Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical and theoretical debates about the body, desire, gender, print and manuscript culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia, Wroth's Urania, Lyly's Euphues; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, Johnson, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about early modern sexualities, the gendering of labor, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.

Anne Tyler is one of America's most significant contemporary writers. This book is a solid introduction to her life and work. It includes the first biography of Tyler, along with a record of her writings and the response to her work. It incorporates source materials from the Anne Tyler Papers at Duke University and letters from Tyler to the author. The volume lists all of Tyler's novels, short stories, articles, and book reviews and provides an annotated bibliography of critical studies. The first half of the book is a biography of Tyler. The author describes her childhood in a North Carolina commune, her high school years in Raleigh, her college years at Duke, and her earliest writing efforts. The biography charts the development of her life and career through her marriage, motherhood, early novels and stories, her life in Baltimore and career as a book reviewer, her rise to fame, and the themes of her major works. The bibliography that follows lists her novels, short stories, nonfiction articles and essays, poetry, children's books, book reviews, and the manuscripts in her papers at Duke University, along with an annotated secondary bibliography.

This collection of essay by leading scholars in the field reveals the major contribution of puritan women to the intellectual culture of the early modern period, showing that women's roles with puritan and broader communities encompassed translating and disseminating key texts and producing an impressive body of original writing.

What do fictional representations of older women add to our understanding of a group of individuals often marginalized in our youth-oriented society? Starting from an overview of 19th-century women's fiction, this book explores this and other questions through close readings of the work of major 20th-century women novelists, considered in relation to these non-fictional perceptions.

Pearl Buck made important contributions as a humanitarian and an advocate of racial equality and women's rights. She did much to change American attitudes toward persons with mental retardation and toward mixed-race children. She was a major force in shaping American views of Asia, particularly China, during the 1930s and 1940s. Until 1993, she was first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 13 essays in this book, the first such collection on Buck to be published in the United States, view her from historical, humanitarian, and literary perspectives.

This book examines three examples of late nineteenth-century Japanese adaptations of Western literature: a biography of Ulysses S. Grant recasting him as a Japanese warrior, a Victorian novel reset as oral performance, and an American melodrama redone as a serialized novel promoting the reform of Japanese theater. Miller argues that adaptation (hon’an ) was a valid form of contemporary Japanese translation that fostered creative appropriation across genres and among a diverse group of writers and artists.

Cormac McCarthy's significance in the field of contemporary American fiction is enormous. Harold Bloom has called him one of the greatest living American writers, and named him one of the three most important authors of the 20th century. His impact has been even greater in the 21st century. He won the American Book Award for All the Pretty Horses (1991), the Pulitzer Prize for The Road (2006), and his influence on contemporary American literature has been compared to that of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, while The Guardian likened the language of The Road to that ofBeckett and Yeats. This collection of new critical perspectives on three of McCarthy's most widely studied novels - All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road - provides a wide-ranging introduction to the different interpretations of his work. Introductions to each set of essays encourage readers to see connections and contrasts between different approaches and comprehensive Further Reading will help students to take their study further.

Providing an access to the main facts of Edgar Allan Poe's life and career, this work should be of service to the student, scholar or general reader who wishes to check a point quickly without referring to the detailed narratives offered by the standard biographies. The chronology includes details of Poe's works, both of those published in his lifetime and those which appeared posthumously. There is a full index of persons, places and works referred to. In this work, the author offers a chronology of Poe which takes into account the latest research into his life and times, and provides an insight into the background, life and work of this literary figure.

Working at the intersections of feminist literary criticism, new historicism, and narratology, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing, 1792-1897 revises current understandings of 19th Century representations of prostitution, female sexuality, and the "rights of women" debate. Eberle's project explores the connections and disjunctures between women writing during the Romantic period and those working throughout the Victorian era. Roxanne Eberle considers a wide range of authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Grand.

A socio-cultural analysis of the relationship between modernism and science fiction, from the 1870s to the 1970s, with examples drawn from literature and other media in Britain, Europe and the Americas. The book challenges how high and low culture has been mapped in the twentieth century.

This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR and the literariness of its literature. The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature,but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monae. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term "posthuman blackness" to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory - an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality - in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved. Reading neo-slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.

In a constantly changing world, individuals are forever growing to meet the challenges and developments that emerge around them. In contemporary society, technology is at the heart of change. Literature, too, reflects the evolution of culture and increasingly represents and considers technology. And as children become young adults, their reading helps shape their understanding of the world. This book examines representative works of science fiction, children's literature, and popular culture to show how these works reflect the process of growing up in a technological world. The volume looks at the simple picture books and comic books that appeal to small children; the formulaic adventures that fascinate older children; the films and television programs that are watched by children and young adolescents; the music videos and programming that appeal to young adults; and the popular novels that interest older readers. Included are discussions of Superman, the Hardy Boys, Star Trek, science fiction films, and music videos. The book points to similarities among popular culture, science fiction, and children's literature and demonstrates the relevance of these works to contemporary society.

To better understand and contextualise the twilight of the Gothic genre during the 1920s and 1830s, "The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade" examines the disreputable aspects of the Gothic trade from its horrid bluebooks to the desperate hack writers who created the short tales of terror. From the Gothic publishers to the circulating libraries, this study explores the conflict between the canon and the twilight, and between the disreputable and the moral.

Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art explores the genesis, development, and religious significance of a literary and iconographic motif, involving a gang of urchins, usually male, who mock or assault a holy or eccentric person, typically an adult. Originating in the biblical tale of Elisha's mockery ( Kings 2.23-24), this motif recurs in literature, hagiography, and art, from antiquity up to our own time, strikingly defying the conventional Judeo-Christian and Romantic image of the child as a symbol of innocence.

Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images -- characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images. J. B. Bullen explores this fascinating link between the image and the idea in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, and demonstrates how Hardy approached his work from a particular "point of view" which not only determined the lighting, composition, and structure of his literary visual effects, but which also allowed him to express emotions and ideas in the direct, "vividly visible" fashion that is the hallmark of his greatest fiction.

One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County--based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi--he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including "A Rose For Emily" and "Barn Burning," and the longer stories "The Bear," "Spotted Horses," and "The Old Man" that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.

• The Unvanquished
• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
• Absalom, Absalom!
• Selected short stories

This study examines James Herriot's five major books as carefully crafted volumes of autobiography based on the building block of the short story. In each of these works Herriot explores the fundamental choice of values underlying a happy and successful life. In his vision the bonds of affection and mutual dependence between all creatures, human and animal, form an enduring theme that lies at the heart of the choices he makes in his personal and professional life. This study will help the reader to understand the relationship between Herriot's stories and each book as a whole and to appreciate Herriot's work in the context of twentieth-century anxieties about identity and meaning.

Following a biographical chapter that describes the relationship between Herriot's life and literary work, Rossi discusses the genre of autobiography, the relationship between truth and fiction in modern autobiography, and Herriot's use of the genre. A separate chapter is then devoted to each of Herriot's works in turn: "All Creatures Great and Small," "All Things Bright and Beautiful," "All Things Wise and Wonderful," "The Lord God Made Them All," and DEGREES"Every Living Thing." The discussion of each work includes sections on plot development and narrative structure, character development, thematic issues, and alternative critical approaches that may be fruitfully applied to the book. Helpful appendices contain identifications of minor characters in the works. A complete bibliography of all of James Herriot's works, critical sources, and a listing of reviews of all of his works completes the volume. Because of the popularity of Herriot's work among adults and young adults this companion will be a key purchase for school and public libraries.

Doeblin's texts, which range widely across contemporary discourses, are paradigms of the encounter between literary and scientific modernity. With their use of 'Tatsachenphantasie', they explode conventional language, seeking a new connection with the world of objects and things. This volume reassesses and reevaluates the uniquely interdisciplinary quality of Doeblin's interdiscursive, factually-inspired poetics by offering challenging new perspectives on key works. The volume analyses not only some of Doeblin's best-known novels and stories, but also neglected works including his early medical essays, political journalism and autobiographical texts. Other topics addressed are Doeblin's engagement with German history; his relation to medical discourse; his topography of Berlin; his aestheticisation of his own biography and his relation to other major writers such as Heine, Benn, Brecht and Sebald. With contributions in English and in German by scholars from Germany and the United Kingdom, the volume presents insights into Doeblin that are of value to advanced researchers and to students alike.

In recent years, much Spanish literary criticism has been characterized by debates about collective and historical memory, stemming from a national obsession with the past that has seen an explosion of novels and films about the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. This growth of so-called memory studies in literary scholarship has focused on the representation of memory and trauma in contemporary narratives dealing with the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship. In contrast, the novel of the postwar period has received relatively little critical attention of late, despite the fact that memory and trauma also feature, in different ways and to varying degrees, in many works written during the Franco years. The essays in this study argue that such novels merit a fresh critical approach, and that contemporary scholarship relating to the representation of memory and trauma in literature can enhance our understanding of the postwar Spanish novel. The volume opens with essays that engage with aspects of contemporary theoretical approaches to memory in order to reveal the ways in which these are pertinent to Spanish novels written in the first postwar decades, with studies on novels by Camilo Jose Cela, Carmen Laforet, Arturo Barea and Ana Maria Matute. Its second section focuses on the representation of trauma in specific postwar novels, drawing on elements from trauma studies scholarship to discuss neglected works by Mercedes Salisachs, Dolores Medio and Ignacio Aldecoa. The final essays continue the focus on the theme of trauma and revisit works by women writers, namely Carmen Laforet, Rosa Chacel, Ana Maria Matute and Maria Zambrano, that foreground the experiences of female protagonists who are seeking to deal with a traumatic past. The essays in this volume thus propose a new direction for the study of Spanish literature of 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, enhancing existing approaches to the postwar Spanish novel through an engagement with contemporary scholarship on memory and trauma in literature."

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The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power. Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire. This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century.

For Henry Fielding, 'storytelling', whether in the form of a play, essay or novel, was a means of transmuting the dross of his own experiences.

In this important new critical biography, Ronald Paulson brilliantly demonstrates how Fielding's life and writings evolved according to his experiments with different professions. It is not sufficient to say that he moved from one literary genre to the next, from drama to essay, from satire to novel. As a playwright and theater manager he thematized the theater and its workings in his writings, moving on to do the same as a journalist, barrister, and finally magistrate. Tom Jones, for example, can be interpreted as a self-projection, seen from the perspective of a barrister, an advocate for the defense; or Billy Booth as a conflation of the author and his father, seen now from the perspective of a grim but just magistrate.

Each chapter in this intriguing book begins with an annotated chronology of the known facts, followed by analyses of the important issues. Paulson's account will be essential reading for all admirers of Fielding as well as serious students of his work.

Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres. This book is an examination of the literary, social, and political significance of the lives and writings of aristocratic women in the mid-Victorian period.