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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"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.

Shows German Science Fiction's connections with utopian thought, and how it attempts Zukunftsbewaltigung: coping with an uncertain but also unwritten future. Since its beginnings, German Science Fiction (or SF) has engaged with social change and technological progress, often drawing from utopian thought. The writer Kurd Lasswitz challenged the authoritarian Wilhelmine order; later, film director Fritz Lang provided a searing critique of Weimar society. Meanwhile utopian thinkers like Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse insisted on the possibility of hope, even in the face of totalitarianism. During the Cold War, German utopian writing and filmmaking were vital both as a warning and as a creative imagining of possible futures. More recently, as rapid scientific and technological advances have continued, literary and cinematic responses have become increasingly dystopian in outlook, reflecting fears connected with globalization, advances in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and persistent challenges like climate change, hunger, migration, and terrorism. This book explores German SF's responses to the question how humanity can match technological advances with social, ethical, and moral progress. It surveys German utopian thought and the German SF tradition-both literary and cinematic-providing close readings of selected works that paradoxically reflect boundless optimism for the possibility of change and increasing pessimism in its likelihood. English translations are provided throughout. Building on its rich tradition but now confidently entering the mainstream, German SF attempts Zukunftsbewaltigung: coping with an uncertain but also unwritten future.

This new critique of contemporary African-American fiction explores its intersections with and critiques of the Gothic genre. Wester reveals the myriad ways writers manipulate the genre to critique the gothic's traditional racial ideologies and the mechanisms that were appropriated and re-articulated as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America. Re-reading major African American literary texts-such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora-African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon.

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.

"Modern Irish Autobiography" provides the first comprehensive overview of the Irish autobiographical tradition as it has received expression in both Irish and English from the nineteenth-century to the present day. Featuring original essays by leading Irish, British and American critics, the book combines historically grounded analyses of key trends and themes with theoretically informed readings of canonical and non-canonical texts. Focusing mainly on written autobiography, the volume locates Ireland's autobiographers in their historical, literary and ideological contexts and surveys the rich diversity of their achievement.

Sherlock Holmes is an iconic figure within cultural narratives. More recently, Conan Doyle has also appeared as a fictional figure in contemporary novels and films, confusing the boundaries between fiction and reality. This collection investigates how Holmes and Doyle have gripped the public imagination to become central figures of modernity.

An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of "presence" in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century. In the years following the 1737 Licensing Act, the English stage found itself for the first time facing serious competition from the novel - newly respectable and increasingly fashionable. But the story is not one of theatre's decline and the novel's rise. As Ros Ballaster shows in this lively and innovative study, the relationship between the two media was one of an intensely creative and productive rivalry. Novelists sent their heroes to the theatre, dramatists appropriated the plots of popular novels, the celebrity status of actors was advanced through guest appearances in printed prose fictions. Some figures, like Richardson's virtuous serving maid Pamela, or Sterne's eccentrichumourist Tristram Shandy, acquired such independent lives in the minds of the public that they migrated into the mainstream of popular culture. Fictions of Presence describes how major authors of the period - Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox and Oliver Goldsmith - spanned both genres. It charts the movement of popular fictional characters between stage and page. And it looks at the representation of contemporary audiences and readers in the new types of the (female) mimic and the (male) critic. Crucially, Ballaster delineates the ground over which the two media competed: the ability to create 'presence' - a sense of being present with the moment of action, of finding 'being' in fictional worlds - in the mind's eye of readers and theatregoers. In so doing, she not only illuminates the shared history of the theatre and the novel, but describes the power of aesthetic experience itself.

A major history of the evolution of political journalism in the late Stuart and early Hanoverian period. The reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) saw a remarkable boom in political journalism and newspaper culture in London, in which some of the leading literary lights of the age, Swift, Defoe, Addison, Steele, were heavily involved. While scholars have dealt at length with the physical development and circulation of these newspapers and with their literary contribution, much less has been done to trace the evolving ideologies of London's political newspapers in this period. In this major contribution to the study of eighteenth-century political culture, Ashley Marshall shows how the ideologies of the leading papers evolved in direct and indirect response to one another. She offers provocative re-readings of well-known journals, including Defoe's Review, Swift's Examiner and the various publishing ventures of Richard Steele, and first accounts of the wealth of smaller, short-lived journals which made up the ecosystem of periodical publishing at the time. A ground-breaking final chapter looks at the radically different ways in which periodical writers imagined and addressed their public. Drawing out the distinction between the Whig ideal of a highly engaged citizenry and a Tory press which conditioned its readers to be dutiful subjects rather than active citizens, Marshall argues that these rhetorical differences reflected an ongoing debate about the ultimate role of journalism.

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019 Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 'If you have even the slightest interest in Orwell or in the development of our culture, you should not miss this engrossing, enlightening book.' John Carey, Sunday Times George Orwell's last novel has become one of the iconic narratives of the modern world. Its ideas have become part of the language - from 'Big Brother' to the 'Thought Police', 'Doublethink', and 'Newspeak' - and seem ever more relevant in the era of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. The cultural influence of 1984 can be observed in some of the most notable creations of the past seventy years, from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs - and from the launch of Apple Mac to the reality TV landmark, Big Brother. In this remarkable and original book. Dorian Lynskey investigates the influences that came together in the writing of 1984 from Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War and war-time London to his book's roots in utopian and dystopian fiction. He explores the phenomenon that the novel became on publication and the changing ways in which it has been read over the decades since. 2019 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of what is arguably Orwell's masterpiece, while the year 1984 itself is now as distant from us as it was from Orwell on publication day. The Ministry of Truth is a fascinating examination of one of the most significant works of modern English literature. It describes how history can inform fiction and how fiction can influence history.

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.

"Americans have cherished and magnified versions of an idealized Mark Twain. We admire and are amused by the celebrity, who sold his pseudonym and his carefully composed face to advertise pipe tobacco, cigarettes, whiskey, and postcards. The extent to which the received images are authentic or inauthentic is, however, in doubt. Common images must be modified when we examine the thoughts and emotions important to the mind and heart of Samuel L. Clemens, the private man."-from the Introduction No writer has been more frequently identified with America than Mark Twain, an emblematic figure often supposed to represent the essential qualities that make America most admirably American. In a fresh appraisal, supported by evidence from both the life and the writings, Guy Cardwell convincingly revises our images of this cultural icon. He portrays an exceptionally complex man who experienced debilitating tensions and neuroses. Caldwell finds that even before the comedian from the West met and married Olivia Langdon, the heiress from Elmira, New York, he was ambitious to join and conquer the world of Eastern affluence and gentility. Yet Clemens's jokes (in his private notebooks) aggressing against women and blacks suggest that his acculturation to gentility was never complete. This book throws new light on Clemens's relations with his wife and her family and on his attitudes toward business, money, art, sex, and the little girls whose company he sought compulsively during his later years. It argues persuasively that in the end Twain was hardly the robust and genial representative of America's mythic frontier past. Alienated from society and from his own writings, he was much more the prototype of the overstrung, exploitatively individualistic modern American.

Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. This book is concerned with children who are not so easily recognized or remembered, the peripheral or overlooked children to be read in works by Dickens, Bronte, Austen and Rossetti.

A comprehensive study of cannibalism in literature and film, spanning colonial fiction, Gothic texts and contemporary American horror. Amidst the sharp teeth and horrific appetite of the cannibal, this book examines real fears of over-consumerism and consumption that trouble an ever-growing modern world.

Frank Shovlin examines in detail six Irish literary periodicals that appeared in the first forty years after the partitioning on Ireland. The six titles are The Irish Statesman (1923-30), The Dublin Magazine (1923-58), Ireland To-Day (1936-38), The Bell (1940-54), Envoy (1949-51) and Rann (1948-53). These journals, while not the only examples of the genre in these neglected decades of Irish cultural history, make the finest and most influential contributions towards the development of a native Irish literary tradition in the earliest years of both Irish states, north and south of the border. The manner in which each of the journals was established and run is considered, with an emphasis on varying editorial personalities and their impact on each periodical. Shovlin emphasizes the common themes of literary realism, the ideological struggle between monolithic nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism, and the importance of publishing context in the interpretation of literary works. The careers of figures such as Patrick Kavanagh, Sean O Faolain, Liam O Flaherty and John Hewitt are re-examined in the light of their involvement with periodical publication. The author concludes with an overview of the progress of the literary periodical in Ireland in the decades after the closure of The Dublin Magazine in 1958. This book is an important contribution to recent growing scholarship on the role of literary magazines specifically and history of the book generally both in Ireland and elsewhere.

E.M. Forster's Modernism is the first detailed and comprehensive investigation into Forster's relationship to Modernism. A fresh and original study, it situates Forster's fiction within a range of early 20th Century contexts: socio-political, generic and aesthetic. It advances the argument that Forster's fiction embodies an important strand within modernism and in doing so makes the case for a new definition and interpretation of 'modernism'.

As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one ofthe most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community offers new readings of fictional and nonfictional works by such figures as Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed, Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Jane Smiley.

This book argues that many of the mid-twentieth century's significant novelists were united by their desire to return the interior novel to ethical engagement. They did not seek morality in society, politics or the individual will, but sought to unveil a transcendent God through the use of techniques drawn from the canon of mystical literature.

These essays explore the relationship between history and artistic form during the 1940s. The essays cover a comprehensive range of issues, including the Blitz, spying, demobilization, traumatic loss, nostalgia for the pre-war years, addiction, and the formation of sexual identity. The writings of both well-known and neglected authors are discussed in detail.