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.

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.

By according a central place to the history of reading, Circles of learning radically rethinks the nature of first-person narrative during this period and reconsiders its relation to the autobiographical discourse. Jenny Mander argues that to understand better both the history of the novel and that of the autobiography we need first to examine the position of the modern reader. The study begins with a critical analysis of Genettian narratology in order to foreground a number of important presuppositions of twentieth-century reading practices, and it goes on to show how these have shaped modern criticism of past texts. Through a detailed examination of eighteenth-century prefactory discourse and Marivaux's concept of personal style as put forward in his journalistic writings, Jenny Mander demonstrates how twentieth-century interpretations can be brought into question by the eighteenth-century novel itself. Adducing models of good reading promoted by pedagogic literature and art as well as by specific scenes of reading within many novels, she is able to ground an alternative analysis of Marivaux's Paysan parvenu and Prevost's Memoires d'un homme de qualite in the practices of eighteenth-century readers, drawing further support from contemporary reviews. This challenging study concludes by showing not only how Prevost's writing sets these practices in yet clearer relief, but also how he points to and participates in their transformation. Offering a fresh perspective on first-person narrative at a formative moment in the history of the French novel, Circles of leaning will interest scholars and theorists of modern prise fiction and autobiography aas well as tose specialising in eighteenth-century literature.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Some of the most memorable movies of Hollywood's Golden Age were based on novels that never received the acclaim they deserved. No-one who saw Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker could forget the actor's wrenching performance but does anyone remember the author of the book on which the film was based? The same can be said of Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This book retrieves these novels and re-evaluates the careers of the eight neglected novelists whose works inspired eight different directors - among them Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, John Huston and Sidney Pollack. Each chapter offers detailed analysis on both the original text and the resulting movie. Taken together, the double examination of novel and film raises some important questions about the nature and problems of cinematic adaptation.

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.

In the second of a series of anthologies on future war stories, the leading specialist in the field presents a selection of prophetic tales about the conflict-to-come between the British and the Germans, tales which had immense influence in the quarter-century before the First World War. An extensive range of contemporary illustrations is included.

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.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few - it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

'It's not a fair world I'm afraid. Beauty or fortune carries the day. You have the beauty and I the fortune, so there's every chance we'll succeed'In Regency England, marriage is everything. For young widow Sybella Lovatt, the time has come to find a suitable husband for her sister and ward Lucie. Male suitors are scarce near their Wiltshire estate, so the sisters resolve to head to London in time for the Season to begin. Once ensconced at the Mayfair home of Lady Godley, Lucie's godmother, the whirl of balls, parties and promenades can begin. But the job of finding a husband is fraught with rules and tradition. Jostling for attention are the two lords - the charming and irresistible Freddie Lynwood and the preternaturally handsome Valentine Ravenell, their enigmatic neighbour from Shotten Hall, Mr Brabazon, and the dangerous libertine Lord Rockliffe, with whom the brooding Brabazon is locked in deadly rivalry. Against the backdrop of glamorous Regency England, Sybella must settle Lucie's future, protect her own reputation, and resist the disreputable rakes determined to seduce the beautiful widow. As the Season ends, will the sisters have found the rarest of things - a suitable marriage with a love story to match? Sunday Times bestselling author Jane Dunn brings the Regency period irresistibly to life in a page-turning novel packed with surprising revelations, which all comes wittily, gloriously, good in the end. Perfect for fans of Gill Hornby, Janice Hadlow, Jane Austen, and anyone with a Bridgerton-shaped hole in their lives. Praise for Jane Dunn: 'Outstanding, perceptive and delightfully readable.' Sunday Times Books of the Year 'Jane Dunn has written a splendid piece of popular history with the ready-pen of a highly skilled writer, endowed with remarkable insight.' Roy Strong, Daily Mail 'Jane Dunn is one of our best biographers.' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times What readers say about Jane Dunn: 'Absolutely brilliant book. Easy, interesting and certainly a page-turner. Enjoyed reading this book so much.' 'I loved this book, Jane Dunn writes with an insight into Elizabeths and Marys psyches that is mesmerising. I couldn't put it down and was gutted when I finally finished it, at a loss of what to read next.' 'One of the best books I have ever read. I have always been interested in this period of history and felt that this book and the way Dunn writes helps to bring history alive. Once I started reading I could not stop.'

Thinking in Literature sets out to examine how the Modernist novel might be understood to be a machine for thinking, and further how it might offer means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis of the concept of thinking in literature using Gilles Deleuze as a point of departure and returning directly to the work of the two philosophers who were most important to Deleuze's understanding of thinking in literature: Spinoza and Leibniz. Three elements are identified as crucial to aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Yet in order to build a fuller understanding of these processes it is necessary to move from theory to specific readings of artistic practice. Uhlmann examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and the young Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.

'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.

In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels; for example, Love presents it as the deep friendship between little girls; in Home it acts as a disruptive force producing deep changes in subjectivity; and in Jazz it becomes something one innovates and recreates each moment-like jazz itself. Each novel's unconventional idea of love requires a new experimental narrative form. Wyatt analyzes the stylistic and structural innovations of each novel, showing how disturbances in narrative chronology, surprise endings, and gaps mirror the dislocated temporality and distorted emotional responses of the novels' troubled characters and demand that the reader situate the present-day problems ofthe characters in relation to a traumatic African American past. The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts' complex narrative strategies draw out the reader's convictions about love, about gender, about race-and then prompt the reader to reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader. Wyatt uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze Morrison's narrative structures and how they work on readers. Love and Narrative Form devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's later novels: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.

This book deals with letters in Anglophone Canadian short stories of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in the context of liminality. It argues that in the course of the epistolary renaissance, the letter - which has often been deemed to be obsolete in literature - has not only enjoyed an upsurge in novels but also migrated to the short story, thus constituting the genre of the epistolary short story. .

Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Mary Shelley, this book uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues among these authors. It crosses the boundary between male and female writers of the Romantic period by linking representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity, demonstrating how these interrelated concerns dismantle traditional binaries separating the canonical and the noncanonical; male and female; poetry and prose; good and evil; subject and object. Through the convergences among the writings of Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley, the book argues that each dismantles and reconfigures subjectivity as androgynous and amoral, subverting the centrality of the male gaze associated with canonical Romanticism. In doing so, it examines key works from each author's oeuvre, from Coleridge's "canonical" poems such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner, through Robinson's lyrical poetry and novels such as Walsingham, to Mary Shelley's fiction, including Frankenstein, Mathilda, and The Last Man.

Charlotte Yonge, a best-seller admired by her greatest literary contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century, but ignored or vilified by critics for the next hundred years, has recently received some attention from biographers, from historians of the Oxford Movement and of children's literature, and from feminist critics; but her literary art, as novelist, historian and critic, has not enjoyed much recognition. Alethea Hayter's book appraises her as a writer, not simply as a symptom of her times, surveying her non-fictional studies in history, onomastics and wild-life as well as her family chronicles, historical novels and children's books.

Although female communication networks abound in many contexts and have received a good measure of critical scrutiny, no study has addressed their unique significance within narrative culture writ large. Filling this conspicuous gap, Ned Schantz presents a lively exploration of the phenomenon, resituating novelistic culture as central even as he ranges across media and the myriad technologies that attend them.
Charting the emergence of female networks via the most prominent modes of communication--gossip, letters, and phones--Schantz brings his study to life with unconventional interpretations of classic British novels and popular Hollywood films spanning multiple genres and time periods. With incisive readings of Clarissa, Emma, and Evelina, Schantz shows how gossip both draws sympathy and is repressed by dominant male culture in a recurrent pattern of avowal and disavowal. The epistolary novel added a rhythm to communication that was generative of fantasy, which in turn informed "telephonic film," a development depicted in analyses of movies such as Sorry, Wrong Number; Vertigo; Terminator; and You've Got Mail. Schantz highlights the way the telephone works as a structuring device, not merely a prop, one that shapes the plot and suggests provocative formal implications.
While this study traverses an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the importance of female communication at its most basic level. Illuminating and accessible--Gossip, Letters, Phones reveals female networks as one of narrative's most supple and persistent elements in literature andcinema.