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.

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.

In Voicing Memory Nick Nesbitt argues that the aesthetic practices of twentieth-century French Caribbean writers reconstruct a historical awareness that had been lost amid the repressive violence of slavery, the plantation system, and colonial exploitation. Drawing on the work of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin, Maryse Conde, and Edwidge Danticat, he shows how these writers use the critical force of the aesthetic imagination to transform the parameters of Antillean experience.

The author takes the aesthetic practices of the black Atlantic--Antillean poetry, literature, and theater, but also Haitian vodou and visual arts, American jazz, and West African musical traditions--to constitute the models informing this Caribbean vernacular historiography. At the same time, Nesbitt shows how concepts from Cesaire's "negritude" to Glissant's "relation" critically rework European theoretical influences to construct a black Atlantic historical self-consciousness. In so doing, Nesbitt points beyond the regionalism of Antillean exoticism to describe French Caribbean literature as a decisive intervention in the construction of a global modernity.

New World Studies

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 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.

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.

`Is there one who understands me?' So wrote James Joyce towards the end of his final work, Finnegans Wake. The question continues to be asked about the author who claimed that he had put so many enigmas into Ulysses that it would `keep the professors busy for centuries' arguing over what he meant. For Joyce this was a way of ensuring his immortality, but it could also be claimed that the professors have served to distance Joyce from his audience, turning his writings into museum pieces, pored over and admired, but rarely touched. In this remarkable book, steeped in the learning gained from a lifetime's reading, David Pierce blends word, life and image to bring the works of one of the great modern writers within the reach of every reader. With a sharp eye for detail and an evident delight in the cadences of Joyce's work, Pierce proves a perfect companion, always careful and courteous, pausing to point out what might otherwise be missed. Like the best of critics, his suggestive readings constantly encourage the reader back to Joyce's own words. Beginning with Dubliners and closing with Finnegans Wake, Reading Joyce is full of insights that are original and illuminating, and Pierce succeeds in presenting Joyce as an author both more straightforward and infinitely more complex than we had perhaps imagined. T. S. Eliot wrote of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, that it is `a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape'. With David Pierce as a guide, the debt we owe to Joyce becomes clearer, and the need to flee is greatly reduced.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word. Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

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.

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.