This book provides students with an introduction to the work of Irvine Welsh that places his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores Welsh's biography, his impact on contemporary Scottish fiction and the cultural relevance of the "Irvine Welsh phenomenon." Including a timeline of key dates, it offers an accessible reading of Welsh's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has provoked.

Here the spirituality of the East and the West have met in a novel that enfigures deep human wisdom with a rich and colorful imagination. Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, it is the story of a soul's long quest in search of he ultimate answer to the enigma of man's role on this earth. As a youth, the young Indian Siddhartha meets the Buddha but cannot be content with a disciple's role: he must work out his own destiny and solve his own doubt--a tortuous road that carries him through the sensuality of a love affair with the beautiful courtesan Kamala, the temptation of success and riches, the heartache of struggle with his own son, to final renunciation and self-knowledge. The name "Siddhartha" is one often given to the Buddha himself--perhaps a clue to Hesse's aims in contrasting the traditional legendary figure with his own conception, as a European (Hesse was Swiss), of a spiritual explorer.

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

Bonner . . . provides a compendium of information, helpful to the undergraduate as well as to the scholar; a chronology of Chopin's life; nine translations by Chopin herself of French short stories, eight of which are by Guy de Maupassant, a major literary influence (five of these published here for the first time); period maps of Missouri, Louisiana, and New Orleans, and a 13-page bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources, which is thorough and organized for easy reference. The bulk of the book is devoted to a Dictionary of Characters, Places, Titles, Terms, and People from the Life and Works of Kate Chopin.' The Dictionary' will be especially helpful to those readers . . . who are unfamiliar with the Cajun and Creole terms--e.g., lagniappe, jambalaya--appearing in Chopin's fiction, or with the many references to French Catholicism made by her characters. . . . Overall, this volume is a valuable tool for both the novice and experienced Chopin reader, and is highly recommended. "Choice"

Recent years have witnessed a major rebirth of interest in the works of Kate Chopin, author of two novels and nearly 100 short stories. The current volume makes an important contribution to the study of Chopin's work by providing a dictionary of characters, places, plot briefs, poem briefs, biographical items, and selected terms; period maps of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Missouri; and a bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources. Also featured are Chopin's translations of eight Guy de Maupassant stories, five of which appear here in print for the first time, and one story by Adrien Vely.

The dictionary delineates the characters and places in Chopin's fiction, many of which reappear as major and minor elements throughout her work. Of particular significance are the many unnamed characters who contribute to the development of recurring social themes. The maps of relevant areas in Louisiana and Missouri will help make the connections between character and place, story, and setting more concrete. The bibliographic essay covers editions, manuscripts, and letters in the primary sources section. Biography and criticism, including general appraisals and those addressed to special topics or particular works, are included in the secondary sources section. The aim throughout is to resolve basic questions and confusions that persist regarding Chopin's work so that the reader can concentrate more productively--and more enjoyably--on the issues of form, theme, and influence that dominate her fiction.

New Perspectives on the European Bildungsro man reflects the change in direction of research on the Bildungsroman, focusing on more psychological, authorial and feminist contents. Departing from the father of the archetype of the genre, Goethe, the authors trace imperative pathways to its French, British, and Italian counterparts, examining spiritual and female Bildungsromane. A wide-ranging analysis provides fresh insights into the genre through comparative analyses of Bildungsromane both diatopically and diachronically, while critical analysis of novels such as Voltaire's Candide, Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre, Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul et Virginie, Collodi's Pinocchio, Aleramo's Una donna present new readings of the characters, plots and purposes of the most famous European novels.

The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law is a study of the radical novel's critique of the evolving social contract in the 1790s. Focusing on selected novels by Thomas Holcroft, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Robert Bage, William Godwin, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth, this book examines narrative investigations into the intricate relationships between theories of rights, the requirements of proprietorship in civil society, and the construction of the legal subject. MARKET 1: Eighteenth-century Studies; Romantic scholars and students MARKET 2: General readers interested in law and literature, and the development of the novel

'A wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive': Charles Dickens's conflicted feelings about Paris typify the fascination and repulsion with which a host of mid-nineteenth-century British writers viewed their nearest foreign capital. Variously perceived as the showcase for sophisticated, cosmopolitan talent, the home of revolution, a stronghold of Roman Catholicism, and a shrine to irreligious hedonism, Paris was also a city where writers were respected and journalism flourished. This historically-grounded account of the ways in which Paris touched the careers and work of both major and minor Victorian writers considers both their actual experiences of an urban environment, distinctively different from anything Britain offered, and the extent to which this became absorbed and expressed within the Victorian imaginary. Casting a wide literary net, the first part of this book explores these writers' reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Paris for mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists., paying particular attention to the ways in which the young Thackeray's exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. The final part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly-growing British readership.

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

This edited volume is a wide ranging collection of essays on Ernest Hemingway and his work by some of the world's leading scholars and critics in the field of Hemingway studies. The collection offers the latest views--and some of the most challenging--of many of the best scholars in the field. The conclusions drawn are as various as the sixteen contributors; many of which challenge generally accepted views in the field. This study will be of interest and use to Hemingway "buffs," to scholars of modern American literature, and to academic libraries.

In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukacs discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present 'concrete potentialities' of individual character in novel ways. Powers of Possibility explores how American experimental writers since the 1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including: Allen Ginsberg's anti-Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines how relations of character and social power were widely discussed in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated the 'revolutionary potential' of African Americans, while advances in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of 'human potential' in space colonies. In considering how the literary writers engage with such debates, Alex Houen also shows how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of 'potential': 'possible as opposed to actual'; 'a quantity of force'; a 'capacity' or 'faculty'; and 'potency'. Such an approach can be characterised as a literary 'potentialism' that turns literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form) into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a literary movement, Houen emphasises, so much as a novel concept of literary practice-a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative to notions of 'postmodernism' and the 'postmodern avant-garde'.

The fin de siecle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siecle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society.

Katharine Mansfield's arrival in London in 1908 marked the start of her professional career as a writer and this study marks a revival of her reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. The international line-up of contributors attests to Mansfield's global appeal. By discussing her fiction in relation to her life, the contributors to this critical work present reinterpretations and readings. Enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to her diaries and letters, these readings combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class and gender, biography/autobiography. The historical and aesthetic studies of Mansfield's work all take place within a framework of modernist literature, criticism and theory, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be a Modernist while allocating Mansfield a firm place in any current study of Modernism.

Dickens is second only to Shakespeare in the range and intensity of critical discussion which his work has provoked. His writing is central to literature and culture across the English-speaking world. In this important new anthology, Steven Connor gathers together representative examples of the range of new critical approaches to Dickens over the last two decades.

The Literature of Terror: the Modern Gothic is the second volume in David Punter's impressive survey of gothic writing covering over two centuries. The text was originally published in 1980 to wide acclaim and following its publication, critical interest in gothic writing has risen substantially. This long awaited second edition has been expanded to take into account the latest critical research, and is now published in two volumes.Volume One covers the period from 1765 to the Edwardian age while Volume Two discusses modern gothic, starting with the 'decadent' gothic writing of Oscar Wilde and continuing through the twentieth century. David Punter's thorough analysis places gothic writing within its historical and sociological context. A new chapter on post-war fiction and film extends the scope of the original study, exploring the development of a contemporary 'culture of horror' and showing the continuing relevance of the Gothic as a means of expression. This new edition also contains a new chapter which analyses the relationship between cultural material and sociopathic behaviour, offering an important contribution to contemporary sociological debate. The two volumes combined pr

Modernist Fiction and News characterizes uses novel reading of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf to explore how these authors engaged with a rapidly expanding news industry in order to establish an experimental space in which to represent experience with the hope of greater immediacy and faithfulness to reality.

Chance, and its representation in literature, has a long and problematic history. It is a vital aspect of the way we experience the world, and yet its function is frequently marginalised and downplayed. Offering a new reading of the development of the novel during the mid-twentieth century, Jordan argues that this simple novelistic paradox became more pressing during a period in which chance became a cultural, scientific and literary preoccupation - through scientific developments such as quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, the influence of existential philosophy, the growth of gambling, and the uncertainty provoked by the Second World War. In tracing the novel's representation of chance during this crucial period, we see both the development of the novel, and draw wider conclusions about the relationship between narrative and the contingent, the arbitrary and the uncertain. While the novel had historically rejected, marginalised or undermined chance, during this period it becomes a creative and welcome co-contributor to the novel's development, as writers such as Samuel Beckett, B.S. Johnson, Henry Green and Iris Murdoch show.

The first edition was regarded as the definitive survey of Gothic and related terror writing in English. No other text considers this genre on such a scale and covers the theoretical perspectives so comprehensively. In the latest edition, the broad range of theoretical perspectives has been enlarged to include modern critical theories. Volume One is a thoroughly updated edition of the original text, covering the period from 1765 up to the Edwardian age, exploring the richness and literary diversity of the gothic form: from the original eighteenth-century gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the melodramatic fiction of Wilkie Collins.

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.

In exceptionally close analyses of six novels by black writer Oscar Micheaux (1884-1948?) beginning with "The Conquest," written in 1913, "The Forged Note" (1915), "The Homesteader" (1917), "The Wind from Nowhere" (1941), "The Case of Mrs. Wingate" (1945), and "The Story of Dorothy Stanfield" (1946), Young traces the development of Micheaux's racial theories and of his stance as apologist for American imperialism. Young argues that these novels are examples of the detrimental effect of oppressive myths on early twentieth-century black behavior and values. The characters in the novels tend to mirror the black stereotypes of the post-bellum confederate romanticists, both the Cavalier racists and the Negrophobes. Adopting the world view of the oppressor required that Micheaux reject both his own blackness and that of his racial kinsmen. Along with many other black writers, Micheaux believed that to assimilate, blacks must learn to pass for white by adopting Anglo-Saxon values, myths, and philosophy. The novels make statements about life from a point of view that exaggerates the worst side of black character, perpetuating the myth of black inferiority that the black protagonists transcend. Young explores the influences of both Jack London and Friedrich Nietzsche on Micheaux's heroes. Micheaux's significance lies less as a figure of literary merit than as an especially graphic example of a black artist unwittingly espousing the beliefs of the oppressor rather than writing out of a truly black aesthetic philosophy. Ironically, Micheaux not only perpetuated racist myths in his novels, but was the victim of such myths as well. Between 1919 and 1948 Micheaux also wrote, directed, and produced over thirty films and was perhaps the most important Afro-American filmmaker before the Civil Rights Movement.

The only in-depth study of Micheaux's novels, and one rich in period detail and insights into the evolution of black stereotypes as reflected in the novels of a black artist, "Black Novelist as White Racist" would be useful to students and teachers of Afro-American Literature and Plains and Western Literature, as well as to those interested in race theory, film history, and sociology.

This series gathers together a body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. "The Critical Heritage" is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

This volume of essays brings together critical analysis and commentary on the literary work of Michel Tournier.

Presenting an argument that Virginia Woolf taught herself to be a feminist artist and public intellectual through her revisionary reading, this study also gives a view of Woolf's tremendous body of knowledge and her contrast references to past literary periods.