The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular-the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre a son apogee (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing-particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry nosuke-Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.

Featuring close readings of commonly studied texts, this book takes students of Children's Literature through the key works, their contexts and critical and popular afterlives. "Children's Literature in Context" is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to children's literature and its wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues involved in the study of children's literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Close readings of commonly studied texts including Lewis Carroll's Alice books, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", "The Lion", "The Witch and the Wardrobe", the "Harry Potter" series and the "His Dark Materials" trilogy highlight major themes and ways of reading children's literature. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores a range of wider cultural texts including the film adaptations of "Harry Potter", "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Golden Compass". The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives on issues including innocence, gender, fantasy, psychoanalysis and ideology. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying children's literature. Texts and Contexts is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: * New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years * Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism * Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing * Mansfield and modernist culture - from Bloomsbury to the little magazines * Mansfield and her contemporaries - Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim * Mansfield and the arts - visual culture, cinema and music The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Color Purple," is one of America's major and most prolific writers. She is also among its most controversial. How has Walker's work developed over the last forty years? Why has it often provoked extreme reactions? Does Walker's cultural, political and spiritual activism enhance or distort her fiction? Where does she belong in the evolving tradition of African American literature?
"Alice Walker," second edition:
* Examines the full range of Walker's prose writings: her novels, short stories, essays, activist writings, speeches and memoirs
* Has been thoroughly revised in the light of the latest scholarship and critical developments
* Brings coverage of Walker's work right up to date with a new chapter on "Now is the Time to Open Your Heart" (2004), and discussion of her recent non-fictional writing, including "Overcoming Speechlessness" (2010)
* Traces Walker's lineage back to nineteenth-century visionary black women preachers and activists
* Assesses Walkers prose oeuvre both in terms of its literary and its activist merits and shortcomings.
Ideal for students and scholars alike, this established text remains an essential guide to the work of a key US author as it explains her unique place in contemporary American letters.

This is a rigorous but accessible account of the interface between landscape and style and form in contemporary British fiction.This study examines the importance of space for the way contemporary novelists experiment with aesthetic form, offering an account of how British writers from the past three decades have engaged with landscape depiction as a catalyst for stylistic innovation. James considers the work of over fifteen major British novelists to offer a wide-ranging and accessible commentary on the relationship between landscape and narrative design, while showing that our approach to those spaces mapped by contemporary fiction cannot be divorced from the emotional aspects of reading itself.Moving between established and emerging novelists, the book reveals that spatial poetics allow us to chart distinctive and surprising affinities between practitioners, demonstrating how writers today compel us to pay close attention to technique when linking the depiction of physical places to new developments in novelistic craft.

"The Ethics of Community initiates a conversation between continental philosophy and cultural/literary studies that is long overdue. Illustrating that there is a fundamental ethics in deconstructionist approaches to community that can be provocatively traced in the context of cultural considerations central to African-American and U.S. Latino literature, this is a book about bridging gaps. Luszczynska nimbly traverses the complex terrain of preeminent French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, offering a valuable introduction to the ethical components of their philosophical projects. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Menendez's In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd serve as case studies through which Nancian community and Derridean bearing witness are elaborated. As Luszczynska demonstrates, Morrison's foregrounding of the distinct cultural sensibilities of her black and white characters and Menendez's preoccupation with geographical displacement and exile, themselves activate a deconstructive ethics. In this groundbreaking study, distinct cultural understandings and contexts provide a novel way of thinking through intricacies of Nancy and Derrida's thought while revealing the potential of the novel to re-imagine ways of being in the concrete world. "

Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of "natural" disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as "natural" disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a "natural" disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

Metafiction and the Postwar Novel is a full-length reassessment of one of the definitive literary forms of the postwar period, sometimes known as 'postmodern metafiction'. In the place of large-scale theorizing, this book centres on the intimacies of writing situations - metafiction as it responds to readers, literary reception, and earlier works in a career. The emergence of archival materials and posthumously published works helps to bring into view the stakes of different moments of writing. It develops new terms for discussing literary self-reflexivity, derived from a reading of Don Quixote and its reception by J.L. Borges - the 'self of writing' and the 'public author as signature'. Across three comprehensive chapters, Metafiction and Postwar Fiction shows how some of the most highly-regarded postwar writers were motivated to incorporate reflexive elements into their writing - and to what ends. The first chapter, on South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, shows with a new clarity how his fictions drew from and relativized academic literary theory and the conditions of writing in apartheid South Africa. The second chapter, on New Zealand writer Janet Frame, draws widely from her fictions, autobiographies, and posthumously published materials. It demonstrates the terms in which her writing addresses a readership seemingly convinced that her work expressed the interior experience of 'madness'. The final chapter, on American writer Philip Roth, shows how his early reception led to his later, and often explosive, reconsiderations of identity and literary value in postwar America.

"Wise Blood: A Re-Consideration "is a collection of nineteen new essays on Flannery O'Connor's 1952 novel about the spiritual journey of a young man raised in a fundamentalist Christian family. Following the pattern of previous books in the Dialogue series, it offers analyses by established and emerging scholars in North America. The volume comprises five sections: Religious and Philosophical Thought; Comedy, Humor, and Animality in "Wise Blood"; Influences on "Wise Blood"; Structural Issues; and Gender, Culture, and Genre. An intensely religious novel by a Catholic author, "Wise Blood "continues to draw keen attention from literary scholars, theologians, preachers, and lay readers. This volume encompasses many new critical perspectives that will encourage greater insights, deeper understandings, and further investigations of the complexities of O'Connor's modern classic set in the Deep South.

Finally breaking through heterosexual cliches of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty "Jezebels," "Cotton's Queer Relations" exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Michael P. Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South's most iconic institution.

Bibler looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class, between plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men, arguing that while the texts portray the plantation as a rigid hierarchy of differences, these queer relations privilege a notion of sexual sameness that joins the individuals as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed. Bibler reveals how these models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation's regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement. "Cotton's Queer Relations "charts bold new territory in southern studies and queer studies alike, bringing together history and cultural theory to offer innovative readings of classic southern texts.

The notion of 'landlines' intimates communication, and is a fairly safe bet as far as most of the writing offered here, critical and creative, is concerned. In a way, of course, the metaphor is a rearguard action, and blows up in one's face, as it were, suggesting as it does a system of telephonic communication that is no longer typical of Africa, which is at the forefront of cellphone culture. On the more positive side, it is hoped that 'landlines' evoke traditional values, permitting the endorsement of communicative standards that are higher than those fostered by the 'etherial' chaos of cyberspace. The essays included are overwhelmingly concerned with Nigeria (productive power-house of the continent), covering such writers as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Vincent Egbuson, Buchi Emecheta, D.O. Fagunwa, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Femi Osofisan (two articles), Wole Soyinka, and Ahmed Yerima. The Nigerian novel (four articles) is roughly matched by studies of Nigerian dramatists (five articles). Also offered are three essays on fiction from outside Nigeria, by Alexander McCall Smith (Botswana), J.M. Coetzee (South Africa), and Marie NDiaye (France), and a treatment of the poetry of Jack Mapanje (Malawi). A further, wide-ranging essay, on cityscapes, discusses novels from Cameroon, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Kenya, as well as paintings from Equatorial Guinea and public placarding in Accra. Social awareness, a firm sense of history and traditional culture, the contemporary challenges of gender and identity-politics, and the perennial theme of endemic corruption are themes that underpin all of the contributions to Matatu 47. Matatu has traditionally fostered the publication of creative writing, and the present issue is no exception, featuring as it does poetry from Trinidad, a play from Nigeria, and short stories from Burundi, Ghana, and Nigeria. The volume closes with in-depth reviews of books on Yoruba proverbs, Chinua Achebe, and transnational literature. Contributors are: E.B. Adeleke, Tony E. Afejuku, Sophia Akhuemokhan, Niyi Akingbe, Sunday Victor Akwu, Felix Ayoh'Omidire, Dele Bamidele, Gilbert Braspenning, Clare Counihan, Jane Duran, Summer Edward, Pelumi Folajimi, Fausat M. Ibrahim, Isaiah U. Ilo, Ayodele S. Jegede, Mahrukh Khan, Adele King, Adebayo Mosobalaje, Dorothy Odartey-Wellington, H. Oby Okolocha, Harry Olufunwa, Owojecho Omoha, Wumi Raji, Marie-Therese Toyi, Flora A. Trebi-Ollennu, Kenneth Usongo, and Lendzemo Constantine Yuka.

Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature, from mid-republican Rome in the second century BC to the Second Sophistic in the second century AD. The contributors explore Latin texts both famous and obscure, from Roman drama and Menippean satire through Latin elegies, epics, and novels to letters issued by Roman emperors and compilations of laws. Each of the essays in this volume combines close reading of Latin literary texts with historical and cultural contextualization, making the collection an accessible and engaging combination of formalist criticism and historicist exegesis that attends to the many ways in which classical Latin literature participated in ancient Roman civic debates.

Katherine Mansfield's French Lives explores how both the literary, cultural, editorial and biographical influence of French arts and philosophy, and life as an emigre in France shaped Mansfield's evolution as a key modernist writer, while setting her within the geographies and cultural dynamics of Anglo-French modernism. Mansfield's many stays in France were decisive in intellectual, personal and psychological terms: discovering 'Murry's Paris' and the Left Bank; escaping to the War Zone to join Francis Carco; living as a civilian in wartime during the bombardments of Paris; travelling and finding lodgings as a single woman in war-ravaged towns; the experience of bereavement and debilitating ill-health abroad; and the joys and pitfalls for an outsider of a foreign land and idiom.

In" Reconstructing the Native South," Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South--literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands. In so doing Taylor advances a provocative, even counterintuitive claim: that the U.S. South and its Native American survivors have far more in common than mere geographical proximity. Both cultures have long been haunted by separate histories of loss and nostalgia, Taylor contends, and the moments when those experiences converge in explicit and startling ways have yet to be investigated by scholars. These convergences often bear the scars of protracted colonial antagonism, appropriation, and segregation, and they share preoccupations with land, sovereignty, tradition, dispossession, subjugation, purity, and violence.

Taylor poses difficult questions in this work. In the aftermath of Removal and colonial devastation, what remains--for Native and non-Native southerners--to be recovered? Is it acceptable to identify an Indian "lost cause"? Is a deep sense of hybridity and intercultural affiliation the only coherent way forward, both for the New South and for its oldest inhabitants? And in these newly entangled, postcolonial environments, has global capitalism emerged as the new enemy for the twenty-first century? "Reconstructing the Native South" is a compellingly original work that contributes to conversations in Native American, southern, and transnational American studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary historical contexts. The Handbook's coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the recalcitrant atavisms of Irish Gothic fiction; nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Mairtin O Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women's fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.

Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms

"In clear and simple prose, Mahon explains how to connect this little black box to the Joycean engine. Just pull some gears, it falls into place and works." -Jean-Michel Rabate, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania

James Joyce's work has been regarded as some of the most obscure, challenging, and difficult writing ever committed to paper; it is also shamelessly funny and endlessly entertaining. Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed "celebrates the daring, humor and playfulness of Joyce's complex work while engaging with and elucidating the most demanding aspects of his writing. The book explores in detail the motifs and radical innovations of style and technique that characterize his major works--Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, "and Finnegans Wake." By highlighting how Joyce's texts have been read by recent innovations in literary and cultural theory, Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed "offers the reader a Joyce that is contemporary, fresh, and relevant.

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought together to produce a comprehensive history of this ill-starred group of renegade writers. Whether the bolshie B.S. Johnson, the globetrotting Ann Quin, the cerebral Christine Brooke-Rose, or the omnipresent Anthony Burgess, these writers each brought their own unique contributions to literature at a time uniquely open to their iconoclastic message. The journey connects historical moments from Bletchley Park, to Paris May '68, to terrorist groups of the 1970s. A tale of love, loss, friendship and a shared vision, this book is a fascinating insight into a bold, provocative and influential group of writers whose collective story has gone untold, until now.

Robots in Popular Culture: Androids and Cyborgs in the American Imagination seeks to provide one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic robots in American popular culture. In the last 10 years, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have become not only a daily but a minute-by-minute part of American life-more integrated into our lives than anyone would have believed even a generation before. Americans have long known the adorable and helpful R2-D2 and the terrible possibilities of Skynet and its army of Terminators. Throughout, we have seen machines as valuable allies and horrifying enemies. Today, Americans cling to their mobile phones with the same affection that Luke Skywalker felt for the squat R2-D2. Meanwhile, our phones, personal computers, and cars have attained the ability to know and learn everything about us. This volume opens with essays about robots in popular culture, followed by 100 A-Z entries on the most famous AIs in film, comics, and more. Sidebars highlight ancillary points of interest, such as authors, creators, and tropes that illuminate the motives of various robots. The volume closes with a glossary of key terms and a bibliography providing students with resources to continue their study of what robots tell us about ourselves. Provides readers with detailed information on popular examples of robots/AI in American popular culture Provides readers with considerable Further Reading suggestions, including scholarly, pop culture, and scientific readings on each topic Places popular examples of robots/AI in pop culture in proper historical perspective Provides scholarly material that gives readers additional important historical context in five essays Gives equal coverage to a diverse array of robots, from the well-known to the obscure

Student Companion to Herman Melville provides a critical introduction to the life and literary works of Herman Melville, the nineteenth-century American author of Moby-Dick, as well as nine other novels and numerous short stories and poems. In addition to providing an overview of Melville's life in relation to his literary works, the book places his writings within their historical and cultural contexts, and then examines each of his major works fully, at the level of the nonspecialist and generalist reader. The chapters that address major works by Melville feature close readings of the literary texts that include analysis of point of view, setting, plot, characters, symbolism, themes, and historical contexts when appropriate. In addition, the four chapters devoted to individual novels, as well as the chapter on Melville's poetry, feature alternate readings to introduce the reader to postcolonial, feminist, genre, reader response, and deconstructionist approaches to literary criticism. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that includes lists of Melville's published works, biographies, contemporary reviews, and recent critical studies. -Early Narratives, from Typee to White Jacket -Moby Dick -Pierre -The Piazza Tales -Other magazine tales: "I and My Chimney," "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and "Israel Potter" -The Confidence-Man -Poetry, including Battle-Pieces and Clarel -Billy Budd

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This 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 introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Since the controversy and acclaim that surrounded the publication of Disgrace (1999), the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature and the publication of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (both in 2003), J. M. Coetzee's status has begun to steadily rise to the point where he has now outgrown the specialized domain of South African literature. Today he is recognized more simply as one of the most important writers in the English language from the late 20th and early 21st century. Coetzee's productivity and invention has not slowed with old age. The Childhood of Jesus, published in 2013, like Elizabeth Costello, was met with a puzzled reception, as critics struggled to come to terms with its odd setting and structure, its seemingly flat tone, and the strange affectless interactions of its characters. Most puzzling was the central character, David, linked by the title to an idea of Jesus. J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things is at the forefront of an exciting process of critical engagement with this novel, which has begun to uncover its rich dialogue with philosophy, theology, mathematics, politics, and questions of meaning.

Including more than 30 essential works of science fiction criticism in a single volume, this is a comprehensive introduction to the study of this enduringly popular genre. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings covers such topics as: *Definitions and boundaries of the genre *The many forms of science fiction, from time travel to 'inner space' *Ideology and identity: from utopian fantasy to feminist, queer and environmental readings *The non-human: androids, aliens, cyborgs and animals *Race and the legacy of colonialism The volume also features annotated guides to further reading on these topics. Includes writings by: Marc Angenot, J.G. Ballard, Damien Broderick, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Grace Dillon, Kodwo Eshun, Carl Freedman, Allison de Fren, Hugo Gernsback, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Robert A. Heinlein, Nalo Hopkinson, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Gwyneth Jones, Rob Latham, Roger Luckhurst, Judith Merril, John B. Michel, Wendy Pearson, John Rieder, Lysa Rivera, Joanna Russ, Mary Shelley, Stephen Hong Sohn, Susan Sontag, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Vernor Vinge, Sherryl Vint, H.G. Wells, David Wittenberg and Lisa Yaszek

The conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. Yet, earlier writers in the genre, such as Raymond Chandler, remain overlooked when it comes to examining how their war experience affected their writing. Sarah Trott corrects this oversight by examining Chandler alongside the World War I writers of the Lost Generation as well as highlighting a melding of very different styles in Chandler's work. Based on Chandler's experience in combat, Trott explains that the writer created detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealization of heroic individualism, as is commonly perceived, but instead as an authentic individual subjected to very real psychological frailties from trauma during the First World War. Inspecting Chandler's work and correspondence indicates that the characterization of the fictional Marlowe goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and can instead be interpreted as a genuine representation of a traumatized veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city, Chandler formed a disillusioned protagonist in an uncaring America. Chandler did so with the sophistication necessary to straddle genre fiction and canonical literature. The sum of this work offers a new understanding of how Chandler uses his war trauma, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his fiction enables Chandler to transcend generic limitations and be recognized as a key twentieth-century literary figure.

How are contemporary authors reimagining the idea of 'Ecuador' following the worst financial crisis in the nation's history, and how do countries on the periphery of the global literary market challenge and enrich World Literature? Winner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode, the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders. This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits that these novels - Eliecer Cardenas' El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andres Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Aleman's Humo (2017) - both reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.