Clouds above the Hill is one of the best-selling novels ever in Japan, and is now translated into English for the first time. An epic portrait of Japan in crisis, it combines graphic military history and highly readable fiction to depict an aspiring nation modernizing at breakneck speed. Best-selling author Shiba Ryotaro devoted an entire decade of his life to this extraordinary blockbuster, which features Japan's emerging onto the world stage by the early years of the twentieth century. Volume I describes the growth of Japan's fledgling Meiji state, a major "character" in the novel. We are also introduced to our three heroes, born into obscurity, the brothers Akiyama Yoshifuru and Akiyama Saneyuki, who will go on to play important roles in the Japanese Army and Navy, and the poet Masaoka Shiki, who will spend much of his short life trying to establish the haiku as a respected poetic form. Anyone curious as to how the "tiny, rising nation of Japan" was able to fight so fiercely for its survival should look no further. Clouds above the Hill is an exciting, human portrait of a modernizing nation that goes to war and thereby stakes its very existence on a desperate bid for glory in East Asia.

Throughout her career, Colette experimented with genre for the purposes of telling stories of her life. The books that resulted, known collectively as her "livres-souvenirs," are far from being autobiographies in the customary sense. By addressing the need to reconsider the generic issues surrounding autobiographical story- telling, Anne Freadman's study brings the richness of "the genre question" to the fore, shedding a fresh light on this much-loved body of work. From the vignettes of La Maison de Claudine to the note-books of L'etoile vesper and Le Fanal bleu, from stories of losing to stories of collecting, Colette's memory books take different narrative forms and explore the passing of time in different ways. This book investigates Colette's variegated generic choices as so many ways of "telling time."

Charlotte Yonge, a dedicated religious, didactic, and domestic novelist, has become one of the most effectively rediscovered Victorian women writers of the last decades. Her prolific output of fiction does not merely give a fascinatingly different insight into nineteenth-century popular culture; it also yields a startling complexity. This compels a reappraisal of the parameters that have long been limiting discussion of women writers of the time. Situating Yonge amidst developments in science, technology, imperialism, aesthetics, and the book market at her time, the individual contributions in this book explore her critical and often self-conscious engagement with current fads, controversies, and possible alternatives. Her marketing of her missionary stories, the wider significance of her contribution to Tractarian aesthetics, the impact of Darwinian science on her domestic chronicles, and her work as a successful editor of a newly established magazine show this self-confidently anti-feminist and domestic writer exert a profound influence on Victorian literature and culture. This book was previously published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular. Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art. He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

When first published in 1983 The Entropy Exhibition was the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as 'New Wave' science fiction. It examines the history of the New Worlds magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses developments in stylistic theory and practice. Michael Moorcock edited and produced the magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1973. Within its pages he encouraged the development of new kinds of popular writing out of the genre of science fiction, energetically reworking traditional themes, images and styles as a radical response to the crisis of modern fiction. The essential paradox of the writing lay in its fascination with the concept of 'entropy' - the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key to both the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The Fiction of the New Worlds writers was not concerned with far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world. Detailed attention is given to each of the three main contributors to the New Worlds magazine - Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard. Moorcock himself is more commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels than by the magazine he supported with them, but here at last the balance is redressed: New Worlds emerges as nothing less than a focus and a metaphor for many of the transformations of English and American literature in the past two decades.

First published in 1965, this reissued work by Wendy Craik provides a thorough and extensive study of Jane Austen's six complete novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. This is a truly groundbreaking study of Austen which, in addition to a close analysis of the novels themselves, also goes on investigate the principles by which Jane Austen selected and arranged her material.

- This is the first book of its kind to review a series of contemporary novels in English through the prism of the critical and theoretical categories of grievability and ungrievability. In the wake of Judith Butler's work on (un-)grievable groups, it addresses the ways in which fiction in English since the 1990s operates in its singularity to delve into the socio-cultural construction of grievability, thereby refining and displacing the more traditional categories of subalternity, inaudibility and invisibility associated with the poetics of postmodernism. - It also considers these categories in relation with the neighbouring issues of visibility and invisibility, ultimately providing a welcome prism though which to envisage such secular forms as the obituary and the elegy. Such genres provide means to perform mourning or, conversely, postulate an ethics of melancholia through continuing attachment to the departed. - Central to the objectives of this volume is the idea of providing an analysis of how Butler's influential categories may be of specific use to literary scholars all the more so as, in our post-trauma age, this traditional function of literature has brought to the fore such aspects of grievability as the influence of race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation in the determination of the grievability or ungrievability of the human beings exposed to individual or collective violence. - More concretely, this book uses the prism of (un-)grievability to contribute to the study of the ethics and politics of literature, taking on board the ethics and politics of form. It shows how some fictions delve into the lives of those considered ungrievable and are submitted to invisibility and/or illicit dead, while, in perpetrator trauma fictions, it is the perpetrators themselves whose refusal or impossibility to acknowledge the harm done to others under warfare conditions, foster a relation of spectrality that transforms the unfairly killed into ghosts who cannot be laid down to rest. - The essays collected in this volume relate the relevance of the above-mentioned critical and theoretical categories to various cultural areas of the English-speaking world, charting the singularities and common concerns of an array of contemporary texts and themes relating to various grounds of relegation and invisibilisation.

First published in 1968, this reissue of Dr. Craik 's critical appreciation of the completed novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bront is seminal for the way in which it shifts emphasis away from the Bront family biography towards a detailed critical analysis of the novels themselves.

Separate chapters are given to each of the seven novels. The author 's aims and techniques in each are assessed and Dr. Craik shows what light the books throw on each other, how they are related to the novels of the Bront 's predecessors, and how the Bront novels compare with their great contemporaries in the nineteenth century novel.

One of Australia's most respected novelists, Alex Miller's writing is both popular and critically well-received. He is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. He has said that writing is his way of 'locating connections' and his work is known for its deeply empathic engagement with relationships and cultures.This collection explores his early and later works, including Miller's best-known novels, The Ancestor Game, Journey to the Stone Country, Lovesong and Autumn Laing. Contributors examine his intricately constructed plots, his interest in the nature of home and migration, the representation in his work of Australian history and culture, and key recurring themes including art and Aboriginal issues. Also included is a memoir, illustrated by photographs from his personal collection, in which Alex Miller reflects on his writing life.With contributions from leading critics including Raimond Gaita, Peter Pierce, Ronald A. Sharp, Brenda Walker, Elizabeth Webby and Geordie Williamson, this collection is the first substantial critical analysis of Alex Miller's work. It is an invaluable resource for anyone teaching and studying contemporary Australian literature.

This four volume backlist collection brings together an array of criticism written about the works of Jane Austen, encompassing everything from a detailed analysis of her six published novels, through to an investigation of the heroines within her fiction, a re-evaluation of her political subtext and proto-feminism, and even a French appreciation of her work.

Published between 1924 and 1987, these four reissued works offer a thorough and engaging insight into Jane Austen and the canon of Austen criticism, which will appeal to the general reader as well as to undergraduates studying 19th Century English Literature and the rise of the novel.

The first international conference ever held in Africa on the works of author Joseph Conrad took place in 1998, to mark the centenary of the publication of heart of darkness. This book draws its title from Conrad's short story, `An Outpost of Progress' which represented the responses of a European to colonial settler assumptions about progress and backwardness, in the light of his first-hand experience of Europeans in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The 13 essays in this collection engage directly with the ways in which Conrad's fiction explores and problematises the notion of `progress', not only at the time when he was writing but now, more than a century later. Although the relationship between modernist and postcolonial literature has been theorised by critics in Britain, Europe and America since the late 1980s, for the first time, this book brings these debates to Africa.

First published in 1977, this concise and insightful study of the life and works of Thomas Hardy provides a thorough examination of Hardy's literary output. Alongside a brief biography of Hardy's life, Professor Page's study also spotlights his major and minor novels, his short stories, his non-fiction prose and his verse.

On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer. As well as setting the novelista (TM)s work in the context of Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite, energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and the mundane.

Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of Kafka, Chekov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with Rotha (TM)s comic brashness and bravura.

Included here are: a preface, a critical essay and explanatory annotations by Margo Culley; essays by acclaimed Kate Chopin biographers; selections from the conduct books of the period; contemporary perspectives on womanhood, motherhood and marriage; and reviews and interpretative essays.

Wuthering Heights is one of the most written-about novels in the English language. Famous for the dark and passionate world Emily Bronte creates, and for the doomed relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, it is a story which has almost become synonymous with romance, not just for Hollywood, chick lit writers and advertisers but for many who have read it and many more who haven't. Countless stories, films, television adaptations and magazine articles owe their origins or inspiration to Bronte's extraordinary story of love and death in the Yorkshire moors. Catherine's desperate avowal - "Nelly, I am Heathcliff" - has been described as the most romantic sentence in fiction. For all its later enormous influence and reputation, the novel was at first easily eclipsed in fame and critical renown by Jane Eyre, the more straightforwardly romantic novel written by Emily's sister, Charlotte, and the runaway bestseller of 1847. It wasn't until the early 20th century that critical opinion began to change, and in recent years the novel has been all but overwhelmed in a flood of criticism of all kinds, with Marxists, feminists and psychoanalysts all finding plenty of grist for their particular mills. So what is Wuthering Heights really about? Is it the Great Romantic Novel which so many readers, critics and film-makers assume it to be? What are we meant to make of Heathcliff, the lonely, violent man at the heart of Bronte's story? In this book Graham Bradshaw explores these questions and shows why Emily Bronte's novel remains such a vivid, subtle and resonant work more than 150 years after it was first published.

"As gripping and twisted as a James Ellroy novel." - Ian Rankin "A masterpiece of literary biography." - David Peace The first critical biography of a titan of American crime fiction. Love Me Fierce In Danger is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called "Demon Dog of Crime Fiction," Ellroy enjoys a celebrity status and notoriety that few authors can match. However, traumas from the past have shadowed his literary success. When Ellroy was ten years old, his mother was brutally murdered. The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that has included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. In tracing his life and career, Steven Powell reveals how Ellroy's upbringing in LA, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a profound and dark influence on his work as a novelist. Using new sources, Powell also uncovers Ellroy's family secrets, including the mysterious first marriage of his mother Jean Ellroy, eighteen years before her murder. At its heart, Love Me Fierce in Danger is the story of how Ellroy overcame his demons to become the bestselling and celebrated author of such classics as The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. Informed by interviews with friends, family, peers, and literary and Hollywood collaborators, as well as extensive conversations with Ellroy himself, Love Me Fierce In Danger pulls back the curtain on an enigmatic figure who has courted acclaim and controversy with equal zealotry.

- This is the first book of its kind to review a series of contemporary novels in English through the prism of the critical and theoretical categories of grievability and ungrievability. In the wake of Judith Butler's work on (un-)grievable groups, it addresses the ways in which fiction in English since the 1990s operates in its singularity to delve into the socio-cultural construction of grievability, thereby refining and displacing the more traditional categories of subalternity, inaudibility and invisibility associated with the poetics of postmodernism. - It also considers these categories in relation with the neighbouring issues of visibility and invisibility, ultimately providing a welcome prism though which to envisage such secular forms as the obituary and the elegy. Such genres provide means to perform mourning or, conversely, postulate an ethics of melancholia through continuing attachment to the departed. - Central to the objectives of this volume is the idea of providing an analysis of how Butler's influential categories may be of specific use to literary scholars all the more so as, in our post-trauma age, this traditional function of literature has brought to the fore such aspects of grievability as the influence of race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation in the determination of the grievability or ungrievability of the human beings exposed to individual or collective violence. - More concretely, this book uses the prism of (un-)grievability to contribute to the study of the ethics and politics of literature, taking on board the ethics and politics of form. It shows how some fictions delve into the lives of those considered ungrievable and are submitted to invisibility and/or illicit dead, while, in perpetrator trauma fictions, it is the perpetrators themselves whose refusal or impossibility to acknowledge the harm done to others under warfare conditions, foster a relation of spectrality that transforms the unfairly killed into ghosts who cannot be laid down to rest. - The essays collected in this volume relate the relevance of the above-mentioned critical and theoretical categories to various cultural areas of the English-speaking world, charting the singularities and common concerns of an array of contemporary texts and themes relating to various grounds of relegation and invisibilisation.

The documents collected in this volume, first published in 1970, trace the development of novel criticism during one of the most formative periods in the history of fiction: from 1700-1800. The material includes prefaces to collections, translations and original novels; essays written for journals modelled on the Spectator; passages taken from miscellanies and from books written primarily for some purpose unconnected with the novel; reviews from the monthly reviews; and introductions to the collected works of certain authors.

This volume covers 100 years of criticism and creative writing, and the materials are arranged chronologically. Each of the documents is headed by an Introductory Note and the Editor has provided an important historical introduction.

First published in 1968, this collection of essays and reviews represents all that Sir Walter Scott wrote on the subject of novels and novelists, and will be invaluable for the study of Scott, both as novelist and critic. The work provides a survey of the novel at an important period of its development and offers an historical perspective not normally available in one volume.

This book expands the discourse as well as the nature of critical commentary on science fiction, speculative fiction and futurism a " literary and cinematic by Black writers. The range of topics include the following: black superheroes; issues and themes in selected works by Octavia Butler; selected work of Nalo Hopkinson; the utopian and dystopian impulse in the work of W.E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler; Derrick Bella (TM)s Space Traders; the Star Trek Franchise; female protagonists through the lens of race and gender in the Alien and Predator film franchises; science fiction in the Caribbean Diaspora; commentary on select African films regarding near-future narratives; as well as a science fiction/speculative literature writera (TM)s discussion of why she writes and how. This book was published as a special issue of African Identities: An International Journal.

What is the role of the prude in the Roman libertin? James Fowler argues that in the most famous novels of the genre the prude is not the libertine's victim but an equal and opposite force working against him, and that ultimately she brings retribution for his social, erotic and philosophical presumption."

First published in 1988, this reissue is an important work in the field of national literary exchange. Declared by American Library Association in its Choice publication one of the ten best reference works of 1988, the volume has survived global change - politically, socially, economically, religiously, aesthetically - to promote cultural dialogue between China and the West. Besides the scores of annotated sources, the introductory essays remain as authentic and moving as the day of their appearance.

Equally to be observed is accelerating demand, especially in academic institutions, for global cultural exchange through national literatures. How can we of the English-speaking world, for example, adequately understand and converse with our Chinese counterparts without some appreciation of their culture, notably of Confucian and Taoist roles in their history as reflected in their literature?

Overall, a pioneering work whose reissue will be welcomed by both scholars and general readers alike.

First published in 1981, this book offers a study of British and American popular fiction in the 1970s, a decade in which the quest for the superseller came to dominate the lives of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Illustrated by examples of the lurid incidents that catapult so many books into the bestseller charts, this comprehensive study covers the work of Robbins, Hailey and Maclean, the 'bodice rippers', the disaster craze, horror, war stories and media tie-ins such as The Godfather, Jaws and Star Wars.

No Fear

Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Read& nbsp; A Midsummer Night's Dream in all its brilliance and actually understand what it means.

& nbsp;

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.

During a period of twenty years--from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken's classic pulp magazine The Black Mask in the early 1930s, through the publication of his novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s--Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.Drawn from those journals, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler offers an intimate view of the writer at work, revealing early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes that would later be used in The Long Goodbye, The Blue Dahlia, and other classics.Filled with both public and private writings, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler includes "Marlowesque" particulars such as pickpocket lingo, San Quentin jailhouse slang, a "Note on the Tommygun," and musings on "Craps." Here, too, are surprising, lesser known essays on Hollywood, the mystery story, British and American writing, and a wicked parody of Hemingway. This sampler--by turns whimsical, provocative, irreverent, and fascinating--also contains a list of possible story titles; "Chandlerisms;" and his short work "English Summer: A Gothic Romance," which the writer viewed as a turning point in his career.