The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. Volume 2 examines the period from1750-1820, which was a crucial period in the development of the novel in English. Not only was it the time of Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and Scott, but it also saw the establishment and definition of the novel as we know it, as well as the emergence of a number of subgenres, several of which remain to this day. Conventionally however, it has been one of the least studied areas-seen as a falling off from the heyday of Richardson and Fielding, or merely a prelude to the great Victorian novelists. This volume takes full advantage of recent major advances in scholarly bibliography, new critical assessments, and the fresh availability of long-neglected fictional works, to offer a new mapping and appraisal. The opening section, as well as some remarkable later chapters, consider historical conditions underlying the production, circulation, and reception of fiction during these seventy years, a period itself marked by a rapid growth in output and expansion in readership. Other chapters cover the principal forms, movements, and literary themes of the period, with individual contributions on the four major novelists (named above), seen in historical context, as well as others on adjacent fields such as the shorter tale, magazine fiction, children's literature, and drama. The volume also views the novel in the light of other major institutions of modern literary culture, including book reviewing and the reprint trade, all of which played a part in advancing a sense of the novel as a defining feature of the British cultural landscape. A focus on 'global' literature and imported fiction in two concluding chapters in turn reflects a broader concern for transnat onal literary studies in general.

The author of such works as "Lamb, Cal, " and "Grace Notes," Bernard MacLaverty is one of Northern Ireland's leading--and most prolific--contemporary writers. Bringing together leading scholars from a full range of critical perspectives, this is a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on MacLaverty. Covering all of his novels and many of his short stories, the book explores the ways in which the author has grappled with such themes as The Troubles, the Holocaust, Catholicism, and music. "Bernard MacLaverty: Critical Readings" also includes coverage of the film adaptations of his work.

In Melchior Wankowicz: Poland's Master of the Written Word, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm examines the life and writing of famous Polish writer Melchior Wankowicz, author of legendary work "The Battle of Monte Cassino". Acclaimed by his readers and critics alike, Melchior Wankowicz was famous for creating his theory of reportage, i.e. the "mosaic method" where the events of many people were implanted into the life of one person. Melchior Wankowicz put into words the beautiful, tragic and heroic events of Polish history that provided a form of sustenance for a people that thrive on patriotism and love of their country. Wankowicz's books shaped national consciousness, glorified the heroism of the Polish soldier. Later in his life, Wankowicz personally set an example by standing up to the Communist party that brought him to trail for his work. In this book, Ziolkowska-Boehm offers a critical examination of Wankowicz's work informed by her experiences as his private secretary. Her access to the author's personal archives shed new light on the life and work of the man considered by many to be "the father of Polish reportage."

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play.
Thomas Karshan argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. He traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian emigre writers who espoused those aesthetics. Karshan then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As he does so, he demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Pope, and the humanist tradition of the literary game.
Drawing in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, and on highly restricted archival material, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play provides the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for, and influence on, contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard. Through Nabokov, it addresses the literary game-playing that is one of the most distinctive elements in post-1945 literature.

Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 explores the intersections of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in America as it is depicted in the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth. Maggie McKinley reconsiders the longstanding association between masculinity and violence, locating a problematic paradox within works by these writers: as each author figures violence as central to the establishment of a liberated masculine identity, the use of this violence often reaffirms many constricting and emasculating cultural myths and power structures that the authors and their protagonists are seeking to overturn.

Leading scholars critically explore three leading novels by Louise Erdrich, one of the most important and popular Native American writers working today. Louise Erdrich has shaped the possibilities for Native American, women's and popular fiction in the United States during the late twentieth century. Louise Erdrich collects new essays by noted scholars of Native American Literature on three important novels that chart the trajectory of Erdrich's novelistic career, "Tracks (1988)," "The Last Report on the Miracles At Little No Horse (2001)" and "The Plague of Doves (2007)". This book illuminates Erdrich's multiperspectival representation of Native American culture and history. Focusing on such topics as humor, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Erdrich's explorations of Native American identities through her innovative fictions. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.

From Henry James' fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz; from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov; modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth-century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. Having its roots in the late-nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, "wastepaper modernism" arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book's own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature's dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

Many of the world's greatest novels have been translated into Persian. Though Iranian novelists are almost completely unknown in the outside world. It is still classical literature that represents Iran. What delays the globalization of Persian novels? As a response, the present study deals with questions about the novel in the Persian literary system, the literary discourse in the Iranian cultural context and modern Persian literature on the global scene.

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo. By examining implicit and explicit allusion to these events in their work, it becomes apparent that both consider 9/11 a crucial event, and that it has profoundly impacted their work. From this important point, the volume focuses on the major change identifiable in both authors' work; a change in the perception, and conception, of time. This is not, however, a simple change after 2001. It allows, at the same time, a re-examination of both authors work, and the acknowledgment of time as a crucial concept to both authors throughout their careers. Engaging with several theories of time, and their reiteration and examination in both authors' work, this volume contributes both to the understanding of literary time, and to the work of Pynchon and DeLillo.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

J. G. Ballard self-professedly devoured the work of Freud as a teenager, and entertained early thoughts of becoming a psychiatrist; he opened his novel-writing career with a manifesto declaring his wish to write a science fiction exploring n

Both Giorgio Agamben and Franz Kafka are best known for their gloomy political worldview. A cautious study of Agamben's references on Kafka, however, reveals another dimension right at the intersection of their works: a complex and unorthodox theory of freedom. The inspiration emerges from Agamben's claims that 'it is a very poor reading of Kafka's works that sees in them only a summation of the anguish of a guilty man before the inscrutable power'. Virtually all of Kafka's stories leave us puzzled about what really happened. Was Josef K., who is butchered like a dog, defeated? And what about the meaningless but in his own way complete creature Odradek? Agamben's work sheds new light on these questions and arrives, through Kafka, at different strategies for freedom at the point where this freedom is most blatantly violated.

Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece. Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors. Approaching Silence promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endo, within and beyond the West. Includes an Afterword by Martin Scorsese on adapting Silence for the screen as well as the full text of Steven Dietz's play adaptation of Endo's novel.

In his attitude toward religion, George Orwell has been characterised in various terms: as an agnostic, humanist, secular saint or even Christian atheist. Drawing on the full range of his public and private writings - from major works such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London to his shorter journalism and private letters and journals - George Orwell and Religion is a major reassessment of Orwell's life-long engagement with religion. Exploring Orwell's life and work, Michael Brennan illuminates for the first time how this profound engagement with religion informed the intensely humanitarian spirit of his writings.

One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity undertakes the first extensive analysis of the works of Dave Eggers, an author who has grown from a small-time media upstart into one of the most influential author-publishers of the twenty-first century. Eggers' rise to fame is charted in careful detail, offering analysis of the circumstances of his success and their effects on the production of his literary oeuvre. As both a memoirist and novelist Eggers has distinguished himself from his cohort of young American authors by insisting on seizing the reins of his publishing output. The nature of this independent streak is given attention in this study, particularly the cultural circumstances of a digitalised, consumer society in which books and literature are primarily commodities. Hamilton examines this spirit of independence as both a practical and figurative state in Eggers' works, and seeks to address the reasons why in a contemporary, globalised society independence is not only personally gratifying for Eggers but also a popularly successful strategy for producing books.

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the "post-truth" era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes - the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.

George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning, but most of her critics relate her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book seeks to demonstrate that more thany any of her Victorian contemporaries she anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty-first century in regard to both art and philosophy. Although rightly associated with "realism" her concept of the real is philosophically informed and her writing is also highly allusive.

This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring Eliot's credentials as a radical thinker and her engagement with political and ethical issues. Opening with her relationship to the Romantic tradition and Byron in particular, he goes on to discuss her reading of Darwinism, her radical critique of Victorian values and her affiliation with modernists such as Joyce. The final essays discuss her work in relation to Derridean themes and to the philosopher Bernard Williams' concept of moral luck. What emerges is a very different Eliot from the rather conservative figure portrayed in much of the critical literature, who might justly be thought of as the most significant Victorian writer for twenty-first century readers and critics.

"Carrying ahead the project of cultural criminology, Phillips and Strobl dare to take seriously that which amuses and entertains us--and to find in it the most significant of themes. Audiences, images, ideologies of justice and injustice--all populate the pages of Comic Book Crime. The result is an analysis as colorful as a good comic, and as sharp as the point on a superhero's sword."--Jeff Ferrell, author of Empire of Scrounge Superman, Batman, Daredevil, and Wonder Woman are iconic cultural figures that embody values of order, fairness, justice, and retribution. Comic Book Crime digs deep into these and other celebrated characters, providing a comprehensive understanding of crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. This is a world where justice is delivered, where heroes save ordinary citizens from certain doom, where evil is easily identified and thwarted by powers far greater than mere mortals could possess. Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl explore these representations and show that comic books, as a historically important American cultural medium, participate in both reflecting and shaping an American ideological identity that is often focused on ideas of the apocalypse, utopia, retribution, and nationalism. Through an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010, as well as several years of immersion in comic book fan culture, Phillips and Strobl reveal the kinds of themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-9/11 context. They discuss heroes' calculations of "deathworthiness," or who should be killed in meting out justice, and how these judgments have as much to do with the hero's character as they do with the actions of the villains. This fascinating volume also analyzes how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to construct difference for both the heroes and the villains in ways that are both conservative and progressive. Engaging, sharp, and insightful, Comic Book Crime is a fresh take on the very meaning of truth, justice, and the American way.Nickie D. Phillipsis Associate Professor in the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY.Staci Stroblis Associate Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.In theAlternative Criminologyseries

"Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is a student-guide to Thomas Hardy's most enduring novel. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is one of the great classics of the British novel tradition and one of the most beloved works of the nineteenth century. This lively, informed, and insightful guide explores the style, structure, themes, critical reception, and literary influence of Thomas Hardy's celebrated novel and also discusses its film and TV adaptations. This is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, offering guidance on literary and historical context, language, style and form, and reading the text. It covers the novel's critical reception and publishing history, adaptations and interpretations and provides a guide to further reading. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

A rich trove of letters from Edith Wharton to her governess, written over the course of their long and affectionate friendship An exciting archive came to auction in 2009: the papers and personal effects of Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849-1916), a governess and companion to several prominent American families. Among the collection were one hundred thirty-five letters from her most famous pupil, Edith Newbold Jones, later the great American novelist Edith Wharton. Remarkably, until now, just three letters from Wharton's childhood and early adulthood were thought to survive. Bahlmann, who would become Wharton's literary secretary and confidante, emerges in the letters as a seminal influence, closely guiding her precocious young student's readings, translations, and personal writing. Taken together, these letters, written over the course of forty-two years, provide a deeply affecting portrait of mutual loyalty and influence between two women from different social classes. This correspondence reveals Wharton's maturing sensibility and vocation, and includes details of her life that will challenge long-held assumptions about her formative years. Wharton scholar Irene Goldman-Price provides a rich introduction to My Dear Governess that restores Bahlmann to her central place in Wharton's life.