"Contexts and Contemporary Reactions" illuminates eighteenth-century culture with selections from conduct books for women. Extracts from Burney s letters and journals and five contemporary reviews are also included. "Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel. The critics include Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Hazlitt, John Wilson Croker, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Hemlow, Martha G. Brown, Kenneth W. Graham, Kristina Straub, Gina Campbell, Susan Fraiman, amd Margaret Anne Doody. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included."

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

For more than a decade now a steadily growing chorus of voices has announced that the 'postmodern' literature, art, thought and culture of the late 20th century have come to an end. At the same time as this, the early years of the 21st century have seen a stream of critical formulations proclaiming a successor to postmodernism. Intriguing and exciting new terms such as 'remodernism', 'performatism', 'hypermodernism', 'automodernism", 'renewalism', 'altermodernism', 'digimodernism' and 'metamodernism' have been coined, proposed and debated as terms for what comes after the postmodern. Supplanting the Postmodern is the first anthology to collect the key writings in these debates in one place. The book is divided into two parts: the first, 'The Sense of an Ending', presents a range of positions in the debate around the demise of the postmodern; the second, 'Coming to Terms with the New', presents representative writings from the new '-isms' mentioned above. Each of the entries is prefaced by a brief introduction by the editors, in which they outline its central ideas, point out the similarities and/or differences from other positions found in the anthology, and suggest possible strengths and limitations to the insights presented in each piece.

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminality-identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither-caused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fiction-both their structure and their intentionality-Liminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernandez Cubas, Javier Marias, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.

If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. This book approaches contemporary narratives of care through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics. Through close-readings of J.M. Coetzee's "Slow Man," Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," Paul Auster's "The Book of Illusions," and Tom McCarthy's "Remainder," it seeks to reframe debates about realism in the novel ranging from Ian Watt to Zadie Smith as engagements with the novel's biopolitical origins: its relation to pastoral care, the camps, and the welfare state. Within such an understanding of the novel, what possibilities for a critical aesthetics of existence does the contemporary novel include?

This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechene calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs - the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text - that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.

Hailed for her remarkable social and psychological insights into the Gilded Age lives of privileged Americans, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, was also a transnational author who cultivated contradictory approaches to identity, difference, and belonging. As literary studies continue to expand beyond nation-based topics, readers are becoming more interested in the international scope of her life and writing. Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism shows that Wharton was highly engaged with global issues of her time, due in part to her extensive travel abroad. Examining both her canonical and lesser-known works and including her art historical discoveries, her political writings, and her travel writing, the essays in this volume explore Wharton's diverse, complex, and sometimes problematic relationship to a cosmopolitan vision.

This study proposes that - rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics - Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/

Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and understandings of the particular America that became Wright's focus at the beginning of his career and was still prominent in his mind at the end. Virginia Whatley Smith's edited collection examines Wright's fixation with America at home and from abroad: his oppression by, rejection of, conflict with, revolts against, and flight from America. Other people have written on Wright's revolutionary heroes, his difficulties with the FBI, and his works as a postcolonial provocateur; but none have focused singly on his treatment of America. Wherever Wright traveled, he always positioned himself as an African American as he compared his experiences to those at hand. However, as his domestic settlements changed to international residences, Wright's craftsmanship changed as well. To convey his cultural message, Wright created characters, themes, and plots that would expose arbitrary and whimsical American policies, oppressive rules which would invariably ensnare Wright's protagonists and sink them more deeply into the quagmire of racial subjugation as they grasped for a fleeting moment of freedom. Smith's collection brings to the fore new ways of looking at Wright, particularly his post-Native Son international writings. Indeed, no critical interrogations have considered the full significance of Wright's masterful crime fictions. In addition, the author's haiku poetry complements the fictional pieces addressed here, reflecting Wright's attitude toward America as he, near the end of his life, searched for nirvana - his antidote to American racism.

John McGahern's work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with 'making it old' rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern's statements about the 'presence' of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGahern's six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGahern's fiction alongside writing by Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Beckett, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Chekhov, amongst others. Drawing out the ways in which McGahern's fiction conceals and reveals its modernist traces, this study considers subjects such as 'low' modernism, the complexity of McGahern's time-writing and his dialectical construction of the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity in Ireland. McGahern's narratives of melancholic return are often read psycho-biographically, but they also involve a return to the remnants of literature, including that of the modernist canon. This book will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those who contemplate the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing.

A steamy, hilarious read! Perfect for fans of Meghan Quinn and Penny Reid. What happens when a New York City playboy, a Southern spitfire, and a hairless cat walk into a coffee shop? Self-made mogul Chase Moore is a charming hound dog with a hairless cat and a family business to save. He was fine being the spare to the heir until the family's billion-dollar business threatens to go belly-up. Now Chase will need more than his rakish good looks to fight his father for control. Powerhouse marketing guru Campbell King returns to Texas and launches her own company after being chewed up and spat out by the city that never sleeps, One phone call makes all the difference when a sauve and sexy male voice offers her the chance to redeem herself and help him save his swanky Manhattan store. When the sexy redhead finally runs into her new billionaire boss, they're both in for a shock. But there's no way Campbell is dating the boss. In fact, anyone but the billionaire would be better... Previously published as A Little Moore Action by Sara L Hudson.

From the perspectives of positive psychology and positive communication, superheroes are often depicted as possessing virtues and serving as inspirational exemplars. However, many of the virtues enumerated as characterizing the superhero (e.g., courage, teamwork, creativity) could just as easily be applied to heroes of other genres. To understand what is unique to the superhero genre, How Superheroes Model Community: Philosophically, Communicatively, Relationally looks not only to the virtues that animate them, but also to the underlying moral framework that gives meaning to those virtues. The key to understanding their character is that often they save strangers, and they do so in the public sphere. The superhero's moral framework, therefore, must encompass both the motivation to act to benefit others rather than themselves (especially people to whom they have no relational obligation) and to preserve the public sphere against those who would disrupt it. Given such a framework, Nathan Miczo argues that superheroes are not, and could not, be loners. They constantly form team-ups, super teams, alliances, partnerships, take on mentorship roles, and create sidekicks. Social constructionist approaches in the communication field argue that communication, in part, works to shape and create our social reality. Through this lens, Miczo proposes that superheroes maintain themselves as a community through the communicative practices they engage in.

Following on the heels of the first volume of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, this second volume narrates the development of L.M. Montgomery's (1874-1942) critical reputation in the seventy years since her death. Edited by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre, it traces milestones and turning points such as adaptations for stage and screen, posthumous publications, and the development of Montgomery Studies as a scholarly field. Lefebvre's introduction also considers Montgomery's publishing history in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom at a time when her work remained in print not because it was considered part of a university canon of literature, but simply due to the continued interest of readers. The twenty samples of Montgomery scholarship included in this volume broach topics such as gender and genre, narrative strategies in fiction and life writing, translation, and Montgomery's archival papers. They reflect shifts in Montgomery's critical reputation decade by decade: the 1960s, when a milestone chapter on Montgomery coincided with a second wave of texts seeking to create a canon of Canadian literature; the 1970s, in the midst of a sustained reassessment of popular fiction and of literature by women; the 1980s, when the publication of Montgomery's life writing, which coincided with the broadcast of critically acclaimed television productions adapted from her fiction, radically altered how readers perceived her and her work; the 1990s, when a conference series on Montgomery began to generate a sustained amount of scholarship; and the opening years of the twenty-first century, when the field of Montgomery Studies became both international and interdisciplinary. This is the first book to consider the posthumous life of one of Canada's most enduringly popular authors.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This book focuses on representations of aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction, including shifting perceptions of physical and sexual prowess, depression, and loss, but also greater wisdom and confidence, legacy, as well as new affective patterns. The collection also incorporates factors such as race, sexuality and religion. The volume includes studies, amongst others, on Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Edmund White. Ultimately, this study proves that men's aging experiences as described in contemporary U.S. literature and culture are as complex and varied as those of their female counterparts.

"Explores the history of Woolf's diaries, not only to reveal heretofore unremarked sources but also to trace her evolving sense of possibilities in diary-writing, possibilities which helped shape Woolf as a fiction writer. A must-read for devotees of Virginia Woolf."--Panthea Reid, author of "Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf" "This revealing book gives us a diarist with greater literary range than Pepys and affords us a second pleasure: the infinitely varied voices of the diaries Virginia read. They fascinate us as they fascinate her: those writers who encouraged, warned, comforted, and trained a developing genius."--Nancy Price, author of "Sleeping with the Enemy" "Lounsberry's deeply researched and gracefully written book shows not only Woolf's development into a great diarist but also her evolvement into the fiction and nonfiction writer revered today."--Gay Talese, author of "A Writer's Life" Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf's diary is her lengthiest and longest-sustained work--and her last to reach the public. In the only full-length book to explore deeply this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolf's development as a writer through her first twelve diaries--a fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolf's pioneering modernist style can be seen.
Starting with fourteen-year-old Woolf's first palm-sized leather diary, "Becoming Virginia Woolf" illuminates how her private and public writing was shaped by the diaries of other writers including Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, the French Goncourt brothers, Mary Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Woolf's "diary parents"--Sir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney. These key literary connections open a new and indispensable window onto the story of one of literature's most renowned modernists.

Ralph Ellison once said, ""We're only a partially achieved nation."" In The New Territory, scholars show how clearly Ellison foresaw and articulated both the challenges and the possibilities of America in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Ellison in these new essays appears more and more to be a cultural prophet of twenty-first century America. As literary scholar Ross Posnock states, ""If in our global, transnational age the renewed promise of cosmopolitan democracy has emerged as an animating ideal of popular political, and academic culture, this is a way of saying that we are only now beginning to catch up with Ralph Waldo Ellison.""In this collection, the editors offer fourteen original essays that seek to examine and re-examine Ellison's life and work in the context of its meanings for our own age, the early twenty-first century, the age of Obama, a period that is seemingly post-racial and yet all too acutely racial. Following a careful introduction that situates Ellison's writings in the context of new approaches and interest in his work, the book offers new essays examining Ellison's 1952 masterpiece, Invisible Man. It then turns to his vast, unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . , with detailed readings of that powerful and elusive narrative. These essays are the first sustained treatments of that posthumous work. The New Territory concludes with five chapters that discuss Ellison's political, cultural, and historical significance, probing how he speaks to the contemporary moment and beyond.

Examining a wide range of comics and graphic novels - including works by creators such as Will Eisner, Leela Corman, Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman, Sarah Glidden and Joe Sacco - this book explores how comics writers and artists have tackled major issues of Jewish identity and culture. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars in contemporary comic book studies, Visualizing Jewish Narrative highlights the ways in which Jewish comics have handled such topics as: *Biography, autobiography, and Jewish identity *Gender and sexuality *Genre - from superheroes to comedy *The Holocaust *The Israel-Palestine conflict *Sources in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish myth Visualizing Jewish Narrative also includes a foreword by Danny Fingeroth, former editor of the Spider-Man line and author of Superman on the Couch and Disguised as Clark Kent..

For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural 'noise' of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and 'psychogeographer' Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair's investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era.

Jonathan Coe is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed contemporary British writers. This comprehensive introduction places his work in clear historical and theoretical context, offering extensive readings of the author's ten novels from The Accidental Woman to Expo 58, including the remarkable What a Carve Up! The book explores Coe's biography and his experimentations with narrative, genre and comedy, as well as his thematic preoccupations with history, memory, loss and nostalgia. The first volume devoted entirely to Coe, this book includes: - A supporting timeline of key dates in literature and current events - An examination of the critical reception to Coe's works - An exclusive interview with Jonathan Coe himself

'Libelles diffamatoires', 'ecrits scandaleux', 'lettres anonymes', 'histoires forgees a plaisir': autant de manifestations, explique Voltaire a Frederic II en 1739 de la 'fureur de nuire' de ceux qui sont resolus a le 'perdre'. Le modele se transpose aisement aux querelles qui marquent l'affirmation conflictuelle du pouvoir intellectuel des philosophes des Lumieres au cours des vingt annees qui suivent la publication du Prospectus de l'Encyclopedie. Olivier Ferret se propose de combler une lacune dans les etudes dix-huitiemistes (les travaux que les litteraires - surtout les historiens - ont consacres au pamphlet concernent la Fronde et la periode revolutionnaire) et adopte, pour la periode 1750-1770, a cote des travaux consacres a un auteur, une querelle ou l'un des clans en presence, une perspective nouvelle, centree sur la question des echanges pamphletaires: c'est par les representations que construisent les pamphlets que les 'philosophes' et les 'antiphilosophes' trouvent un semblant d'unite. En expliquant pourquoi, en raison de l'antagonisme ideologique qui oppose les deux clans, elles ressortissent aussi au religieux et au politique, l'auteur cherche a degager la specificite de ces querelles litteraires et a questionner leurs repercussions sur une sphere publique litteraire en train de se constituer en opinion publique. Les preoccupations de l'histoire culturelle sont au coeur d'une demarche qui, pour tenter de cerner les elements d'une pratique litteraire, voire d'une poetique du pamphlet qui n'est pas une forme anhistorique, fait aussi appel a des problematiques issues de la lexicologie, de la bibliographie materielle, de l'analyse rhetorique et de l'analyse du discours. En observant la part qu'il prend dans ces querelles, il s'agit enfin de mesurer l'influence de Voltaire sur la physionomie de tels echanges pamphletaires.

Though discussing sexual material in novels aimed at the young adult market may make some individuals blush, the authors of such fiction often seek to represent a very real component in the lives of many teens. Unfortunately, authentic and teen-relatable information on healthy adolescent sexuality is not readily available, and sex education classes have had a minimal effect on positive sexual identity development. Consequently, young adult literature that contains sexual elements can play a critical role in addressing the questions and concerns of teens. In Sexual Content in Young Adult Fiction: Reading between the Sheets, Bryan Gillis and Joanna Simpson examine sexual material in canonical, historical, dystopian, romantic, and realistic contemporary fiction for teens. The authors begin with an exploration of sexual identity development and discuss the constructive influence that realistic representations of teen sexual behavior can have on that development. The authors provide a myriad of texts and examples that will help parents, teachers, and librarians better understand the positive role that sexual content in YA fiction can play in the socio-emotional and academic development of adolescents. The book concludes with an overview and analysis of censorship in the world of young adult fiction. In addition to providing a survey of sexual content in young adult literature, this book can help inspire adults to facilitate effective and responsible discussions about young adult fiction that contains sexual material. Featuring a "novels cited" and "works cited" bibliography, Sexual Content in Young Adult Fiction is an important resource that parents and educators will find particularly valuable.