When Sophie Sayers joins a writers' retreat, she's hoping to find inspiration and perhaps a little adventure. Away from her comfort zone, she also takes stock of her relationship with her boyfriend Hector. But scarcely has the writing course begun when bestselling romantic novelist Marina Milanese disappears on a solo excursion to an old windmill. First on the scene, Sophie is prime suspect for Marina's murder. When a storm prevents the police from landing on the island to investigate, Sophie must try to solve the crime herself - not easy, when everyone at the retreat has a motive. As she strives to uncover the truth about Marina's fate, Sophie arrives at a life-changing decision about her own future. Previously published by Debbie Young as Murder Your Darlings.

Jane Austen's minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed. Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austen's minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries. Austen's minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence. These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing women's limited choices. This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.

From 1809 until just before her death, Jane Austen lived in a small, all-female household at Chawton, where reading aloud was the evening's entertainment and a crucial factor in the way Austen formed and modified her writing. This book looks in detail at Jane Austen's style. It discusses her characteristic abstract vocabulary, her adaptations of Johnsonian syntax and how she came to make her most important contribution to the technique of fiction, free indirect discourse. The book draws extensively on historical sources, especially the work of writers like Johnson, Hugh Blair and Thomas Sheridan, and analyses how Austen negotiated her path between the fundamentally masculine concerns of eighteenth-century prescriptivists and her own situation of a female writer reading her work aloud to a female audience.

Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction investigates the representation of disability in fictional works by the leading Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, exploring how disability acts as a major element in the shaping of the sensation novel genre and how various sensation novels respond to traditional viewpoints of disability and to new developments in physiological and psychiatric knowledge. The depictions of disabled characters in sensation fiction frequently deviate strongly from typical depictions of disability in mainstream Victorian literature, undermining its stigmatized positioning as tragic deficit, severe limitation, or pathology. Close readings of nine individual novels situate their investigations of physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities against the period's disability discourses and interest in senses, perception, stimuli, the nervous system, and the hereditability of impairments. The importance of moral insanity and degeneration theory within sensation fiction connect the genre with criminal anthropology, suggesting the genre's further significance in the light of the later emergence of eugenics, psychoanalysis, and genetics.

Honest and unflinching, this book illuminates the literary world of the latter half of the 20th century, as well as giving a personal insight into the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard.

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'.

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.

"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.

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.

This volume contains an introduction, new edition of the Greek text, English translation, and detailed linguistic and historical commentary of Apollodoros' speech "Against Neaira" (4th century BC). The introduction provides a comprehensive account of the historical and legal background, authorship, style, technique, manuscripts and textual tradition of the speech, and a radically new interpretation of the case against Neaira. The edition of the Greek text is based on independent collations of manuscripts written before the 14th century, bringing a new sensitivity to the stylistic preferences of Apollodoros. The commentary contains discussions on textual points, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, style and technique, while the historical notes illustrate the constitutional, legal, social and political background of the speech. The book is of the highest interest to scholars and students of the Attic Orators, Athenian society, daily life, women and gender relations, law, constitution, institutions, religion and culture.

This book explores the relationship between H.G. Wells's scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. It investigates how Wells utilizes his early fiction to participate in a range of topical scientific disputes and, increasingly, as a means to instigate social reform.

An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org.
Examining recent rewritings of the Victorian period by authors such asA. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Gail Jones and Graham Swift, "Victorian Afterimages" explores the way in which neo-Victorian fictions enact and celebrate the power of cultural memory in an age historically obsessed and yet charged with the inability to think historically.

Travel Writing and the Transnational Author explores the travel writing and transnational literature of four authors from the 'postcolonial canon': Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie.

Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern times and argues that the novels of this period reveal a dramatic shift in conceptions of "creatureliness." Scholars have turned to the term "creaturely" recently to describe shared aspects of human and animal experience, thus moving beyond work that primarily attends to distinctions between the human and the animal. Carrying forward this recent scholarship, Novel Creatures argues that creatureliness has been an intensely millennial preoccupation, but in two contrasting forms-one leading up to the turn of the millennium, and the other appearing after the tragic events of 9/11.

This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels - that imagine the anteriority of a narrative - and coquels - that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text - are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating. This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats s writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare s verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats s poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare s art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats s cultural politics. This book identifies three stages of Yeats s cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England s national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats s fin-de-siecle Shakespeare is a Symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland s rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats s work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state. In each case, Yeats s thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats s writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession."

Since World War II critics have been predicting the decline of the novel. This book argues that the novel is not dead. Looking at American and English fiction it claims that the novel can not only change the possibilities of art, but also contribute to awareness of life's possibilities.

The Postfeminist Biopic explores the influence of postfeminist culture on cinematic representations of female biographies. While earlier research has described the subgenres of the classical female biopic and the feminist biopic, Polaschek proposes a third subgenre, the postfeminist biopic, which has appeared as part of a broader trend of reviving and reconfiguring classical genre forms aimed at women. The book explores the conventions of the postfeminist biopic through a close analysis of four films that represent the lives of women who are established members of the second-wave feminist canon: Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003), which depicts the life of the American poet Sylvia Plath; Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002), about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), which includes a biographical narrative about the English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf; and Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2006), a fictionalized interpretation of the coming of age of the English novelist Jane Austen.

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.

The Rise of the African Novel is the first book to situate South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonization that spanned the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary generation of established and emerging continental and diaspora African writers of international renown.

Calling it a major crisis in African literary criticism, Mukoma Wa Ngugi considers key questions around the misreading of African literature: Why did Chinua Achebe’s generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa’s literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past?

While acknowledging the importance of Achebe’s generation in the African literary tradition, Mukoma Wa Ngugi challenges that narrowing of the identities and languages of the African novel and writer. In restoring the missing foundational literary period to the African literary tradition, he shows how early South African literature, in both aesthetics and politics, is in conversation with the literature of the African independence era and contemporary rooted transnational literatures.

This book will become a foundational text in African literary studies, as it raises questions about the very nature of African literature and criticism. It will be essential reading for scholars of African literary studies as well as general readers seeking a greater understanding of African literary history and the ways in which critical consensus can be manufactured and rewarded at the expense of a larger and historical literary tradition.

Taking its cue from Baudelaire's important essay "The Painter of Modern Life," in which Baudelaire imagines the modern artist as a "man of the world," this collection of essays presents Oscar Wilde as a "man of the world" who eschewed provincial concerns, cultural conventions, and narrow national interests in favor of the wider world and other worlds-both real and imaginary, geographical and historical, physical and intellectual-which provided alternative sites for exploration and experience, often including alternative gender expression or sexual alterity. Wilde had an unlimited curiosity and a cosmopolitan spirit of inquiry that traveled widely across borders, ranging freely over space and time. He entered easily and wholly into other countries, other cultures, other national literatures, other periods, other mythologies, other religions, other disciplines, and other modes of representation, and was able to fully inhabit and navigate them, quickly apprehending the conventions by which they operate. The fourteen essays in this volume offer fresh critical-theoretical and historical perspectives not just on key connections and aspects of Wilde's oeuvre itself, but on the development of Wilde's remarkable worldliness in dialogue with many other worlds: contemporary developments in art, science and culture, as well as with other national literatures and cultures. Perhaps as a direct result of this cosmopolitan spirit, Wilde and Wilde's works have been taken up across the globe, as the essays on Wilde's reception in India, Japan and Hollywood illustrate. Many of the essays gathered here are based on groundbreaking archival research, including some never-seen-before illustrations. Together, they have the potential to open up important new comparative, transnational, and historical perspectives on Wilde that can shape and sharpen our future understanding of his work and impact.

When Tom Wolfe declared that 'new' journalism had surpassed the novel as the most vital form of literature, he set off a rivalry that Norman Mailer, the novelist and 'new' journalist, labeled an 'undeclared war' between journalism and fiction. Many of the important twentieth century journalist-literary figures in the United States and the United Kingdom rejected so-called non-fictional methods as their favored way to convey social truths. Despite their own careers in jorunalism, they came to believe that the writing formulas that grew out of industrialized journalism could be an impediment to expressing an authentic view of the world. In this volume, Doug Underwood asks whether much of what is now called literary journalism is, in fact, 'literary, ' and whether it should rank with the great novels by such journalists-turned-novelists such as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, who believed - as Mailer did - that fiction provided a more expansive way for the realistic writer to express the important 'truths' of life.

"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.

These are pathbreaking works which draws out Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. "Goethe's Modernisms" demonstrates Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. It also reveals him to be one of modernity's profoundest critics. His influence has not only shaped aesthetic issues, but a myriad of cultural and intellectual ones as well. By studying his works, we can thus gain insights into the foundational principles of modern society and its shortcomings. Tantillo explores Goethe's role within the culture wars that have been with us for some time, his role as a both a progenitor and a critic of modernity, and suggests how we might rethink aspects of our current policies, whether educational or fiscal. Each chapter presents an interpretation of literary texts and then demonstrates their relationship to a contemporary issue: the ascendancy of science and technology and their close connection to new economic theories (Faust); the cultural success of religious evangelicalism and its consequences (The Sorrows of Young Werther); and, the ramifications of progressive, student-centered education (the Wilhelm Meisternovels). Each chapter further places these issues within the context of conservative and liberal philosophies.