'This is a marvellous, endlessly illuminating book ... It doesn't go on the shelf alongside other critics; it goes on the shelf alongside Dickens' Howard Jacobson ___________________ Discover the tricks of a literary master in this essential guide to the fictional world of Charles Dickens. From Pickwick to Scrooge, Copperfield to Twist, how did Dickens find the perfect names for his characters? What was Dickens's favourite way of killing his characters? When is a Dickens character most likely to see a ghost? Why is Dickens's trickery only fully realised when his novels are read aloud? In thirteen entertaining and wonderfully insightful essays, John Mullan explores the literary machinations of Dickens's eccentric genius, from his delight in cliches to his rendering of smells and his outrageous use of coincidences. A treat for all lovers of Dickens, this essential companion puts his audacity, originality and brilliance on full display. 'Brilliantly sharp ... Mullan makes us see that Charles Dickens was one of the most artful, which is to say skilled, writers the world has ever seen' Mail on Sunday 'Put it on your Christmas list and spend the post-goose collapse reading the good bits aloud' Laura Freeman 'Even if you know a lot about Dickens you will find revelations in this book, and if you know nothing about him it will be the perfect appetiser' The Times, The best paperbacks of 2021

The International Who's Who of Authors and Writers provides an invaluable and practical source of information on the personalities and organizations of the literary world. This trusted directory provides up-to-date and reliable biographical details essential to anyone interested in the world of literature. * Includes many up-and-coming writers about whom information cannot be found elsewhere * All entries are updated just prior to publication ensuring the utmost accuracy Contents: * Over 8,000 entries * Provides concise biographical information on novelists, authors, playwrights, columnists, journalists, editors and critics * Includes biographical details of established writers as well as those who have recently risen to prominence * Each entry details career, works published, literary awards and prizes, membership and contact addresses where available * A detailed listing of major international literary awards and prizes and winners of those prizes * Includes a directory of major literary organizations and literary agents * Lists members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This unprecedented book examines the explosion of homosexual discourse in post-Soviet Russia from the turbulent years of the immediate post-communist era through the more troubling recent developments of Vladimir Putin's regime. Focusing on concepts of sexuality, gender, and national identity within competing portrayals of same-sex desire, Brian James Baer explores a variety of popular media, including fiction, film, television, music, and print to detail how homosexuality in today's Russia has come to signify a surprising and often contradictory array of uniquely post-Soviet concerns.

Avoid jargon and expressions e.g. unique, ground-breaking, stellar, accessible, cutting edge Include information which isn't obvious from the book description above Mention if a book is especially topical or is likely to appeal in particular geographical areas Remember that artwork and contributors could be important selling points

This book addresses how current debates about education could make a contribution to feminist thought. Contemporary feminist theory explores gender relations through theories of subjectivity with focusing on how education fosters the development of subjectivities. This book talks about how the new economics of schooling under regimes of global capitalism are affecting the gendering subjectivities. Reading the World looks at postcolonial literature and feminist novels in order to theorize how the shrinking of the public sphere, the diminishing powers of the nation-state, the waning democracy, the rise of the global corporation and the reign of corporate ideologies influences access to learning, what counts as knowledge, the socialization and reproduction of land, and subsequently, both the meaning of subjectivity and the possibilities of a radical feminism.
Both global feminism and feminist history offer examples of the ways education has historically countered oppressive ideologies, injustices, economic inequality, disenfranchisement, and the knowledge factories which convey these imbalances of power. Because critical pedagogy is centrally concerned with using education to further democratic projects and economic redistribution, it is essential, given the gender of poverty, that it develops materialist theories of gender not exclusively based in psychoanalysis or libel ideas of assimilation, tolerance and inclusion.
In order to construct a rationalist critique of feminist subjectivity, this books draws on black feminism, postcolonial feminism, socialist feminism, but also a rich postcolonial literary tradition which foregrounds learning as a means of resisting hegemonic power and imperialisms.
This book is concerned with enriching a number of scholarly fields

This accessible introduction to the structure of English, general theories in linguistics, and important issues in sociolinguistics, is the first text written specifically for English and Education majors. This engaging introductory language/linguistics textbook provides more extensive coverage of issues of particular interest to English majors and future English instructors. It invites all students to connect academic linguistics to the everyday use of the English language around them. The book's approach taps students' natural curiosity about the English language. Through exercises and discussion questions about ongoing changes in English, How English Works asks students to become active participants in the construction of linguistic knowledge.

This book brings together leading critics in American literature to address the representation of time throughout a wide range of genres, methodologies, and chronological periods. American literature, from its beginnings to the present, provides a particularly rich set of texts to examine in this regard, with its interest in history, modernity and progress. Each essay considers how time embeds itself in a variety of textual representations, including Native American rituals, Shaker dances, novels, poetry, and magazines in order to provide readers with a capacious view of time's constitutive role in American literature. The essays are organized into four sections - Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. Each section reflects a particular approach to the question of time, but taken as a whole the volume makes visible unexpected temporal patterns that cut across time period and genre.

Brummett explores the ways people use three key terms-reality, representation, and simulation-as rhetorical devices with political and social effect. Human perception, language, and aesthetics experiences are the bases for the fluidity among these terms. Each term's rhetoric is illustrated in an analysis of texts in popular culture: William Gibson's novels, the usenet group rec.motorcycles, and the film Groundhog Day. Brummett explores the ways people use three key terms-reality, representation, and simulation-as rhetorical devices with political and social effect. People write and speak as if there were such things as reality, representation, and simulation. People treat the terms as if they were clearly referential and as if those referents were clearly distinct. But what kind of political, social work do people do when they write and speak in those terms? What kind of claim is being made, or accusation leveled when such a term is used? How do the dimensions and parameters of meaning facilitated by each term work in the management and distribution of power? These are questions of rhetoric, the manipulation of signs and symbols for influence and effect. Brummett illustates the rhetoric of reality in a critical analysis of William Gibson's science fiction novels. The rhetoric of representation is shown in discusions on the usenet group rec.motorcyles. The rhetoric of simulation is explained through the film Groundhog Day. Of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with rhetoric and popular culture, media, communication, and technology, and the literature of science and science fiction.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

This book proposes a new theorisation when studying cyber dissidents in an African digital sphere. It argues that social media dissidents are a recent development in a long lineage of dissidents in African societies. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, the study locates contemporary dissidents in the same family with other historical dissident figures found in African orature, the Chimurenga wars, through music, poetry and other forms of expression. The book argues against techno-deterministic approaches to studying social media-born digital dissidence in Africa. It is aimed at scholars dedicated to studying social media movements in African contexts and the global south generally, prompting them to re-evaluate their earlier conclusions and adopt a more nuanced and contextspecific approach.

Alfred McClung Lee's The Daily Newspaper in America is an extensive examination of the newspaper industry from 1710 to 1936, from an economic and sociologically point of view, fully backed by statistical data. Lee [1906-] provides an excellent general study of the subject, with his work covering such topics as labour, ownership and advertising. The Daily Newspaper in America Part 1 0-415-22891-3: 234x156: 402pp GBP75.00 The Daily Newspaper in America Part 2 0-415-22892-1: 234x156: 410pp GBP75.00

Series Information:
Communication and Linguistic Theory

This classic text appeared in 1941 and has been used since by generations of journalism students. The work has been described by one reviewer as a history of 'American folkways, as reflected in its press'. Through this work and others on academic journalism, Mott (1886-1964) became known as one of the founding giants of journalism education. As a major encyclopedic reference work, the book concentrates on ten major subject areas, with each section containing a selective and briefly annotated bibliography. American Journalism Part 1 0-415-2893-X: 234x156: 390pp: GBP75.00 American Journalism Part 2 0-415-22894-8: 234x156: 392pp: GBP75.00

Building on the foundations of the "independent tradition" of British object relations theory and modern infancy research, Sanville proffers a new understanding of the role of play in the clinical situation. She attends especially to the therapeutic situation as a safe playground, the therapist's playful engagement of the patient, and the patient's emergent ability to embrace playfully the liberating possibilities of psychoanalytic therapy.

Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality features 14 new essays by leading specialists in critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and English literature. The essays, which present wide-ranging historical considerations of negation in light of recent developments in poststructuralism and postmodernism, range over many of the siginificant texts in which negation figures prominently. The book includes a wide-ranging introductory chapter that examines how attention to negation -- the inescapable nescience that is posited in any and every linguistic expression -- enhances the hermeneutic possibilities present in language. In addition, the four sections of the book bring together major critical interventions on, among others, negative meaning, unrecognizability, elenctic negation, apocalypse, nihilism, negation and gender, and denegation. All the essays involve close attention to key texts by major authors, including William Shakespeare, Henry James, Federico Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Roland Barthes, Douglas Barbour, Paul de Man, bp Nichol, Jacques Derrida, and Dogen Kigen. The volume opens up new areas in critical theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language, and defines a major new area of inquiry in relation to notions of postmodern textuality. Critical theorists, students of comparative literature, English literature, and the history of ideas, and those interested in the hermeneutic implications of postmodernism will find this volume of substantial interest. Its extensive bibliographical apparatus and index make the collection a valuable reference tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as for those seeking a variety of interpretive approaches to the problem of negation in literature. "

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Series Information:
The New Critical Idiom

In Unveiling the Hidden-Anticipating the Future: Divinatory Practices Among Jews Between Qumran and the Modern Period, Josefina Rodriguez-Arribas and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum collect ten studies based on primary sources ranging from Qumran to the modern period and covering Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The studies show Jews practising divination (astrology, bibliomancy, physiognomy, dream requests, astral magic, etc.) and implementing the study and practice of the prognostic arts in ways that allowed Jews to make them "Jewish," by avoiding any conflict with Jewish law or halakhah. These studies focus on the Jewish components of this divination, providing specific firsthand details about the practices and their practitioners within their cultural and intellectual contexts-as well as their fears, wishes, and anxieties-using ancient scrolls and medieval manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judaeo-Arabic. Contributors are Michael D. Swartz, Helen R. Jacobus, Alessia Bellusci, Blanca Villuendas Sabate, Shraga Bar-On, Josefina Rodriguez-Arribas, Amos Geula, Dov Schwartz, Joseph Ziegler, and Charles Burnett.

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women's work-spinning, mending and weaving-is carried out. In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame and how their "mischief making" evidences compassion and concern. The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.