Using a wealth of diverse source material this book comprises an innovative critical study which, for the first time, examines Scott through the filter of his female contemporaries. It not only provides thought-provoking ideas about their handling of, for example, the love-plot, but also produces a different, more sombre Scott.

Long before Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Roddenberry, and Chris Carter, the names of David Lasser, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Hugo Gernsback, and Sam Moskowitz were well known by the first fans of a new kind of fiction. These pioneers were among the visionary individuals who launched the science fiction genre, which today enjoys such wide appeal.

Through exclusive interviews, Eric Leif Davin takes readers back to the late 1920s, when Gernsback, "the father of science fiction," founded the world's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. Lasser, one of Gernsback's editors, recalls his own amazing book The Conquest of Space-the first work in English to seriously probe the possibility of space flight. Other highlights include a discussion with the widow of Stanley G. Weinbaum ("A Martian Odyssey"), the first author to write about an alien in sympathetic terms; talks with the giants of early sci-fi Frank K. Kelly and Raymond Z. Gallun; Wolf Man creator and science fiction script writer Curt Siodmak; pioneer book publisher and writer Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; plus commentary on popular sci-fi magazines.

The lives, experiences, memories, and insights provided in Pioneers of Wonder are a treasure for all fans of this dynamic literary phenomenon.

From its beginnings narratology has incorporated a communicative model of literary narratives, considering these as simulations of natural, oral acts of communication. This approach, however, has had some problems with accounting for the strangeness and anomalies of modern and postmodern narratives. As many skeptics have shown, not even classical realism conforms to the standard set by oral or 'natural' storytelling. Thus, an urge to confront narratology with the difficult task of reconsidering a most basic premise in its theoretical and analytical endeavors has, for some time, been undeniable. During the 2000s, Nordic narratologists have been among the most active and insistent critics of the communicative model. They share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using 'natural' narratives as a model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for all of them, the distinction of fiction is of vital importance. This anthology presents a collection of new articles that deal with strange narratives, narratives of the strange, or, more generally, with the strangeness of fiction, and even with some strange aspects of narratology.

Pearl S. Buck's portrayal of Chinese peasants was the first literary representation, in China as well as in America, of the majority of the Chinese population. Her work changed the image of the Chinese people in the American mind--ultimately facilitating the 1943 repeal of the 61-year-old Chinese Exclusion Act and arousing Americans' support of the Chinese resistance against the Japanese aggression in World War II. From a multicultural point of view, Chinese scholar Kang Liao analyzes Buck's phenomenal success and the ensuing neglect of her works by American critics. Liao's insights into Buck's function as one of the few writers from an age of Eurocentrism who shed light on a new age of multiculturalism will be of interest to both students and scholars interested in race, class, and gender issues.

This scholarly edition presents for the first time all of the known surviving letters of British novelist Sarah Harriet Burney (1772-1884). The overwhelming majority of these letters--more than ninety percent--have never before been published. Burney's accomplishments, says Lorna J. Clark, have been unjustly overlooked. She published five works of fiction between 1796 and 1839, all of which met with reasonable success, including "Traits of Nature" (1812), which sold out within three months. These letters position Burney among her fellow women writers and shed light on her relations with her publisher and her ambivalence toward her own work and her readership. Her lively observation of the literary scene evinces the range and scope of her reading, as well as her awareness of literary trends and developments. Burney was, for example, remarkably prescient in recognizing, and praising from the first, the talent of Jane Austen, and met several of the authors of her day. A challenging new perspective on family matters also emerges in the letters. The youngest child of the second marriage of Charles Burney, and the only daughter to remain unmarried, Sarah Harriet had the unenviable task of caring for her father in his later years. Her letters reveal a darker side of Dr. Burney, and also help to round out our image of a more favored daughter, Sarah Harriet's half-sister (and fellow novelist), Frances Burney. As literature, Clark observes, Burney's letters are, arguably, her best work. Thoroughly versed in the epistolary arts, she sought always to amuse and entertain her correspondents. Burney ultimately emerges as a quiet but heroic single woman, relegated to the margins of society where she struggled for independence and self-respect. Displaying literary qualities and a lively sense of humor, the letters provide a fascinating insight into the literary, political, and social life of the day.

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the beautiful child offers partisans of 'art for art's sake' an emblem for the ecstatic and erotic, even the queer possibilities of art. Aestheticism's erotic child is thus in stark contrast to the innocent child of today's ideology, who secures the claims of identity against the very disorientations celebrated by aestheticism. Articulating aesthetic transport through the desiring and desired child, aestheticism interrogates the ideology underpinning sexual oppression.

Throughout George Eliot's fiction, not only do a remarkable number of her characters act under the influence of unwise consumption of alcohol and opium, but drugs also recur often as metaphors and allusions. Together, they create an extensive pattern of drug/disease references that represent socio-political problems as diseases in a social body and solutions to those problems (especially solutions that depend on some kind of written language) as volatile remedies that retain the potential to either kill or cure.

This stimulating study takes a fresh look at two of Dickens' most widely-studied texts. Part I uses carefully selected short extracts for close textual analysis, while Part II examines the historical and literary contexts and key criticism. The volume is an ideal introductory guide for those who are studying Dickens' novels for the first time.

In British Women Writers of World War II , Phyllis Lassner offers a challenging analysis of politicized literature in which such British women writers as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson debated the `justness' of World War II. Lassner questions prevailing approaches to women's war writing by exploring the complex range of pacifist and activist literary forms of women who redefined such pieties as patriotism and duty and heroism and victimization.

As industrialization transformed American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, increasing numbers of women sought employment outside the home and many were drawn into the labor movement. This collection of twenty-five stories published in union journals offers a portrait both of women's experiences as wage-earners and of the conflicts, values, and aspirations that touched their lives in this period of massive social upheaval. Written by reformers, union officials, and popular fiction writers, the stories present an uneasy synthesis of labor movement virtues with domestic ideals of femininity, females assertiveness with female subordination, and moralizing with romantic fantasy.

Far from being a conservative writer endorsing women's domestic role, Agatha Christie's book depicts women as adventurous, independent women who renegotiate sexual relationships along more equal lines. Women are also allowed the dangerous competency to disrupt society and yet the texts refuse to see them as double deviant because of their femininity. This detailed textual analysis of her oeuvre demonstrates exactly how quietly innovatory Christie was in relation to gender, beginning in nineteen twenty and concluding in the early seventies.

"Random Destinations" examines how novels and short stories portray those who managed to escape from Central Europe in the 1930s following the rise of Nazism. They faced many concrete and psychological problems at their random destinations: language acquisition, adjustment to different mores, fitting into the community, coming to terms with having been rejected by their homeland, the conflict between the desire to remember and/or forget their past, and, above all, the need to reshape their identities. Their personal struggles are contextualized within their historical situation, both global and specific to their new locale. The book argues that fiction, by taking ordinary escapees' difficulties into account, paradoxically offers a subtler and more truer picture that sociological studies that have tended to foreground the successes of a few outstanding individuals.

York Notes Advanced have been written by acknowledged literature experts for the specific needs of advanced level and undergraduate students. They offer a fresh and accessible approach to the Study of English literature. Building on the successful formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. York Notes Advanced help to make the study of literature more fulfilling and lead to exam success. They will also be of interest to the general reader, as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles. Key Features: Study methods - Introduction to the text - Summaries with critical notes - Themes and techniques - Textual analysis of key passages - Author biography - Historical and literary background - Modern and historical critical approaches - Chronology - Glossary of literary terms. General Editors: Martin Gray - Head of Literary Studies, University of Luton; Professor A.N. Jeffares - Emeritus Professor of English, University of Stirling.

"The short story remains a crucial if neglected - part of British literary heritage. This accessible and up-to-date critical overview maps out the main strands and figures that shaped the British short story and novella from the 1850s to the present. It offers new readings of both classic and forgotten texts in a clear, jargon-free way"--Provided by publisher.

Romantic Indians considers the views that Britons, colonists, and North American Indians took of each other during a period in which these people were in a closer and more fateful relationship than ever before or since. It is, therefore, also a book about exploration, empire, and the forms of representation that exploration and empire gave rise to-in particular the form we have come to call Romanticism, in which 'Indians' appear everywhere. It is not too much to say that Romanticism would not have taken the form it did without the complex and ambiguous image of Indians that so intrigued both the writers and their readers. Most of the poets of the Romantic canon wrote about them-not least Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; so did many whom we have only recently brought back to attention-including Bowles, Hemans, and Barbauld. Yet Indians' formative role in the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism has rarely been considered. Tim Fulford aims to bring that formative role to our attention, to show that the images of native peoples that Romantic writers received from colonial administrators, politicians, explorers, and soldiers helped shape not only these writers' idealizations of 'savages' and tribal life, but also their depictions of nature, religion, and rural society. The romanticization of Indians soon affected the way that real native peoples were treated and described by generations of travellers who had already, before reaching the Canadian forest or the mid-western plains, encountered the literary Indians produced back in Britain. Moreover, in some cases Native Americans, writing in English, turned the romanticization of Indians to their own ends. This book highlights their achievement in doing so-featuring fascinating discussions of several little-known but brilliant Native American writers.

"Nabokov's Shakespeare" is a comprehensive study of an important and interesting literary relationship. It explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language, penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century. As a Russian youth, Nabokov read all of Shakespeare, in English. He claimed a shared birthday with the Bard, and some of his most highly regarded novels ("Lolita, Pale Fire" and "Ada") are infused with Shakespeare and Shakespeareanisms. Nabokov uses Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works in a surprisingly wide variety of ways, from the most casual references to deep thematic links.Schuman provides a taxonomy of Nabokov's Shakespeareanisms; a quantitative analysis of Shakespeare in Nabokov; an examination of Nabokov's Russian works, his early English novels, the non-novelistic writings (poetry, criticism, stories), Nabokov's major works, and his final novels; and a discussion of the nature of literary relationships and influence. With a Foreword by Brian Boyd.

Literature and Film, Dispositioned looks to twentieth-century literature's encounter with film as a means to thinking about the locations of thought in literature and literature's location in the world. It includes readings of works by James Joyce, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett, whose Film (1965) forms a concluding focus.

This collection of essays explores some new possibilities for understanding postcolonial traumas. It examines representations of both personal and collective traumas around the globe from Palestinian, Caribbean, African American, South African, Maltese, Algerian, Indian, Australian and British writers, directors and artists.

This literary biographical study examines the life and works of the mid-Victorian woman novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose popularity is now well established. It places her writing in the context of her attitudes towards creative production, her relationship with publishers, and her literary friendships, as well as examining those events of her life which fed into her work. It pays particular attention to the ways in which she sought to reconcile the conflicting demands made upon her, as woman and as artist.

Jonathan Swift's moral and political satires astonished his contemporaries and still have the power to disturb, with their compelling images and unsettling turns of argument, and to delight, with their charm and inventive wit. A Preface to Swift examines the complex appeal of this fierce critic of oppression. While thematically arranged, the text follows a broadly chronological account of Swift's life to show his development as a writer from the prolific and inventive iconoclast to the mature satirist whose enduring memory of past events produced warm friendship as well as strong resentment. It considers in detail his engagement with the corruption of over-secure politicians and his opposition to the easy rationalism of free-thinking pundits. Gulliver's Travels is shown to be a coherent critique of eighteenth-century ideas of science, education and politics in which the order of the books ('the progress of the fable') is highly significant for its whole meaning. While this is a major focus, Keith Crook also discusses a wide range of Swift's other works, including his early satires, his political writings, his poems and his letters. Detailed chronological charts place his life and works in the political and cultural context, and illustrations have been chosen with commentaries to extend the reader's sense of Swift's connections with London, Ireland and his contemporaries. This will be a particularly useful introduction to students who are studying satire as a genre; the early eighteenth-century literary, scientific, philosophical and political context; the representation of women; the political relation of Ireland to England; and the position of the artist within society, especially in connection with the levers of power.

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-’50s America as the “tough guy.” The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender “otherness,” this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.

This is a collection of original essays on Philip Roth offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of recent texts. Philip Roth has without doubt been one of the most important writers of fiction in the United States during the latter part of the twentieth century. "Philip Roth" collects new essays by noted Roth scholars on three essential novels appearing in recent years, "American Pastoral" (1997), "The Human Stain" (2000), and "The Plot Against America" (2004). The volume illuminates Roth's multilayered perceptions of twentieth-century America as a place, a culture, and an idea that shapes its inhabitants in profound ways. Focusing on such topics as ethnicity, gender, race, the family, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Roth's penetrating explorations of American selfhood. The contributors probe this American Jewish writer's insights into the paradoxes of freedom and self-determination, the politics of identity, especially as defined by racial or ethnic affiliation, and the possibilities available for self-definition and transformation within the context of American history and culture. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.