This critical study illuminates the neglected intersection of war, disease, and gender as represented in an important subgenre of World War I literature. Novels by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter and Alice Munro interpret the traumatic after effects of World War I and the influenza pandemic of 1918-20.

Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional literary criticism and the practice of writing; and secondly effect: an emphasis on the playing with styles and forms, resulting from an enhanced self-consciousness and awareness of the elusiveness of meaning and the limitations of the realist form.
Dr Currie's volume examines first the two components of metafiction, with practical illustrations from the work of such writers as Derrida and Foucault. A final section then provides the view of metafiction as seen by metafictional writers themselves.

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.

The continuing cultural encounters of the Americas, between European and indigenous cultures, and between scientific materialism and premodern supernaturalism, have originated new narrative forms. While supernatural short fiction of the Americas belongs to the broad category of the fantastic, which is generally approached synchronically, reading audiences of the past 200 years have shifted their beliefs about the supernatural several times. While nineteenth-century readers understood science as real and the supernatural as imaginary, modern audiences recognize both as inaccurate, a shift which allows authors of supernatural fiction to celebrate premodern indigenous beliefs which were once disdained by a materialist culture.

This book situates supernatural short fiction of the Americas within the changing cultural and epistemological contexts of the last 200 years and explores how authors have drawn upon a wealth of indigenous traditions. The book begins with a discussion of theories of the supernatural and the fantastic. It then looks at some of the first encounters of European and Native American supernatural beliefs and points to the common elements of these early traditions. The volume next focuses on American literature of the nineteenth century, which has a complex fusion of materialist biases and metaphysical fascinations. The final portion of the book gives greater attention to Spanish-American literature and the blending of the supernatural with attitudes of nostalgia and uncertainty.

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.

In this book, Mary Talbot shows how fiction works in the constitution and reproduction of social life. She does not reduce fiction to a functional support for ideology, however, but considers that the greatest interest in fiction is as a source of pleasure. She discusses both 'high' and 'low' fiction, combining discussion of social context with language analysis. Taking a view of fiction as a product of social practices, the book examines not only the texts themselves but also what people do with them and how they are valued. Fictions at work will be of interest to students on a variety of courses including linguistics, English, women's studies, cultural studies, and media and communication studies.

'Beer offers an assemblage of discrete essays ( written in the spirit of the short story itself), connected by generic and thematic concerns, with the delightful result of giving us a series of lucidly written close readings from the perspective of what Virginia Woolf calls 'the common reader' - Katherine Joslin, Western Michigan University A wide range of short fiction by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the focus for this study, examining both genre and theme. Chopin's short short stories, Wharton's novellas, Chopin's frankly erotic writing and the homilies in which Gilman warns of the dangers of the sexually transmitted disease are compared. There are also essays on ethnicity in the work of Chopin, Wharton's New England stories, Gilman's innovative use of genre and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' on film.

Barbara Hepworth sculpted outdoors and Janet Frame wore earmuffs as she worked to block out noise. Kate Chopin wrote with her six children ‘swarming around her’ whereas the artist Rosa Bonheur filled her bedroom with the sixty birds that inspired her work. Louisa May Alcott wrote so vigorously – skipping sleep and meals – that she had to learn to write with her left hand to give her cramped right hand a break.

From Isak Dinesen subsisting on oysters, champagne and amphetamines, to Isabel Allende's insistence that she begins each new book on 8 January, here are the working routines of over 140 brilliant female painters, composers, sculptors, writers, filmmakers and performers.

Filled with details of the large and small choices these women made, Daily Rituals Women at Work is a source of fascination and inspiration.

Dickens's career as a journalist spanned four decades, during which he wrote over 350 articles: reports, sketches, reviews, leaders, exposblioges, satires and reminiscences. This project offers the first critical guide to over a million words of vintage Dickens, which have been much overlooked in continuous assessments and re-assessments of his novels. It provides both a biographical and socio-historical account of the main phases of Dickens's career as a journalist, and a critical assessment of the thematic and stylistic development of his work.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siecle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable "stuff," has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of "character" in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

This book examines Austen's novels in relation to her philosophical and religious context, demonstrating that the combination of the classical and theological traditions of the virtues is central to her work. Austen's heroines learn to confront the fundamental ethical question of how to live their lives. Instead of defining virtue only in the narrow sense of female sexual virtue, Austen opens up questions about a plurality of virtues. In fresh readings of the six completed novels, plus Lady Susan, Emsley shows how Austen's complex imaginative representations of the tensions among the virtues engage with and expand on classical and Christian ethical thought.

More than one hundred years after being written, Great Expectations is still one of the most widely studied works of fiction. This casebook of historical documents, collateral readings and essays brings to life both Dickens' masterpiece and the social issues surrounding his work. The interdisciplinary approach offers students insight into the historically significant issues, such as child welfare, that ignited Dickens' creative and moral sensibilities. Newlin has unearthed significant documentation on the dilemma of Victorian women, supplying original social commentary such as Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and John Stuart Mill's 1861 The Subjection of Women. This work also addresses the transportation and deportation of convicts with first-hand accounts of the treatment of prisoners. Original materials describing the significance of class distinctions, with demographic data from 1834, point up the socio-economic gaps that stratified Victorian society. Other primary documents describe the physical settings such as the Marsh Country and the river, and Bow Street in London, that figure prominently in Great Expectations. This collection of sources will help broaden students' understanding of Great Expectations and places it within its historical context. A literary analysis chapter introduces students to the important themes and various writing techniques employed by Dickens. Each subsequent chapter offers original essays and explication of historical documents on significant issues. Each section concludes with thought-provoking study questions, topics for research, and lists of suggested readings. This volume will enhance students' reading of this classicand will facilitate further research for student and teacher alike.

Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s - "the Paris of the Orient" - was both a glittering metropolis and a shadowy world of crime and social injustice. It was also home to Huo Sang and Bao Lang, fictional Chinese counterparts to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The duo lived in a spacious apartment on Aiwen Road, where Huo Sang played the violin (badly) and smoked Golden Dragon cigarettes as he mulled over his cases. Cheng Xiaoqing (1893-1976), "The Grand Master" of twentieth-century Chinese detective fiction, had first encountered Conan Doyle's highly popular stories as an adolescent. In the ensuing years he played a major role in rendering them first into classical and later into vernacular Chinese. In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing detective fiction very much in Conan Doyle's style, with Bao as the Watson-like-I narrator - a still rare instance of so direct an appropriation from foreign fiction. Cheng Xiaoqing wrote detective stories to introduce the advantages of critical thinking to his readers, to encourage them to be skeptical and think deeply, because truth often lies beneath surface appearances. His attraction to the detective fiction genre can be traced to its reconciliation of the traditional and the modern. In "The Shoe," Huo Sang solves the case with careful reasoning, while "The Other Photograph" and "On the Huangpu" blend this reasoning with a sensationalism reminiscent of traditional Chinese fiction. "The Odd Tenant" and "The Examination Paper" also demonstrate the folly of first impressions. "At the Ball" and "Cat's-Eye" feature the South-China Swallow, a master thief who, like other outlaws in traditional tales, steals only from the rich and powerful. "A Summer Night's Tragedy" clearly shows Cheng's strategy of captivating his Chinese readers with recognizably native elements even as he espouses more globalized views of truth and justice.

A celebration of 30 years Marvel's most anarchic anti-hero, Deadpool with profiles of his greatest allies, his deadliest enemies, and his most anarchic adventures! This deluxe book explores the comic book history of Deadpool, looking in-depth at his greatest adventures, strangest foes, and his unlikeliest allies. Lavishly illustrated with stunning art, this tribute to the most outspoken Marvel character also includes interviews with the real life geniuses behind his ongoing adventures. For all fans of X-Men and Marvel comics characters.

This study of Lawrence's travel writings is the first book-length study to approach the subject with reference to contemporary postcolonial theory. Focusing on the writings of 1921-25, the period when Lawrence was most intensely engaged in travel, it includes chapters on "Sea and Sardinia, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent" and the essays and stories inspired by Lawrence's experience of the New World.

This book sheds light on the complex relationship between Hindi and Urdu. Through a detailed reading of a representative set of 20th century short stories in both languages, the author leads the reader towards a clear definition of the differences between Hindi and Urdu. The full translations of the stories have been extensively annotated to point out the details in which the Hindi and Urdu versions differ. An overview of early and contemporary Hindi/Urdu and Hindustani grammars and language teaching textbooks demonstrates the problems of correctly naming and identifying the two languages. This book now offers a detailed and systematic database of syntactic, morphological and semantic differences between the selected Hindi and Urdu stories. A useful tool for all scholars of modern Hindi/Urdu fiction, (socio-)linguistics, history or social sciences.

Why have so many prominent literary authors-from Philip Pullman and Jose Saramago to Michele Roberts and Colm Toibim-recently rewritten the canonical story of Jesus Christ? What does that say about our supposedly secular age? In this insightful study, Magdalena Maczynska defines and examines the genre of scriptural metafiction: novels that not only transform religious texts but also draw attention to these transformations. In addition to providing rich examples and close readings, Maczynska positions literary studies within interdisciplinary debates about religion and secularity. Her book demonstrates a surprising turn of events: even as contemporary novelists deconstruct the traditional categories of "secular" and "sacred" writing, they open up new spaces for scripture in contemporary culture.

This book of essays is the first to probe Anais Nin's achievements as a literary artist. With an introduction by the editor, Suzanne Nalbantian, the collection examines the literary strategies of Nin in their psychoanalytical and stylistic dimensions. Various contributors scrutinize Nin's artistry, identifying her unique modernist techniques and her poetic vision. Others observe the transfer of her psychoanalytical positions to narrative. The volume also contains fresh views of Nin by her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell as well as innovative analyses of the reception of her works.

Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, this book pursues what can be gained through a comparative approach to reading and readerships.

Africa has long captured the Western imagination as a land shrouded in danger and mystery. British and American novels written before World War II established popular conventions and stereotypes about Africa that have been increasingly challenged by contemporary American novels set in Africa. Kuhne's book overviews the ways in which Africa has been employed as a powerful setting for American novels written since World War II. Kuhne argues that contemporary American novels with African settings are largely didactic, that these novels convey specific lessons about Africa and Africans, and that they compare African and American cultures in order to evaluate and critique the two worlds.

The book begins by summarizing the conventions and themes Westerners have traditionally associated with Africa and by detailing how British and American authors from Aphra Behn to Ernest Hemingway depicted Africa before World War II. It then looks at contemporary American novels set in invented African nations, novels that typically suggest that the problems that trouble actual African nations are the result of colonialism. A separate chapter then examines the African novels of African Americans, which generally aim to correct the historical record, refute stereotypes, and detail the horrors of the slave trade. The volume also looks at genre fiction set in Africa, while a final chapter discusses postcolonial novels with African settings.

Pierre Courtade (1915-1963) was recognised by his peer group to be an independent, sharply intelligent thinker and a talented writer. His principal work consists of journalism -- near daily articles in the Communist press during the late 1940s and 1950s -- six novels (two unpublished) and two volumes of short stories.
This first study of Courtade examines the conflict between his private and public personas and in particular his role as a political commentator and as an artist struggling to reconcile his talent with the demands made by Party ideology. Courtade's life and work is analysed in light of archival material and interviews with people who knew and worked with him. The author assesses Courtade's contribution to French left-wing intellectual life and places him in the context of the evolution of French intellectuals' political commitment in the 20th century. As witness to some of the most critical periods in French history -- the Occupation and the Resistance, the Cold War and French involvement in Indo-China -- Courtade's responses provide fascinating insights and a new perspective on this turbulent time.

This book explores whether the post-9/11 novels of Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie can be read as part of an attempt to revise modern 'knowledge' of the Islamic world, using globally-distributed English-language literature to reframe Muslims' potential to connect with others. Focussing on novels including Shalimar the Clown, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Wasted Vigil, and Burnt Shadows, the author combines aesthetic, historical, political and spiritual considerations with analyses of the popular discourses and critical discussions surrounding the novels; and scrutinises how the writers have been appropriated as authentic spokespeople by dominant political and cultural forces. Finally, she explores how, as writers of Indian and Pakistani origin, Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie negotiate their identities, and the tensions of being seen to act as Muslim representatives, in relation to the complex international and geopolitical context in which they write.

Professor Wheeler's widely-acclaimed survey of the nineteenth-century fiction covers both the major writers and their works and encompasses the genres and "minor" fiction of the period. This excellent introduction and reference source has been revised for this second edition to include new material on lesser-known writers and a comprehensively updated bibliography.

Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction examines how Victorian writers used dialogue in the presentation of characters and the relationships between them, and its contribution to the work as a whole. Quoting over a hundred novels of the period, including all the major authors, many fascinating topics are discussed. The book also looks at the conventions which governed the writing and circulation of fiction, imposing certain restraints on the novelists. It also relates the dialogue used in Victorian fiction to evidence from other sources about the actual speech of the period. This book will be of great value to those studying the social history of the period, as well as literature, and will appeal to the general reader interested in Victorian fiction.

The women's bestseller has become the acknowledged literary phenomenon of the last half-century. Madonne M. Miner takes the first critical look at this development and offers a serious reading of five of the most famous twentieth-century women's bestsellers--Gone with the Wind, Forever Amber, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, and Scruples. She outlines repeated plot structures, image patterns, and thematic concerns. From these Miner constructs a twentieth-century white middle-class American woman's story, suggests ways in which female readers respond to women's bestsellers, and proposes a matrilineal linkage between the novels.