political principle.

Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was hailed by many in his day as America's foremost poet, outranking T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. Perhaps best known for his sonnets, he startles readers into attention and response through deliberate obscurity and ambiguity and demanding syntax. Many of Robinson's works continue to be published today, introducing him to new generations of readers. This comprehensive encyclopedia provides information on Robinson's poems--he published more than 200--and also his less well-known prose works, along with entries on his family, friends, and professional associates. For entries on his writings, the year published, summaries of the works, background information, and critical commentary illuminating enigmatic passages are provided. For people, the entries provide biographical information and describe the influence the person had on Robinson's life.

Through close readings of texts by playwright Anne Devlin, poet Medbh McGuckian, and novelist Anna Burns, this book examines the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. Ruprecht Fadem argues that literary texts address this tension through spectral, bordered metaphors and juxtapositions of the ancient and the contemporary.

Though one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, Saul Bellow has continually elicited conflicting responses from critics. Some critics have seen him as America's greatest contemporary writer, while others have discounted him as discouragingly redundant. Not even his novel Herzog, generally considered his worthiest achievement, has gone unchallenged. The expansion of critical theory in the last decade has added to the controversy over Bellow's works. The reviews and essays gathered in this volume illustrate the many disparate critical responses and approaches to Saul Bellow over the last 50 years, from the late 1940s into the 1990s. Representative samples of criticism from the earliest reviews to the most recent assessments trace the different critical phases and approaches to Bellow's work over time. The selections included also reflect larger trends in literary criticism over the last half century and chart the history of the critical community's response to Bellow. The selections are arranged chronologically in clusters devoted to particular works.

The complete poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor, possibly Africa's most famous poet, are offered in translation for the first time in this bilingual edition. The book, representing the culmination of a lifetime of work, includes ""Lost Poems"", a collection of Senghor's earliest work. Senghor's poetry contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa's past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture. Co-founder of the negritude literary movement, Senghor is concerned that ways be provided for African and European cultures to enrich each other while preserving their own cultural identities. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, reclaims his ancestral heritage and celebrates African culture. He writes with an awareness of his readers, preparing them to receive his culture and its values. With emotional power, he draws the reader deep into his world. In his introduction, translator Melvin Dixon places Senghor's writing in a historical perspective by relating it to his political inolvement. Dixon also elaborates on the ways in which the poems chronicle Senghor's own development as an intellectual, particularly on his struggles with issues of self and cultural identity. Dixon's translation preserves the integrity of Senghor's work by retaining, in the original, words and expressions unique to Senghor's African French, expressions whose meaning would be compromised in translation.

Community in Twentieth Century Fiction is the first systematic study on the role that modern and contemporary fiction has played in the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), the essays in this collection examine narratives by Joyce, Waugh, Greene, LaGuma, Mansfield, Davies, O'Brien, Naipaul, DeLillo, Coetzee, Frame and Atwood. Through the integrated articulation of notions such as finitude, openness, exposure, immunity and death, we aim at uncovering the strategies of communal figuration at work in modern and contemporary fiction. Most of these strategies involve a rejection of organic communities based on essentialist fusion and an inclination to dramatize 'inoperative communities' (Nancy) of singularities aware of their own finitude and exposed to that of others.

This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism operates according to a deepened understanding of what mimesis is and how it works, which in turn occasions a fresh look at other related dimensions of the modernist achievement. Modernism is neither "difficult" nor elitist. Instead, it trends toward simplicity, directness, and common culture. Dowden argues that naivete rather than highbrow sophistication was for the modernists a key artistic principle. He demonstrates that modernism, far from glorifying subjective creativity, directs itself toward healing the split between subject and object. Mimesis closes this gap by resolving representation into play and festivity.

This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to and overview of World Literature. Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism to postmodernism, Theo D haen examines:

• the return of the term "world literature" and its changing meaning
• Goethe 's concept of Weltliteratur and how this relates to current debates
• theories and theorists who have had an impact on world literature
• non-canonical and less-known literatures from around the globe
• the possibility and implications of a definition of world literature.

This book is the ideal guide to an increasingly popular and important term in literary studies. It is accessible and engaging and will be invaluable to students of world literature, comparative literature, translation and postcolonial studies and anyone with an interest in these or related topics.

This collection of essays addresses a number of facets of George Orwell, examining both Orwell the man of letters and Orwell the political man. In his preface, Courtney Wemyss asserts that Orwell may not receive the recognition he is due because at present he is appreciated for the wrong reasons. The author of other fine novels (such as Burmese Days and Coming up for Air), Orwell should also be recognized for his literary criticism, book reviews, and documentaries, which depict the England of his times in the manner of Samuel Pepys. The Less-recognized--and equally important--facets of George Orwell's works and impact on English culture presented in this collection will prove informative to Orwell specialists and to scholars of twentieth-century English literature and politics.

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantanamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.

This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czeslaw Milosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.

Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space explores why houses, in some ways the most private of spaces, have taken up such visibly public positions in the work of a range of prominent poets from Northern Ireland, examining the work of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Medbh McGuckian.

In November 1988 Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In this study of his writings only now being widely translated into English, Haim Gordon, an Israeli professor committed to intercultural dialogue, examines Mahfouz's work from an existential perspective. While Mahfouz is first and foremost a storyteller, he gives the reader an extra "baksheesh." By telling stories of persons from all walks of life--civil servants, peasants, pimps, lawyers, and businessmen--Mahfouz depicts the existential problems that Egyptians face today. Using a Socratic approach, Gordon questioned Mahfouz directly in a series of personal interviews conducted over the past ten years. In these interviews Gordon probed the existential themes in the characters, plots, and issues raised in Mahfouz's stories. The result is an intimate and highly personal look at life in Egypt. As a very involved and critical onlooker, Haim Gordon addresses the problems facing contemporary Egyptians as portrayed in Mahfouz's stories: the Egyptian's flight from freedom and confrontation, the "niggar" situation of Egyptian women, the debilitating effects of poverty, the blatant oppression of political rights, the degradation of true faith and the lack of spirituality. Mahfouz's stories reveal that which western scholars unintentionally, and politicians intentionally conceal--daily life in Egypt.

The first book in a decade from a poet whose blank verse speaks "with the precise qualifications of Henry James, and conveys the muted but implicit drama of Edward Hopper"--Anthony Hecht.. In this, his first collection since the acclaimed Little Voices of the Pears , Herbert Morris gathers fifteen recent poems in his two signature modes, the dramatic monologue and the meditative reverie. His subjects include a resplendent apricot gown once worn by Lillian Gish ("Chaplin enthralled, Griffith smitten, ecstatic"); a poignant human detail in Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac ; and a host of variations on the Peaceable Kingdom , the obsessive lifework of the painter Edward Hicks. Mr. Morris's blank verse, for decades now a glory of American poetry, here achieves a new level of mastery.