This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land .

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.

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism offers a typology of alien encounters and addresses a range of texts including classic novels of alien encounter by H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein; recent blockbusters by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler and Sheri Tepper; and experimental science fiction by Peter Watts and Housuke Nojiri.

Scholarly interest in 'the Irish Gothic' has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, but the debate over exactly what constitutes this body of literature remains far from settled. This collection of essays explores the rich complexities of the literary gothic in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland.

The "invisible hand," Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

This study of selected literary and cinematic works by Michael Ondaatje investigates the political potential of the Canadian authors aesthetics. Contributing to current debates about affect and representation, ideology critique and the artwork, trauma and testimony, this book uses the concept of the haptic to demonstrate how Ondaatjes multisensory, fluid and historically inflected writing can forge an enabling relationship between audience, author and text. This is where Ondaatjes micropolitics, often misconstrued as ideologically suspect aestheticism, emerges: a praxis that intimates how one can write and read politically with a difference.

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.

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.

This collection demonstrates how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920 witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, finding common ground in the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism.

This study of the long and varied afterlife of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, primarily in the overlapping arenas of children's and popular culture, offers new insights into not only the continued popularity and relevance of Crusoe's story, but into how modern conceptions of childhood have been shaped by nostalgia and by ideas of 'the popular.' Because it enjoyed such tremendous success as a pedagogical work for children and as a source for children's and popular entertainments, Robinson Crusoe provides a unique case study in the development of our ideas of childhood and the points of intersection between children's and popular cultures. Drawing on a wide range of adaptations and remediations, including children's abridgements, print 'robinsonades, ' chapbooks, popular songs, pantomimes, toys, games, and various consumer items, this book offers a fresh consideration of the place Crusoe has occupied in our culture for almost three centuries.

This study of Dickens in relation to his period shows how deeply he reflected its vibrant novelty, and how his works transform the social and cultural stimuli of the time - technological enterprise, urbanization, class mobility, the sense of profound difference from the preceding age - into a new and flexible fictional form.

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

This book reveals a "female sexual economy" in the marketplace of contemporary short fiction which locates a struggle for sexual power between mothers and daughters within a larger struggle to pursue that to pursue that object of the American dream: "whiteness."

Katherine Mansfield had a career-long engagement with the literary marketplace from the age of eighteen. This book examines how she developed as a writer within a range of book and periodical publishing contexts, reconsidering her writing's enactment of a commercially viable modern aesthetic in her experimentation with the short story form.

H. G. Wells was one of the most influential authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best remembered today as the author of classic works of science fiction, such as The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon. He was also the author of The Outline of World History, an ambitious chronicle of the world from antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century. Through essays and reviews, this volume traces the critical reception of his works. An introductory essay overviews Wells's literary career and provides a context for understanding his works. Each of the sections that follow treats one of his major works, according to the publication date of his story. Within each section are reviews, essays, or excerpts that exemplify the critical response to that particular work from the time of its appearance to the present day. A bibliography at the end of the volume lists the most important modern critical studies of Wells and indicates the tremendous contemporary interest in Wells as an author.

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.

On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment-the pillory-that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity-ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony-may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.

A truly cosmopolitan Irish writer, George Moore (1852-1933) was a fascinating figure of the fin de siecle, moving between countries, crossing genre and medium boundaries, forever exploring and promulgating aesthetic trends and artistic developments: Naturalism in the novel and the theatre, Impressionism in painting, Decadence and the avant-garde, Literary Wagnerism, the Irish Literary Revival, New Woman culture. This volume on border-crossings offers a variety of critical perspectives to approach Moore's multifaceted oeuvre and personality. The essays by contributors from various national backgrounds and from a wide range of disciplines establish original points of contact between literary creation, art history, Wagnerian opera, gender studies, sociology, and altogether reposition Moore as a major representative of European turn-of-the-century culture.

OrIoff shows that Cortazar did not become a political writer as a result of the Cuban Revolution, as is often claimed, but rather that the representation of the political was present in Cortazar's very first writings. The book analyses the evolution of the representation of distinct political elements throughout Cortazar's writings, mainly with reference to the novels and the so-called collage books, which have so far received only limited critical attention. The author also alludes to some short stories and refers to many of Cortazar's non-literary texts. Through this chosen corpus, the book follows a thematic thread, showing that politics was present in Cortazar's fiction from his very first writings, and not - as he himself tended to claim - only following his conversion to socialism. The study aims to show that contrary to what many critics have argued, this political conversion did not divide the writer into an irreconcilable before and after - the apolitical versus the political - but rather it simply shifted the emphasis of the representation of the political that already existed in Cortazar's writings. Carolina Orloff is an independent scholar working on research projects in the UK and in Argentina.

Noted Asian Americanist Sau-ling C. Wong presents a thought-provoking overview of critical issues surrounding Kingston's contemporary classic, such as reception by various interpretive communities, canon formation, cultural authenticity, fictionality in autobiography, and feminist and poststructuralist subjectivity. Eight critical essays are supplemented by headnotes, an interview, and an annotated bibliography.

From the early 1970s, working class writing and publishing in local communities rapidly proliferated into a national movement. This book is the first full evaluation of these developments and opens up new perspectives on literature, culture, class and identity over the past 50 years. Its origins are traced in the context of international shifts in class politics, civil rights, personal expression and cultural change. The writing of young people, older people, adult literacy groups as well as writing workshops is analysed. Thematic chapters explore how audiences consumed this work, the learning of writers, the fierce debates over identity, class and organisation, as well as changing relations with mainstream institutions. The book is accessibly written but engages with a wide range of scholarly work in history, education, cultural studies, literature and sociology. It will be of interest to lecturers and students in these areas as well as the general reader. -- .

As the first essay collection dedicated to Philip K. Dick in two decades, this volume breaks new ground in science fiction scholarship and brings innovative critical perspectives to the study of one of the twentieth century's most influential authors.

Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony.

Rococo Fiction in France reconfigures the history of the "long eighteenth century" by revealing the rococo as a literary phenomenon that characterized a range of experimental texts from the end of the French Renaissance to the eve of the French Revolution. Tracing the literary rococo's evolution from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, and exploring its radicalization during the 1670s, '80s, and '90s, Allison Stedman unearths the seventeenth century rococo's counter-vision for the trajectory of the French monarchy and the dawn of the French Enlightenment. The first part of the study investigates the relationship between Montaigne's philosophy of literary production and those of early seventeenth-century "table-talk" novelists, libertine writers, and playwrights involved in the quarrel over Corneille's play Le Cid. She thus establishes the existence of a rococo philosophy of literary production whose goal was to innovate, to bring pleasure, and to create communities. The second part of the study explores the impact that the Duchess de Montpensier's literary portrait galleries, Jean Donneau de Vise's periodical the Mercure Galant, and other forms of rococo literary production-by such authors as Charles Sorel, Alcide de Saint-Maurice, J.N. de Parvial and Jean de Prechac-had in the creation of a textually mediated social sphere that served as the foundation of the publicly critical culture of the French Enlightenment. The study concludes with an investigation of the influx of salon sociability into the textually mediated social sphere during the 1690s. Stedman examines the role of interpolated literary fairy tales, proverb plays and other rococo publication strategies-in such late seventeenth-century women writers as d'Aulnoy, Lheritier, Murat, and Durand-in transfiguring the salon from an exclusive social circle mediated by physical presence to an inclusive social diaspora mediated by texts. Rococo Fiction in France challenges established views of early modern French literary history and discusses a range of little known works in a generous and engaging manner.