The Irish Theatre in Transition explores the ever-changing Irish Theatre from its inception to its vibrant modern-day reality. This book shows some of the myriad forms of transition and how Irish theatre reflects the changing conditions of a changing society and nation.

This book proposes a new departure point for the investigation of transnational literary alliances: the traumatic constellation of translatio imperii, which followed the dissolution of the East-Central European empires in the 1920s and the crumbling of the West European colonial empires in the 1950s. To prevent their breakdown, the former transitioned from a 'sovereign' to a 'disciplinary' mode of administration of their peripheries, the latter from the merciless assimilation of their colonial constituencies to their affirmative regeneration. This book treats Franz Kafka as the writer of the first transition, prefiguring J. M. Coetzee as the writer of the second. In a series of close readings, it investigates the particular ways in which the restructuring of power relations between the agencies in their fictions is a response to the delineated post-imperial reconfiguration of the new countries' governmental techniques. By displacing their narrative authority beyond the reach of their readers, they laid bare the sudden withdrawal of transcendental guarantees from the world of human commonality. This entailed an unstable and elusive configuration of their fictional worlds as a key feature of post-imperial literature.

Although Eugene O'Neill's work has generated much scholarship, his one-act plays have not received the critical attention they deserve. Given that O'Neill began his career writing such plays, including his justly famous "Sea Plays," associated with the Provincetown Players, it is surprising that his one-acts have been largely neglected. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

This essential discussion of Amy Tan's life and works is a necessity for high school students and an enriching supplement for book club members. A tour-de-force in Asian American writing, Amy Tan has created works that are essential to high school and undergraduate literature classes and are often book club selections. Reading Amy Tan is a handy resource that offers both groups plot summaries of five of Tan's novels, as well as character and thematic analysis. The handbook also provides an overview of Tan's life and discusses how she emerged onto the scene as a novelist. Tan's typical themes, including Asian American issues and mother-daughter relationships, are examined in relation to today's current events and pop culture. Readers will also discover how and where they can find Tan on the Internet, and how the media has received her works. The "What Do I Read Next" chapter will help readers find other authors and works that deal with similar subjects. This handbook is an indispensable tool for both high school and public libraries. Summarizes each of Tan's novels, offering a plot summary and a discussion of themes, settings, and characters Provides questions that can be used to generate classroom and book club discussion Includes sidebars to highlight interesting information about the author and her work Offers a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources to facilitate further study

Featuring canonical Spanish American and Brazilian texts of the 1920s and 30s, Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature is an innovative analysis of the body as site of inscription for avant-garde objectives such as originality, subjectivity, and subversion. Guided by close attention to socio-historical contexts and mythical sources, the study illuminates aspects such as the relationship between synecdoche and the body politic, the corporeal and linguistic effects of immersion in the return to language origin, and the quest for new frontiers in poetic ontologies. Unpacking the vanguard body legacy, this insightful anatomy will be of interest to scholars of the avant-garde, body theory, and Latin American comparative literature.

From the early 20th century to the present, Southern literary talent has flourished. The newer poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists of this region often use their writings to explore the changing social values of the South, while also drawing upon traditional Southern values and culture. This reference work is a guide to the writings of 50 contemporary Southern poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists. Many of the authors profiled in this volume have established themselves as writers of lasting significance. However, the book also profiles the careers and work of authors who are emerging only now as masters of their art. Each chapter in this book is devoted to a single author, and arranged alphabetically for the reader's convenience. Each is written by an expert on the author, and includes a biographical sketch, a discussion of major themes, a survey of criticism, and a bibliography of works by and about the author. An introductory essay overviews modern Southern writing, and a selected, general bibliography concludes the work.

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

Despite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.

A wonderfully helpful survey of the drama of Sam Shepard. It is bound to find many eager readers among those who are either intrigued or baffled--or both--by the plays of this still-young playwright whom many think contemporary America's finest. Choice America's most highly acclaimed contemporary playwright continues to puzzle critics, even as his reputation grows and his imagination seeks new creative channels. Finding the dramatist difficult to classify, critics and scholars continue to search for the central direction of Shepard's creative development. Lynda Hart's study, which focuses on ten representative plays, is the first book to examine Shepard's growth and development as a dramatist within and against the historical tradition. Offering a unified critical perspective, the author considers the plays from both a literary standpoint and as texts for performance. Resources include a bibliography that offers the most complete listing of relevant critical writings.

The fully-lived, yet tragically ended life of Ernest Hemingway has attracted nearly as much attention as his extensive canon of writings. This critical study introduces students to both the man and his fiction, exploring how Hemingway confronted in his own life the same moral issues that would later create thematic conflicts for the characters in his novels. In addition to the biographical chapter which focuses on the pivotal events in Hemingway's personal life, a literary heritage chapter overviews his professional developments, relating his distinctive style to his early years as a journalist. With clear concise analysis, students are guided through all of Hemingway's major works including "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940), and "The Old Man and the Sea" (1952). Full chapters are also devoted to examining his collections of short fiction, the African Stories, and the posthumous works.

Each chapter carefully examines the major literary components of Hemingway's fiction with plot synopsis, analysis of character development, themes, settings, historical context, and stylistic features. Alternate critical readings are also given for each of the full length works. An extensive bibliography citing all of Hemingway's writings as well as biographical sources, general criticism, and contemporary reviews will help students understand the scope of Hemingway's contributions to American Literature.

While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.

"Fetishism and Its Discontents "argues that post-1960 American fiction utilizes fetishism as a strategy for expressing social and political discontent and for negotiating traumatic experiences. Through close readings of novels and short stories by Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, John Hawkes, and Tim O’Brien, among others, Christopher Kocela moves away from the entrenched, Freudian constructs of fetishism and uncovers a new understanding of the fetish as a parallax object that testifies to often threatening differences in racial, gender, and class perspectives.  The first detailed study of its kind, this book brings originality and rigor to a culturally timely topic.   

Breaking new ground in this century, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first of its kind to address the work of contemporary international women playwrights. The book considers the work of established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Marie Clements, Lara Foot-Newton, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Caridad Svich, and Judith Thompson, but it also foregrounds important plays by many emerging writers. Divided into three sections-Histories, Conflicts, and Genres-the book explores such topics as the feminist history play, solo performance, transcultural dramaturgies, the identity play, the gendered terrain of war, and eco-drama, and encompasses work from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Oceania, South Africa, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. With contributions from leading international scholars and an introductory overview of the concerns and challenges facing women playwrights in this new century, Contemporary Women Playwrights explores the diversity and power of women's playwriting since 1990, highlighting key voices and examining crucial critical and theoretical developments within the field.

Examining a rich new generation of Latin American writers, this collection offers new perspectives on the current status of Latin American literature in the age of globalization. Authors explored are from the Boom and Postboom periods, including those who combine social preoccupations, like drug trafficking, with aesthetic ones.

This is the first collection to examine the theory and practice of the historical novel in twentieth-century German and Austrian literature. One of the main aims of the volume is to work against the conventional view of the historical novel as an antiquated and escapist genre, remote from contemporary problems and tied to nineteenth-century models of realism. These essays show that the historical novel is in fact always a response to contemporary history.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Lizette Woodworth Reese was a professional, independent woman from the time she left high school in 1873. She began her teaching career that year and published her first poem in Baltimore's Southern Magazine in 1874. She taught for 45 years in the public schools of Baltimore. Her poetry and her readings of it were particularly popular in women's roups throughout the United States. She was one of the founders of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore and its chairman of poetry until her death in 1935. In April, 1931 she was named Poet Laureate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In that same month, she was iven an honorary doctorate of literature by Goucher College which called her one of the greatest living women in America. In her lifetime, Reese was internationally admired for her poetic genius and hailed by H.L. Mencken as one of the most distinguished poets in the United States. This volume is the first extensive collection of her poems since her Selected Poems was published in 1926. The volume begins with a short biographical sketch of the poet and includes some 250 of her poems. The poems are arranged into sections illustrating some of her major themes: nature, love, remembrance, faith, family, history, and literature. An eighth section contains a complete narrative poem, Little Henrietta, about the life and death of a young girl. Introductory comments help to place Reese in the continuum of American poetry and to indicate her influence on succeeding generations of poets. The book also includes an extensive bibliography and a subject index.

Jewish identity in German culture remains in a critical state of flux. Analyzing its construction and perception in public discourse, the contributors of this volume discuss the works of a number of authors--from Kafka to new writers such as Irene Dische and Maxim Biller. In addition, topics covered include: American-Jewish writers in Germany, minority culture, homosexuality, and Jewish magazines.

Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction examines the representation of the Irish woman migrant and ideas of exile in the contemporary Irish novel. Women have frequently been overlooked or made to serve an emblematic or symbolic function in the portrayal of exile in Irish writing, but more recent treatments of exile and emigration show a keen interest in reclaiming the history of the Irish woman emigrant and in explicitly addressing this lacuna. The book surveys how the Irish woman emigrant is imagined from the early twentieth century to the present day, and explores how six Irish authors - Julia O'Faolain, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, John McGahern, William Trevor and Colm Toibin - have contributed to the recovery of the story of the woman migrant. Particular emphasis is given to how these writers offer complex representations of women in relation to the Irish emigrant experience and respond to a range of different meanings of exile and emigration in an Irish context.

This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and post-memory of the Holocaust both scrutinises recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.

This is the first inter-group and gender inclusive collection of scholarship in U.S. Latino literary criticism that begins with the assumption that the literature written by U.S. Latinos is as important an object of scholarship as U.S. Latino/a history, sociology, and culture, fields that have dominated previous inter-group anthologies. Some of the most important and insightful Latino and Latina literary scholars in the field write on authors from the four major Latino/a groups-- Cuban American, Dominican American, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican American. The anthology evaluates the state of U.S. Latino/a literary study and projects a vision of that study for the twenty-first century. This book is divided into four major areas of literary inquiry: analyses of the psychic relations between the Latino/a subject and its mimetic others; explorations of the complexities of race and Afro-Latino/a poetics; studies of the representation of labor in the Latino/a literary imagination; and genealogical and archival assessment of U.S. Latino literature's relationship with American, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures and histories.

For nearly a decade, writers' collectives such as "Kwani Trust" in Kenya and "Femrite," the Ugandan women writers' association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. "Women's Literature in Kenya and Uganda: ""The Trouble with Modernity" extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve." "Marie Kruger demonstrates that the writers' simultaneous interest in gender dynamics within local communities and in social exchanges between two neighboring East African nations allows for a unique examination of the relationship between modernity, gender, and the complex cultural and political networks of the region.

From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith, this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. Examining the female figure in these contemporary fictions, it looks at the ways in which authors intervene in the historical process to present these women, real and imagined. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history. Featuring chapters by newer scholars alongside established figures in the field such as Diana Wallace, as well as an interview with authors Susan Sellers and Alice Thompson, it engages with debates around history, literary value and the postmodern to illustrate the importance of these female figures.