The American South received increased attention from national commentators during the interwar era. Beginning in the 1920s, the proliferation of daily book columns and Sunday book supplements in newspapers reflected a growing audience of educated readers and its demand for books and book reviews. This period of intensified scrutiny coincided with a boom in the publishing industry, which, in turn, encouraged newspapers to pay greater attention to the world of books. Reviewing the South shows how northern critics were as much involved in the Southern Literary Renaissance as Southern authors and critics. Southern writing, Gardner argues, served as a litmus to gauge Southern exceptionalism. For critics and their readers, nothing less than the region's ability to contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the nation was at stake.

It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring" (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving-and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche-as ever.

A field guide to the trade and art of editing, this book pulls back the curtain on the day-to-day responsibilities of a literary magazine editor in their role, and to the specific skills necessary to read, mark-up and transform a piece of writing. Combining a break-down of an editor's tasks - including creating a vision, acquisitions, responding to submissions and corresponding with authors - with a behind-the-scenes look at manuscripts in progress, the book rounds up with a test editing section that teaches, by way of engaging exercises, the nitty-gritty strategies and techniques for working on all kinds of texts. Generous in its insight and access to practicing editors' annotations and thought processes, The Invisible Art of Literary Editing offers an exclusive look at nonfiction, fiction and poetry manuscripts as they were first submitted, as they were marked up by an editor and how the final piece was presented before featuring an interview with the editor on the choices they made about that piece of work, as well as their philosophies and working practices in their job. As a skill and a trade learnt through practice and apprenticeship, this is the ultimate companion to editing any piece of work, offering opportunities for learning-by-doing through exercises, reflections and cases studies, and inviting readers to embody the role of an editor to improve their craft and demystify the processes involved in this exciting and highly coveted profession.

How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an "off-yellow," darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.

Writing her first novel during World War I, West examines the relationship between three women and a soldier suffering from shell-shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England's class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition.

Over six years of imprisonment in Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book - No Friend but the Mountains. In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which reflects the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world. In this book Boochani's collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout Western nation-states and beyond.

This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity. -- .

One of the greatest supernatural stories ever told, The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs has enthralled and captivated audiences since it was first published.

An accessible and wide-ranging consideration of concerns facing English Studies in its surrounding context of the university and society. The contributors to this volume seek to trace, in the face of current challenges, historical and contemporary debates surrounding English Studies.

The "Book of Aneirin" is a thirteenth-century manuscript collection of Welsh praise-poetry. In comparison with other Welsh sources of similar date, the language of this text exhibits a number of features which have been interpreted as archaisms and taken as indications of great antiquity for the text. However, particularly in syntax, claims about the status of these 'archaisms' have not been discussed in the context of the grammatical organisation of the text as a whole. This book approaches various aspects of grammar against the background of a comprehensive edition of the finite verbal clauses of the text. Syntactic analysis of the data-base so established takes its point of departure from the relationship of the verb with its arguments in the clause, and is concentrated on two issues: 1. the type and status of basic word order in the text; 2. the interaction of the semantics of the predication with the pragmatics of communication of information. It is argued that, as would be expected for a Welsh text, the basic order is VSO, but also, and more importantly, that the text does not contain 'archaic' evidence of any earlier, different basic orders. Rather it is argued that word-order variation in the text can be rigorously analysed in terms of a model of functional syntax which is sensitive to both the pragmatics of the text and the semantics of the predications involved. In the light of these results, argumentation concerning historical syntax and especially reconstruction of syntax are evaluated, both in the field of Celtic and in wider cross-language perspective. Finally, the edition of the finite clauses of the text is followed by a number of notes discussing historical and synchronic aspects of the material presented, with particular emphasis on morphology and etymology.

The first of Chekhov's full-length dramas, Ivanov treads a fine line between broad comedy and tragic melodrama.

An early gem from the creator of the Kurt Wallander series, charting the life of a principled man through tragedy, heartbreak, true love and the battle for a nation's soul. "A very engaging portrait . . . There is a powerful lack of sentimentality to the telling of the story [and] a lovely and genuinely moving love story at the heart of the book." Liam Heylin, Irish Examiner At 3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in 1911, Oskar Johansson is caught in a blast in an industrial accident. The local newspaper reports him dead, but they are mistaken. Because Oskar Johansson is a born survivor. Though crippled, Oskar finds the strength to go on living and working. The Rock Blaster charts his long professional life - his hopes and dreams, sorrows and joys. His relationship with the woman whose love saved him, with the labour movement that gave him a cause to believe in, and with his children, who do not share his ideals. Henning Mankell's first published novel is steeped in the burning desire for social justice that informed his bestselling crime novels. Remarkably assured for a debut, it is written with scalpel-like precision, at once poetic and insightful in its depiction of a true working-class hero. Translated from the Swedish by George Goulding

A children's classic comes to life in an enchanting dramatization narrated by Alan Bennett.   Enter the world of the great river and meet the marvelous riverbank animals: the poetic Rat, his friend Mole, and the boastful Toad, as they voyage down the river and into the Wild Wood to great adventures!  This
exclusive BBC production features a full cast, authentic sound effects and sweeping music to warm hearts young and old.  

From the Georgics of Virgil to Flaubert's landscapes of happiness, Ullrich Langer argues that lyric representation holds a particular power to address our humanity. Ranging across a vast chronology, the book investigates how such poetry and prose activates our capacities for empathy, equity, irony and reasoning, while educating us in pleasure and helping us comprehend death. Each chapter constitutes a fresh encounter with some of the most celebrated texts of European literary history, demonstrating how the lyrical works, and what it elicits in us. Through deft rhetorical and philological analysis, the study presents the value of literary studies for both ethical purposes and aesthetic ends.

This work explores Dickens's perception of Italy as it appears in the travel book Pictures from Italy. Corpus methodologies, alongside the notion of intersectionality, display the writer's multi-faceted interpretation of the Italians and his efforts to highlight their multidimensionality and heterogeneity. The book debates that Pictures from Italy departs from conventions - it investigates the function of travel in the construction of Italian identity and discusses Dickens's relationship with Italy. Corpus linguistics methodologies analyse the language of the book and shed newlight on the relationship between body language and culture.

William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing examines the many physical texts in Faulkner's novels and stories from letters and telegrams to Bibles, billboards, and even the alphabetic shape of airport runways. Current investigations in print culture, book history, and media studies often emphasize the controlling power of technological form; instead, this book demonstrates how media should be understood in the context of its use. Throughout Faulkner's oeuvre, various kinds of writing become central to characters forming a sense of the self as well as bonds of intimacy, while ideologies of race and gender connect to the body through the vehicle of writing. This book combines close reading analysis of Faulkner's fiction with the publication history of his works that together offer a case study about what it means to live in a world permeated by media.

Examining the research possibilities, debates and challenges posed by the emerging field of genetic translation studies, this book demonstrates how, both theoretically and empirically, genetic criticism can shed much-needed light on translators' archives, the translator figure and the creative process of translation. Genetic Translation Studies analyses a diverse range of translation materials including manuscripts, typographical proofs, personal papers, letters, testimonies and interviews in order to give visibility, body and presence to translators. Chapters draw on translations of works by authors such as Saint-John Perse, Nikos Kazantzakis, Rene Char, Antonio Lobo Antunes and Camilo Castelo Branco, in each case revealing the conflicts and collaborations between translators and other stakeholders, including authors, editors and publishers. Covering an impressive array of language contexts, from Portuguese, English and French to Greek, Finnish, Polish and Sanskrit, this book demonstrates the value of the genetic turn in translation studies and offers new ways of working with translator correspondences.

The first detailed treatment of Switzerland in British literature and culture from Joseph Addison to John Ruskin, this book analyzes the aesthetic and political uses of what is commonly called the 'Swiss myth' in the parallel development of Romanticism and liberalism. The myth merged the country's legends going back to the Middle Ages with the Enlightenment image of a happy, free nation of alpine shepherds. Its unique combination of conservative, progressive, and radical associations enabled writers before the French Revolution to call for democratic reforms, whereas those coming after could refigure it as a conservative alternative to French liberte. Integrating intellectual history with literary studies, and addressing a wide range of Romantic-period texts and authors, among them Byron, the Shelleys, Hemans, Scott, Coleridge, and, above all, Wordsworth, the book argues that the myth contributed to the liberal idea of the people as a sublime yet sleeping sovereign.

This book reveals a synergy between postsecularity - as a critique of emergent liberal secular ideals and practices - and the modern literary sphere, in which conservative writers feature prominently. Corrinne Harol argues boldly yet compellingly that influential literary forms and practices including fiction, mental freedom, worlding, reading, narration, and historical fiction are in fact derived from these writers' responses to secularization. Interrogating a series of concepts - faith, indulgence, figuring, reading, passivity, revolution, and nostalgia - central to secular culture, this study also engages with works by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Margaret Cavendish and Walter Scott, as well as attending to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Edmund Burke. Countering eighteenth-century studies' current overreliance on the secularization narrative (as content and method, fact and norm), this book models how a postsecular approach can help us to understand this period, and secularization itself, more fully.

Offering an innovative perspective on early modern debates concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The letters in Plautus are potent tools for making and thinking about Plautine comedy inside Plautine comedy. Emilia Barbiero demonstrates that Plautus' embedded letters reify the internal performance and evince its theatricality by means of the epistolary medium's script-like ability to precipitate presence in absence. These missives thus serve as emblems of the dramatic script, and in their onstage composition and recitation they cast a portrait of the plays' textual origins into the plays themselves. But by virtue of their inscription with a premise which is identical to that of the comedies they inhabit, the Plautine letters also reproduce the relationship between the playwright's Greek models and his Latin translations: the mirror effect created by a dramatic text inscribed, read and realized within a dramatic text whose plot it also duplicates generates a mise-en-abyme which ultimately serves to contemplate problems of novelty and literary ownership that beset Plautus' literary endeavor.

In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.