Now a firmly established part of world literature course offerings in many general education curricula, African literature is no longer housed exclusively with African Studies programs, and is often studied in English, French, Portuguese, Women's Studies, and Comparative Studies departments. This book helps fill the great need for research materials on this topic, presenting the best resources available for 300 African writers. These writers have been carefully selected to include both well-known writers and those less commonly studied yet highly influential. They are drawn from both the Sub-Sahara and the Maghreb, the major geographical regions of Africa. The study of Africa was introduced into the curriculum of institutions of higher learning in the United States in the 1960s, when the Black Consciousness movement in the United States and the Cold War and decolonization movements in Africa created a need for the systematic study of other regions of the world. Between 1986 and 1991, three Africans won Nobel literature prizes: Soyinka, Mahfouz, and Gordimer, and the visibility of African writers increased. They are now a firmly established part of world literature courses in many general education curricula throughout North America. African Writers is meant to serve as a resource for introductory material on 300 writers from 39 countries. These writers were selected on the basis on two criteria: that there is material on them in an easily available reference work; and that there is some information of research value on free Web sites. Each writer is from the late-19th or 20th century, with the notable exception of Olaudah Equiano, an 18th-century African whose slave narrative is generally considered the first work of African literature. All entries are annotated.

Most criticism of The Lord of the Rings trilogy emphasizes the most likely heroes in the tales: Aragorn, Frodo, Gandalf, and even Sam. From popular to scholarly literature, the women and "smaller" characters often go overlooked. But our notions of what makes a hero have altered since September 11, and sometimes the most unlikely people can come to embody all that we look up to and admire in a person. Here, Lynnette Porter examines what we mean when we talk about heroes, and for the first time illustrates the heroic qualities that can be found in the women and other beloved, though less-celebrated, characters in the Lord of the Rings books and movies. She takes a critical look at the importance of literary and cinematic heroes in general, emphasizing the roles of Merry, Pippin, Galadriel, Eowyn, Arwen, Legolas, and Gimli, who can all be considered heroes despite their relatively smaller roles. She shows, ultimately, that our attraction to and celebration of heroes does not have to be limited to the "leading man," but rather that women and youth often display essential characteristics of true heroes. Bringing together a discussion of both the books and the movies, Porter reveals for readers the heroic nature of several characters in The Lord of the Rings who have been ignored in terms of their status as heroes. Nevertheless, these female and youthful characters have received incredible popular acclaim and illustrate the shift in the way the Western movie-going public identifies and glorifies heroes. While other stars may have outshone the likes of Merry and Pippin, Arwen and Galadriel, Porter redirects the spotlight on these favorites of the books and movies to show us how the roles theyplay, the actions they take, and the behaviors they display are worthy of our praise and admiration. This unique and refreshing perspective adds dimension to our understanding of The Lord of the Rings phenomenon.

This unique book describes and organizes nearly 2,500 mystery titles. Divided into sections-amateur, public, and private detective-titles are then categorized as traditional classic, eccentric, lone wolf, and so on. Niebuhr even notes whether each detective is of the hardboiled, softboiled (cozy), or traditional type. Author, title, subject, character, and location indexes offer further access. With more than 2,500 titles and more than 200 authors, this book provides an excellent understanding of the genre. An indispensable resource for librarians and mystery fans.

If you've been searching for a comprehensive readers' advisory guide for mystery and detective fiction, look no further. With more than 2,500 titles and more than 200 authors, this book will provide you with an excellent overview and a thorough understanding of the genre, from topics of interest, a history of mystery fiction, and subgenres, to hints for advising readers, and a discussion of collection development and preservation techniques. Even with no prior knowledge about the genre, with this guide you will find it easy to answer questions raised by readers. And if you're an avid reader of mystery and detective fiction, you will love this book as you explore titles and gain an even deeper insight into the genre. Books can be searched by author, title, character, subject, and location. An indispensable resource for library professionals, educators, and mystery fans

J. K. Rowling achieved astounding commercial success with her series of novels about Harry Potter, the boy-wizard who finds out about his magical powers on the morning of his eleventh birthday. The books' incredible popularity, and the subsequent likelihood that they are among this generation's most formative narratives, call for critical exploration and study to interpret the works' inherent tropes and themes. The essays in this collection assume that Rowling's works should not be relegated to the categories of pulp fiction or children's trends, which would deny their certain influence on the intellectual, emotional, and psychosocial development of today's children. The variety of contributions allows for a range of approaches and interpretive methods in exploring the novels, and reveals the deeper meanings and attitudes towards justice, education, race, foreign cultures, socioeconomic class, and gender. Following an introductory discussion of the Harry Potter phenomenon are essays considering the psychological and social-developmental experiences of children as mirrored in Rowling's novels. Next, the works' literary and historical contexts are examined, including the European fairy tale tradition, the British abolitionist movement, and the public-school story genre. A third section focuses on the social values underlying the Potter series and on issues such as morality, the rule of law, and constructions of bravery.

This meticulous biography traces Tolkien's life from his boyhood in South Africa to his formative school years in England, his college years at Oxford, and his career as an influential scholar and revolutionary writer. His immensely popular books are discussed in great detail, from their inception as ideas through their publication and remarkable legacy. This biography will appeal to students who are fans of Tolkien's books, as well as those who are new to the world of Middle Earth. Included are an extensive bibliography of poems, fiction, and scholarly work written by Tolkien, and a further reading section listing important biographies, letter collections, and critical studies of Tolkien's works. A timeline provides the reader with a comprehensive list of the events of his life and career.

Tolkien's outer life was relatively calm, yet his scholarship and stories are remembered as one of the 20th century's most astonishing achievements. First as a student at Oxford University, then as a professor, Tolkien was fascinated with languages and philology and used the worlds he studied to shape the one he was creating. After years of nominal success, "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the RingS" erupted into popularity, bringing fantasy fiction to the forefront of popular culture in America, and ultimately the world.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez had already earned tremendous respect and popularity in the years leading up to that honor, and remains, to date, an active and prolific writer. Readers are introduced to Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez with a vivid account of his fascinating life; from his friendships with poets and presidents, to his distinguished career as a journalist, novelist, and chronicler of the quintessential Latin American experience. This companion also helps students situate Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez within the canon of Western literature, exploring his contributions to the modern novel in general, and his forging of literary techniques, particularly magic realism, that have come to distinguish Latin American fiction.

Full literary analysis is given for "One Hundred Years of Solitude," as well as "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (1981), "Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985), two additional novels, and five of Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez's best short stories. Students are given guidance in understanding the historical contexts, as well as the characters and themes that recur in these interrelated works. Narrative technique and alternative critical perspectives are also explored for each work, helping readers fully appreciate the literary accomplishments of Gabriel Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez.

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home," says Darl Bundren in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. How much Faulkner himself is speaking may be suggested by this moving collection of nearly 150 letters. Written during his twenties, these letters describe Faulkner's first encounters with the North (..".I made my first subway trip yesterday. The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice."); his brief World War I military service, which grew in the retelling; the productive New Orleans months with Sherwood Anderson; and his first trip to Europe, with cold autumn days in Paris ("Good thing the Lord gave these folks wine--they rate a recompense of some kind for this climate.") Fascinating in themselves for their close observation of people and places, the letters also offer glimmers of The Sound and the Fury and other future works, as the young writer stores up characters, settings, and events that will re-emerge, transformed, int the great novels of his maturity. Never before published, these letters are from the Faulkner collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. "These letters, for years sequestered and unavailable, are among the most informative, touching, and eloquent William Faulkner ever wrote. No Faulkner specialist can be without this book; no Faulkner admirer should be without it." Joseph Blotner, author of Faulkner: A Biography"

"The Subaltern Ulysses " was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

How might an IRA bomb and James Joyce's "Ulysses" have anything in common? Could this masterpiece of modernism, written at the violent moment of Ireland's national emergence, actually be the first postcolonial novel? Exploring the relation of "Ulysses" to the colony in which it is set, and to the nation being born as the book was written, Enda Duffy uncovers a postcolonial modernism and in so doing traces another unsuspected strain within the one-time critical monolith. In the years between 1914 and 1921, as Joyce was composing his text, Ireland became the first colony of the British Empire to gain its independence in this century after a violent anticolonial war. Duffy juxtaposes "Ulysses" with documents and photographs from the archives of both empire and insurgency, as well as with recent postcolonial literary texts, to analyze the political unconscious of subversive strategies, twists on class and gender, that render patriarchal colonialist culture unfamiliar. "Ulysses," Duffy argues, is actually a guerrilla text, and here he shows how Joyce's novel pinpoints colonial regimes of surveillance, mocks imperial stereotypes of the "native," exposes nationalism and other chauvinistic ideologies of "imagined community" as throwbacks to the colonial ethos, and proposes versions of a postcolonial subject. A significant intervention in the massive "Joyce industry" founded on the rhetoric and aesthetics of high modernism, Duffy's insights show us not only "Ulysses," but also the origins of postcolonial textuality, in a startling new way.

Enda Duffy is assistant professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence as though to seize on a new life. Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief."

'Stories of Happy People' is a collection of ten short fictions that maps the range of contentment, from inner joy to the edges of despair.

With the expressions "Lost Generation" and "The Men of 1914," the major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative, historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can be heard to stir in these words?
Vincent Sherry reopens these long unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of the English war. He reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity--the idioms of public reason and civic rationality--marked the sizable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. If modernist writing characteristically attempts to challenge the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this study recovers the historical cultural setting of its most substantial and daring opportunity. And this moment was the occasion for great artistic innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
Combining the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture with abundant visual illustration, Vincent Sherry provides the framework for new interpretations of the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. With its relocation of the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.

Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel.

Written in 1967 from the vantage point ot the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz gives a fascinating portrait of the young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination from an early age to be an important American writer.

Considering William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy, from the antebellum period through to the New Deal, this book seeks to link the occlusive stylistics of Faulkner's writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centered on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. By way of close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.

This study considers Angela Carter's work in media, a critically neglected body of work comprising five radio plays, two film adaptions and a television documentary, as well as two unrealized screenplays, an operatic libretto and a stage play. Charlotte Crofts undertakes detailed textual analysis of unpublished work, including the poem Unicorn (1966) and The Holy Family Album (1991). She refers extensively to exclusive interviews with directors and producers with whom Carter collaborated. Included are the first publication of photographs from the set of The Magic Toyshop (1986), and excerpts from the script and storyboard of The Holy Family Album.

This study is about the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing. Stating that Beckett is "primarily about love," John Keller makes a radical re-assessment of his influence and immense popularity. The book examines numerous Beckettian texts, arguing that they embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness, one founded on early experience with the mother. Writing itself becomes an internal dialogue, in which the reader is engaged, between a "narrative-self" and a mother.

The twentieth-century novelist Neil M. Gunn is best remembered for his evocative accounts of Highland life as given in The Silver Darlings, Morning Tide and Highland River. In The Fabulous Matter of Fact, Richard Price goes beyond this starting point and provides the reader with both a comprehensive study of all Gunn's extant novels (including an early unpublished novel), and a detailed account of the literary context within which Gunn worked. Close textual criticism is enriched by references to Gunn's poetry, short stories, essays and letters, and many of his key sources and allusions are identified for the first time. Price explores Gunn's early literary relationship with the Celtic Twilight writers of the late nineteenth century, and his subsequent relation to the work of modernists such as Eliot and Proust, showing that Gunn was much more aware of literary movements than has been believed. Price also describes the historical context of the 1940s, focusing on Gunn's complex reaction to the war and his views on the nature of freedom, and he traces the extent, in Gunn's later novels, of his increasing interest in the limitations and loci of human compassion. Including useful plot summaries and a radical re-reading of the novels from the mid-1940s onwards, this is the most wide-ranging, approachable and informative guide to the work of Neil M. Gunn available.

Much good criticism of Mrquez came in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the perception of his fiction has been dominated by that novel. It seemed the implicit goal to which the earlier fiction has been striving. By concentrating on the later novels, including The General in his Labyrinth, this study brings out the internal dialogue between the novels so that One Hundred Years of Solitude then stands out, like Don Quixote in Cervantes' oeuvre, as untypical yet more deeply representative. Behind the popular impact of its 'magical realism' lies Mrquez' abiding meditation on the nature of fictional and historical truth.

"A respected biographer and no stranger to his subject" (Newark Star-Ledger), Meyers delves into the complex life of the man whose visionary work gave us the great anti-utopias of modern literature. "The breadth of his research is impressive" (New York Times Book Review), drawing on a close study of the new edition of Orwell's Complete Works, personal interviews, and unpublished material in London's Orwell Archive.

Meyers's "briskly paced, absorbing narrative . . . offers keen insights" (Boston Sunday Globe) on Orwell's intellectual development, as well as his human failings -- his childhood insecurities, his political dilemmas, and his conflicted relationships with women. "Leagues in front of" Orwell's previous biographers, Meyers "convincingly demonstrates the essence of Orwell's] character" (Denver Colorado] Post), revealing a "much more helpful and believable portrait" (Paul Theroux).

When Calista Jacobs, whose young son Charlie already shows signs of his father's scientific brilliance, discovers that her husband has been murdered, she sets out to track down his killer in this novel of murder and Harvard University politics.