Clareson reveals the interplay between literary expressionism and intellectual history and shows how science fiction was a popular response to world events during the period 1870-1930. He emphasizes that at least before World War II, the predominant tone of American science fiction was optimistic and that one way or another--through advanced technology or a return to primitiveness--the writers were going to produce Some Kind of Paradise.

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."

This account of Orwell's life is chiefly concerned with what influenced Orwell, his relations with publishers and editors, and the analysis of certain key experiences. These include the deposition that during the Spanish Civil War he was guilty of espionage and high treason; his work at the BBC; his interest in pamphlet literature; and his time as a war correspondent. The work offers an assessment of his earnings from 1922 to 1945, and a look at his attitudes of class, women and religious belief. Special attention is paid to his essays.

After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.

Imagine reading a classic novel like James Joyce's "Ulysses" as though for the first time. Such an exercise, especially when informed by contemporary narrative theory, makes possible a different reading experience of the work, one with a renewed focus on plot and a surprising amount of suspense. Veteran Joyce scholar Margot Norris offers an innovative study of the processes of reading "Ulysses" as narrative and focuses on the unexplored implications, subplots, subtexts, hidden narratives, and narratology in one of the twentieth century's most influential novels. It is a striking and essential contribution to literary criticism that will change the readings and understandings of Joyce's most important work.

Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yade Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Gunter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Muller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality; yet any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Drawing on feminist and new historicist methodologies, Catherine Waters argues that Dickens' novels record a shift in notions of the family away from stress on the importance of lineage and blood toward a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

Jane Austen and the State of the Nation explores Jane Austen's references to politics and to political economics and concludes that Austen was a liberal Tory who remained consistent in her political agenda throughout her career as a novelist. Read with this historical background, Austen's books emerge as state-of-the-nation or political novels.

Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as "The Comforters" (1957), DEGREESThe Public Image" (1968), "The Driver's Seat" (1970), "Reality and Dreams" (1996), and "Aiding and Abetting" (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction.

The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.

Critical Essays on William Faulkner compiles scholarship by noted Faulkner studies scholar Robert W. Hamblin. Ranging from 1980 to 2020, the twenty-one essays present a variety of approaches to Faulkner's work. While acknowledging Faulkner as the quintessential southern writer-particularly in his treatment of race-the essays examine his work in relation to American and even international contexts. The volume includes discussions of Faulkner's techniques and the psychological underpinnings of both the origin and the form of his art; explores how his writing is a means of "saying 'no' to death"; examines the intertextual linkages of his fiction with that of other writers like Shakespeare, Twain, Steinbeck, Warren, and Salinger; treats Faulkner's use of myth and his fondness for the initiation motif; and argues that Faulkner's film work in Hollywood is much better and of far greater value than most scholars have acknowledged. Taken as a whole, Hamblin's essays suggest that Faulkner's overarching themes relate to time and consequent change. The history of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stretches from the arrival of the white settlers on the Mississippi frontier in the early 1800s to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. Caught in this world of continual change that produces a great degree of uncertainty and ambivalence, the Faulkner character (and reader) must weigh the traditions of the past with the demands of the present and the future. As Faulkner acknowledges, this process of discovery and growth is a difficult and sometimes painful one; yet, as Hamblin attests, to engage in that quest is to realize the very essence of what it means to be human.

This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction. Studying this debate reveals a set of local literary histories, based on both canonical and non-canonical texts, that complicate received notions of the didactic Middle Ages, the sophisticated Renaissance, and the fallow fifteenth century in between.

Fiction can be a powerful force to educate students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. This anthology includes articles from a number of individuals from a range of different disciplines and perspectives. All of the contributors to Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature are committed to treating literary texts with integrity and believe that business should have a larger claim upon people's literary consciousness. In addition, they all value the important role of literature in dealing with the complexities of a capitalist culture. This collection of essays provides a means to appreciate the richness and variety of fictional portrayals of businesses and businesspersons. The works selected for examination reflect the variety of philosophical, political, economic, cultural, social, and ethical perspectives that have been found over time in American society. The novels and plays analyzed include high literature, mid-range literature, popular literature, ancient epics, grand narratives, hero tales, masterpieces, ideological texts, science fiction, and more. There are a great many works of literature waiting to be read and studied by business and economically-minded individuals from many different viewpoints and fields of study. This volume provides a space to explore a wide range of fictional works and opinions about them.

An unusual grouping of mainly British writers, this insightful study includes some, like Henry James, who are indisputably leaders of the canon regardless of genre, and others, like Algernon Blackwood, who wrote almost exclusively in the supernatural; all, however, were clearly masters of this genre. The author, Edward Wagenknecht, writes from a long lifetime of scholarly study and publishing, thoroughly internalized familiarity with all of the exemplary works chosen for examination, and personal friendship fostered by extensive epistolary intercourse with two of the subjects, Walter de la Mare and Marjorie Bowen. The seven chapters on the individual writers each examine plot, character, mood, and setting in a traditional sense, sparked by personal observations and unique comparisons. Each study is preceded by a biographical sketch and documented by comprehensive bibliography and notes. In the case of the less studied writers, like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, these chapters may be the fullest accounts ever published. For all, Wagenknecht combines a fan's appreciation with a scholar's insights to produce an important and enjoyable book.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpiecesGCo The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied herGCoranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environmentGCobut also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility.

This volume examines a wide variety of the ways in which the fantastic has impacted upon contemporary women's fiction. Some of the issues addressed include: the importance of the cyborg and the spectre to critical and fictional discourses of gender; the interface between the grotesque and contemporary readings of feminist utopianism; and the growing similarity between late 20th century gothicism and the magical real. The study is based upon the work of 15 writers and includes novels by Allende, Atwood, Carter, Head, Morrison, Weldon, Winterson and Wittig.

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte's literary representations of illness and disease reflect the major role illness played in the lives of the Victorians and its frequent reoccurrence within the Brontes' personal lives. An in-depth analysis of the history of nineteenth-century medicine provides the necessary cultural context to understand these representations, giving modern readers a sense of how health, illness, and the body were understood in Victorian England. Together, medical anthropology and the history of medicine offer a useful lens with which to understand Victorian texts. Reading the Bronte Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Bronte novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

This is one of the first books to comprehensively explore representations of madness in postwar British and American Fiction. The five authors come from diverse backgrounds - literary studies, social psychology, medical psychiatry and psychiatric nursing - and as such the book's perspectives are informed through several discourses, making it a unique co-authored text in the discipline of Health Humanities. The book looks at representations of madness in a range of texts by postwar writers (such as Ken Kesey, Marge Piercy, Patrick McGrath, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Golding, Patrick Gale, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, to name a few), and explores the ways in which these representations help to shape public perceptions and experiences of mental disorder.
This book is relevant to both those with interests in literary studies and a vital read for psychiatric clinicians and professionals who are interested in how literature can inform and enhance clinical practices.

A revisionist study of Mansfield as a profoundly colonial yet daringly experimental writer, at the forefront of modernism. The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended her artistic influences through a supreme understanding of voice, being and subjectivity.

This resounding defence of the principles of free expression revisits the 'Satanic Verses' uproar of 1989, as well as subsequent incidents such as the Danish cartoons controversy, to argue that the human right of free speech is by no means so secure that it can be taken for granted.

Myths of Power - Anniversary Edition sets out to interpret the fiction of the Bronte sisters in light of a Marxist analysis of the historical conditions in which it was produced. Its aim is not merely to relate literary facts, but by a close critical examination of the novels, to find in them a significant structure of ideas and values which related to the Brontes' ambiguous situation within the class-system of their society. Its intention is to forge close relations between the novels, nineteenth-century ideology, and historical forces, in order to illuminate the novels themselves in a radically new perspective. When originally published in 1975 (second edition in 1988), it was the first full-length Marxist study of the Brontes and is now reissued to celebrate 30 years since its first publication. It includes a new Introduction by Terry Eagleton which reflects on the changes which have happened in Marxist literary criticism since 1988, and situates this reissue of the second edition in current debates.

Appearing in book form for the first time, this treasure trove of letters illuminates the life of the beloved poet/writer from early childhood into middle age.

All her life, May Sarton carried on a voluminous private correspondence—with family, friends, and lovers. From the beginning, as these remarkable letters show, the essence of an extraordinary human being was present, her gifts ready to unfurl and mature.

Fittingly, an early letter thanks parents for books. Later we enter the world of the theater, then years rich with study, travel, teaching, and the discipline of craft. Sarton's deep anguish as World War II approaches pervades many letters, but readers will also encounter the things that gave Sarton joy: her love of flowers, her affection for animals, her celebration of beauty in all its guises.

As Sarton divides her time between America and Europe, in an era when ocean voyages were the norm, illustrious acquaintances and intimates are introduced, among them Eva Le Gallienne, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian and Juliette Huxley, and Louise Bogan. Always, Sarton's voice is clear and courageous, startlingly candid about her passions, her moods, and her vulnerabilities. Her words, seeming as fresh as when they were written, stand against the backdrop of the crucial events of the century as she invites old and new readers into her personal world.

"Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature" argues that the outskirts of cities have become spaces for a new literature beyond boundaries of traditional notions of nation, class, and gender. These new constructions of dwellings and neighborhoods house new notions of the roles of women in the working class, a reconception paralleled by the use of the sorts of textual innovations once presumed to be the territory of metropolitan elites. Chapters on James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway, and Eoin McNamee examine appropriations of voice, shifts in narrative perspective, and strategic uses of local vernacular as techniques that characterize the explosion of working-class literary production in Scotland and Ireland in the eighties and nineties.

This book is the first full-length biographical and critical study of the American Realist author Harold Frederic (1856-1898). As London correspondent for the New York Times and the author of nine novels, Frederic was internationally known at the time of his death; today he is remembered mainly for his novel "The Damnation of Theron Ware" (1896). Drawing on archival and published material not available to earlier writers on Frederic, Myers paints a fascinating portrait of the man and his times as an expatriate in London in the 1890s, his friendship with James, Crane, Wells, and their circle, and the scandal surrounding his death at the age of 42.

Frederic was a colorful fellow. As a correspondent in London in the 1890s, he knew Henry James, Stephen Crane, George Gissing, and a host of other literary characters. He fully lived a bohemian life, keeping a real wife and a common-law wife simultaneously, fathering broods of children, writing journalism and novels at a great rate, and dying at 42 of overwork--partly because he let his second wife talk him into refusing medical help (leading to a scandalous court case). Myers concentrates on four main themes: Frederic as an expatriate; his work as representative of the transition from realism to naturalism in American literature; Frederic as a transitional author in the shift from 19th century to 20th century styles of publishing; and Frederic as a representative of the fin de siecle. Myers has worked extensively with Frederic's correspondence as well as in publishers' archives (especially Scribner's), and he sees Frederic as a writer who flourished just as the American literary marketplace was being transformed from the rather poky 19th-century model into the faster-paced 20th-century version so familiar today. This biography will interest not just specialists and Frederic scholars, but also anyone with an interest in American literary culture in one of its defining moments.