John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions is an exploration of Banville's novels from the point of view of various psychoanalytic understandings of the concept of narcissism. It presents this increasingly central figure in contemporary fiction as a writer for whom narcissism is both an essential truth of selfhood and a fundamental aspect of the writing of fiction. Though it deals with a number of theoretical concepts, it does so in a straightforward and highly accessible manner. The book is not simply a reading of a single, isolated aspect of Banville's work; rather, it presents narcissism as the key to understanding this writer, and as a way of bringing together the various disparate strands - thematic, stylistic and formal - of his complex and enigmatic oeuvre.

Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader? How did his reading choices respond to his environment? This book looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s and examines the masculine reader and author, and how they challenged feminine middlebrow and literary modernism.

London has become the focus of a ferocious imaginative energy since the rise of Thatcher. "The Making of London" analyses the body of exceptional work by writers who have unconditionally committed their writing to the many lives of a city undergoing complex transformations. The book traces a major shift in the representation of the capital city, from the postmodern obsession with textuality, the shoring up of London's myths against a declining social fabric, and an exuberant multicultural utopia, to an anxious post-9/11 metropolis that has fallen apart. Is London undone? Authors covered include Maureen Duffy, Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.

German sociology--indeed sociology as a discipline--belongs to modern times. This unusual anthology includes works by Theodor W. Adorno, Uta Gerhardt, Jnrgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Karl Ulrich Mayer, Georg Simmel, Roberto Michels, Max Weber, Hans Gerth, Hans Speier, Alfred Schutz, Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim, Theodor Geiger, Ralf Dehrendorf, Rene Konig, Renate Mayntz, Reinhard Bendix, Claus Offe, and Stephan Leibfried. A substantive introductioni by Uta Gerhardt and detailed biographical sketches of the contributors will aid the general reader, student, and scholar alike.

David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of "The Leopard", one of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. "The Leopard" describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory. But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millenial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.

This comprehensive and sophisticated feminist analysis contradicts the negative evaluations of earlier feminist critics to define Oates' feminist accomplishments. Wesley presents Oates' fiction as a dynamic structure that grew out of her obsessive concern with the American family and shows her literary patterns of resistance to the gender ideology that shapes it. She illustrates how Oates' disturbing portrayals of troubled families can and do address complex issues of power in contemporary society--economic dislocation, gender inequity, and violence--as they are experienced in intimate relationships. The author defines and exemplifies the central concepts of family, power, and resistance in Oates' work with reference to her own literary criticism and the theoretical principles of Frederic Jameson. She begins by examining the presentation of the mother and the father in Oates' earliest works and then charts mother and daughter, brother and sister, and other family relationships. Wesley contends that the power dynamics of Oates' families relegate daughters to a position of impotence and sons to one of isolation and shows that the evolution of the children's refusal to identify themselves with their male or female models is a major focus in Oates' fiction.

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.

This book is a critical study of visual representations of Jose Marti-The National Hero of Cuba-, and the discourses of power that make it possible for Marti's images to be perceived as icons today. It argues that an observer of Marti's icons who is immersed in the Cuban national narrative experiences a retrospective reconstruction of those images by means of ideologically formed national discourses of power. Also, the obsessive reproduction of Marti's icons signals a melancholia for the loss of the martyr-hero. But instead of attempting to forget Marti, the book concludes that the utopian impulse of his memory should serve to resist melancholia and to visualize new forms of creative re-significations of Marti and, by extension, the nation. Contents: Gaze, Intentionality, and Manipulation Battling for the National Icon The Filming of a Memory Melancholia for Marti Afterthoughts: Resisting Cuban Melancholia

This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known post-war novelists, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.

This comprehensive introduction places the work of Julian Barnes into historical and theoretical context. Including a timeline of key dates, this guide explores his characteristic literary techniques, offers extensive readings of all ten novels and provides an overview of the varied critical reception his work has provoked.

This book is a comparative study of 12 works of fiction broadly representative of the Western canon. Its aim is to discover what gives these 12 works their lasting appeal and vitality over and beyond their formal qualities. It focuses on the interplay of text and subtext within each work after defining these terms at the outset. It then compares its 12 sample classics systematically in a conclusion that argues from the works themselves to classics in general.

Binion's key finding is that for a piece of fiction to feel deep, whole, and great, as classics do, its text must be underpinned from start to finish by a subtext, or alternative reading, which calls that text itself into question. A book for scholar, student and educated public alike, no serious reader will be able to consider what makes a classic without reference to this work.

Recently voted the best literary work of all time, Cervantes' Don Quixote is widely read by students and has had enormous influence on popular culture. Written by a leading Cervantes scholar yet accessible to students and general readers, this book conveniently introduces Cervantes' masterpiece. Included along with a detailed plot summary are chapters on the novel's background, themes, style, and reception. The volume closes with an extensive bibliographical essay and a selected, general bibliography. In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club, affiliated with the Nobel Prize organization, polled 100 writers from around the world, asking each to name the 10 best works of imaginative literature of all time. Cervantes' Don Quixote, though first published in 1605, was the overwhelming winner. Don Quixote is a favorite among students and general readers alike. It has been translated into more languages than any book other than the bible; adapted to the stage more than any other non-dramatic text; illustrated more than any other novel; and inspired more films than any other literary work. Written by a leading scholar yet accessible to high school students, this guide is an indispensable introduction to the world's most important novel. An introductory chapter overviews Cervantes' life and career and discusses the background of his novel. The book then provides a detailed plot summary of Don Quixote and considers the merits of different editions. It then looks at the cultural and historical contexts surrounding the novel and gives extensive attention to the work's themes, style, and reception. A bibliographical essay and selected, general bibliography of major studies conclude the volume.

Exploring the relationship between fiction and nation formation in the Muslim world through 12 unique studies from Azerbaijan, Libya, Iran, Algeria, and Yemen, amongst others, this book shows how fiction reflects and relates the complex entanglements of nation, religion, and modernity in the process of political and cultural identity formation.

Addressed to all readers of Dostoevsky, as well as to teachers, students, and specialists, this lucidly-written study approaches the underground man, Raskolnikov, and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov as imagined human beings whose feelings, behaviors, and ideas are expressions of their personalities and experience. While asserting the autonomy of Dostoevsky's characters, Paris shows that there is a tension between them and the author's rhetoric and demonstrates that the characters often escape their illustrative roles. By paying close attention to mimetic detail, this book seeks to recover Dostoevsky's psychological intuitions and fully to appreciate his brilliance in characterization.

Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology is the first detailed exploration of Hardy's linguistic `awkwardness', a subject that has long puzzled critics. Dennis Taylor's pioneering study shows that Hardy's language must be understood as a distinctive response to the philological and literary issues of his time. Deeply influenced by the Victorian historical study of language, Hardy deliberately incorporated into his own writing a sense of language's recent and hidden history, its multiple stages and classes, and its arbitrary motivations. Indeed, Taylor argues, Hardy provides an example of how a writer `purifies the dialect of the tribe' by inclusiveness, by heterogeniety, and by a sense of history which distinguishes Hardy from a more ahistorical, synchronic modernist aesthetic and which constitutes an ongoing challenge to literary language. In what is the first major treatment of a writer's relation to the Oxford English Dictionary, the author also examines the influence on Hardy's language of the founding and development in this period of the OED.

Cosmopolitanism and Place considers the way contemporary Anglophone fiction connects global identities with the experience in local places. Looking at fiction set in metropolises, regional cities, and rural communities, this book argues that the everyday experience of these places produces forms of wide connections that emphasize social justice.

Fin-de-Siecle Fictions, 1890s- 1990s focuses on fin-de-siecle British and postmodern American fictions of apocalypse and investigates the ways in which these narratives demonstrate shifts in the relations among modern discourses of power and knowledge.

Recent revisions of the idea of separate spheres, which governed Victorian scholarship of the past two decades, have provoked considerable interest in both domestic and political fiction of the period and in the political dimensions of domestic life. This book challenges arguments about the division of the political from other fictional genres and divisions of the private from the public sphere. It shows that Victorian literature identified the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer came into being. While some thinkers maintained that the rights-bearer is defined by purely formal reasoning, this volume claims that Locke and other educational writers conceived reason as embodying emotion. It looks at works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens to reveal how the emotional relations of the household shaped the political self and how women gained identity as rights-bearers.

The book argues that the intimate space of the household does not exist separately from public, political, and economic domains. It revises generic understandings of political fiction and shows that domestic plots are integral to political plots. This is so because domestic fiction focuses on the cultivation of the liberal self in the household and the disclosure of that self in terms of its vision of the good. The volume concludes that domestic space is the foundation of liberal polity, and that an account of the household in which the liberal self is disclosed is at the heart of both Victorian political fiction and philosophy.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

The decade after 1815 was a period of cultural instability, in which literature was redefined in response to a mass readership. Magazines were a product of and response to a culture that was metropolitan in size and heterogeneity. This book analyses a literary genre that made creative use of a cultural confusion which elsewhere provoked anxiety.

Salman Rushdie's writing is engaged with translation in many ways: translator-figures tell and retell stories in his novels, while acts of translation are catalysts for climactic events. Covering his major novels as well as his often-neglected short stories and writing for children, "Salman Rushdie and Translation" explores the role of translation in Rushdie's work. In this book, Jenni Ramone draws on contemporary translation theory to analyse the part translation plays in Rushdie's appropriation of historical and contemporary Indian narratives of independence and migration.

From Romeo and Juliet to Rebecca, entries treat scores of the most memorable novels and plays, providing information on authors, works, characters, and themes. Coverage is fair and square: men and women get equal time; elite and popular fiction are treated with respect; and minority voices are clearly heard. Classic Love and Romance Literature includes more than 340 A-Z entries that are are thoroughly illustrated, cross-referenced, and indexed. This work accomplishes what the best reference books always do: it sends you back to the originals. Over 340 A-Z entries are thoroughly illustrated, cross-referenced, and indexed