In recent years, controversy has surrounded the narrative turn in history and the historical turn in fiction. This book clarifies what is at stake, tracing connections between historiography and life-writing, arguing that the challenges posed in representing the past illuminate issues which are central to all literary narrative.

The post-war redevelopment of London has been the most extensive in its history, and has been accompanied by a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. This book explores the literary re-imagining of the city in post-war fiction and argues that the image, history, and narrative of the city has been transformed alongside the physical rebuilding and repositioning of the capital. Drawing on the ideas of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Anthony Vigler and others as well as the latest work on urban representation, this book is an important contribution to the study of the intersection between place, lived experience, and the literary imagination. Texts covered include novels by some of the most significant and lesser known authors of the period, including Graham Greene, George Orwell, J. G. Ballard, Stella Gibbons, David Lodge, Doris Lessing, B. S. Johnson, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.

Through a detailed study of Mayy Ziyadah's literary salon, Boutheina Khaldi sheds light on salon and epistolary culture in early twentieth-century Egypt and its role in Egypt's Nahdah (Awakening). Bringing together history, women's studies, Arabic literature, post-colonial literature, and media studies, she highlights the important and previously little-discussed contribution of Arab women to the project of modernity.

Bertolt Brecht has been perceived as an ardent proponent of social change, an avid advocate of a just world that he defined in terms of socialism, and an adamant foe of capitalism for whose demise he hoped. He is justly regarded as one of the great innovators of theater theory and practice in the 20th century, and his influence has extended to Latin America and Asia. This reference book surveys Brecht's enormous contribution to world drama. Chapters by expert contributors assess his dramatic innovations, his poetry and prose, and topics of special interest to Brecht studies. With the centennial of his birth approaching in 1998, Bertolt Brecht's controversial reception in general and in the United States in particular, is coming into clearer focus. One of the great dramatists of the 20th century, Brecht has been viewed as an ardent proponent of social change, an avid advocate of a just world that he defined in terms of socialism, and an adamant foe of capitalism for whose demise he hoped. With the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political and economic milieu of Europe has changed drastically, and socialist writers are now being studied from a fresh perspective. This volume surveys and assesses Brecht's enormous contribution to the arts. Chapters by expert contributors explore his innovative dramatic theory and theatrical practice. Though best known for his contribution to the stage, Brecht also wrote poetry and prose fiction, and his poems and prose are examined in this work. Brecht's influence is also considered, and chapters examine topics of special interest, such as Brecht and film, the role of music in his works, feminist and Marxist approaches to his writings, the problem of translating Brecht into English, and the reception and appropriation of his plays and dramatic theory in various countries. While the chapters are historical in focus, the contributors also demonstrate the continuing relevance of Brecht in general and the Brechtian theater in particular in the 1990s.

In the wake of psychoanalysis and the birth of therapy, trauma is a powerful concept in twenty-first century culture. Thomas J. Brennan, S.J. finds roots of the "sensibility of trauma" by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses--the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust.

Widely acclaimed as one of America's most distinguished female playwrights, Lillian Hellman made an entrance into a largely male-dominated field in 1934 with" The Children's Hour," a drama that rocked the literary establishment with its frank treatment of lesbianism while calling attention to her writing talents. Written between 1934 and 1963, Hellman's dramatic canon includes eight original plays and four adaptations. Two of these, "Watch on the Rhine" (1941) and "Toys in the Attic" (1960), received Drama Critics' Circle Awards. In addition to her dramatic activities, she wrote three memoirs and a novella, contributed articles to national magazines, edited ChekoV's letters and Dashiell Hammett's mysteries, and penned several screenplays. She is probably best known for "The Little Foxes" (1939), her drama about a family of predatory entrepreneurs who seek to build an industrial fortune on the ruins of the old South.

Both a quick reference guide and an exhaustive resource, this volume provides broad and thorough coverage of Hellman's dramatic career. It begins with a critical overview of her life, along with a chronology of her accomplishments. The bulk of the book, which treats her eight original plays and four adaptations, all written for the Broadway stage, provides detailed plot summaries, stage histories, and critical overviews. The next section offers an annotated bibliography of primary sources. This is followed by an annotated secondary bibliography, which is divided into sections on reviews, books, and articles. Entries in the bibliographies are first arranged chronologically and then alphabetically, so that the reader can gain a fuller sense of the development of Hellman's career and the response to her works over time. Detailed indexes conclude the volume and offer full alphabetical access to its contents.

Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.

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.

2013 Winner of the Asian American Studies Association's prize in Literary Studies Anger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. In Ingratitude, erin Khue Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repayment-all the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority.Through readings of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance, and other texts, Ninh offers not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. She connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection. In so doing, literary criticism crosses over into a kind of collective memoir of the Asian immigrants' daughter as an analysis not of the daughter, but for and by her.

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.

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.

This book applies models that reflect the fluid, mediated, hybrid, and nomadic global scenes within which Generation X artists and writers live, think, and work in Spain. Henseler touches on critical insights in comparative media studies, cultural studies, and social theory, and conveys the nuances of multiple voices, facts, figures, and faces.

This title studies how poets from two postcolonial countries, Ireland and Poland, refuse the consolations of roots and belonging, and search for non-traditional modes of exploring identity. Are we allowed to choose where we belong? What pressures make us feel that we should belong somewhere? This book brings together four major poets - Heaney, Mahon, Zagajewski, and Hartwig - who ask themselves these questions throughout their lives. They start by assuming that we can choose not to belong, but know this is easier said than done. Something in them is awry, leading them to travel, emigrate, and return dissatisfied with all forms of belonging. Writer after writer has suggested that Polish and Irish literature bear some uncanny similarities, particularly in the twentieth century, but few have explored these similarities in depth. Ireland and Poland, with their tangled histories of colonization, place a large premium upon knowing one's place. What happens, though, when a poet makes a career out of refusing to know her place in the way her culture expects? This book explores the consequences of this refusal, allowing these poets to answer such questions through their own poems, leading to surprising conclusions about the connection of knowledge and belonging, roots and identity.

This book studies the reception history of Western literature in China from the 1840s to the present. Qi explores the socio-historical contexts and the contours of how Western literature was introduced, mostly through translation and assesses its transformative impact in the cultural, literary as well as sociopolitical life of modern China.

Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama faced a difficult task-rallying African American voters while resisting his opponents' attempts to frame him as ""too black" to govern the nation as a whole. Obama's solution was to employ what Toni Morrison calls ""race-specific, race-free language," avoiding open discussions of racial issues while using terms and references that carried a specific cultural resonance for African American voters. Stephanie Li argues that American politicians and writers are using a new kind of language to speak about race. Challenging the notion that we have moved into a ""post-racial" era, she suggests that we are in an uneasy moment where American public discourse demands that race be seen, but not heard. Analyzing contemporary political speech with nuanced readings of works by such authors as Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Colson Whitehead, Li investigates how Americans of color have negotiated these tensions, inventing new ways to signal racial affiliations without violating taboos against open discussions of race.

"Sympathetic Sentiments "develops an innovative interdisciplinary framework to explore the implications of living in a 'culture of feeling' that seems ill at ease with itself, one in which 'sentiments' are frequently denounced for being 'sentimental' and self-indulgent. This is traced back to the inheritance of the eighteenth century, enabling us to identify a distinctive 'spectacle of sympathy' in which sympathy seems inherently to entail public forms of expression whereby being 'on show' is both a condition of the authenticity of such affects "and" of their capacity to be masked and simulated - hence stimulating controversy, but also the exploration of the vicarious dimensions of modern experience so central to modern literature, art and culture. The implications of all this are further explored in the context of current debates over the display of trauma as the language of sympathetic engagement, and the alleged prevalence of 'compassion fatigue' in the era of media sensationalism. Overall, the book uncovers the patterns that both reproduce our capacity for 'sympathetic sentiments' while revealing the inherent underlying tensions.

The Reception of British Authors in Europe series includes literary and political figures, as well as philosophers, historians and scientists. Each volume provides new research on the ways in which selected authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining the breadth and significance of H. G. Wells's literary and political impact throughout 20th-century Europe H.G. Wells was described by one of his European critics as a 'seismograph of his age'. He is one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction, and as a novelist, essayist, educationalist and political propagandist his influence has been felt in every European country. This collection of essays by scholarly experts shows the varied and dramatic nature of Wells's reception, including translations, critical appraisals, novels and films on Wellsian themes, and responses to his own well-publicized visits to Russia and elsewhere. The authors chart the intense ideological debate that his writings occasioned, particularly in the inter-war years, and the censorship of his books in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain. This book offers pioneering insights into Wells's contribution to 20th century European literature and to modern political ideas, including the idea of European union.

In this novel interpretation of cultural discourse in Spanish America, Alonso argues that Spanish American cultural production is marked by an internal rhetoric crisis that resulted from the adoption of discourses regarded as "modern" in historical and economic circumstances that are themselves the negation of modernity. Through a reading of texts by Sarmiento, Masilla, Quiroga, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez and others, Alonso identifies the existence of this textual dynamics in works ranging from the 19th century to the present.

In addition to contributing significantly to the growing field of Burroughs scholarship, Burroughs Unbound also directly engages with the growing fields of textual studies, archival research, and genetic criticism, asking crucial questions thereby about the nature of archives and their relationship to a writer's work. These questions about the archive concern not only the literary medium. In the 1960s and 1970s Burroughs collaborated with filmmakers, sound technicians, and musicians, who helped re-contextualized his writings in other media. Burroughs Unbound examines these collaborations and explores how such multiple authorship complicates the authority of the archive as a final or complete repository of an author's work. It takes Burroughs seriously as a radical theorist and practitioner who critiqued drug laws, sexual practice, censorship, and what we today call a society of control. More broadly, his work continues to challenge our common assumptions about language, authorship, textual stability, and the archive in its broadest definition.

Edgar Allen Poe's influence on the twentieth century French writer Paul Valery was profound, much more so than on Baudelaire and Mallarme. This book is the first comprehensive study of Poe's influence of Valery and is based on Valery's own concept of literary influence. Valery discovered in Poe's tales and literary essays a Drama of the intellect that was to inspire his Evening with Monsieur teste, Agathe, and Introduction to the method of Leonardo Da Vinci. Valery's poetics and approach to literary criticism have direct connections to Poe's Philosophy of Composition and Poetic Principle. Valery's only essay devoted to his American mentor, On Poe's Eureka, recognizes the importance of the cosmological poem in Valery's intellectual development. Eureka awakened in him an interest in science and mathematics that lasted a lifetime and inspired him to apply scientific analysis to literary genius, the first writer to place creative work on an analytical basis and explore the psychological aspects of literature.