The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

This is a concise and authoritative guide to Virginia Woolf's classic text "To the Lighthouse" (1927), including a brief plot summary and introduction to characters and a guide to critical reception. "To the Lighthouse" is one of Virginia Woolf's most widely read and commonly studied novels. Offering an authoritative, up-to-date guide for students, this guide introduces its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text. It is the ideal companion to reading and studying the novel, setting "To the Lighthouse" in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception. The book also includes a brief plot summary and guide to characters to enable students to progress quickly from early concerns about what is happening in the novel. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant 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.

The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain's Golden Age not only helped that country become a modern state but also affected its great literature. In this fascinating book, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria explores the works of Cervantes, showing how his representations of love were inspired by examples of human deviance and desire culled from legal discourse. Gonzalez Echevarria describes Spain's new legal policies, legislation, and institutions and explains how, at the same time, its literature became filled with love stories derived from classical and medieval sources. Examining the ways that these legal and literary developments interacted in Cervantes's work, he sheds new light on "Don Quixote "and other writings.

Shows how Adler, Wander, Hilsenrath, and Klüger intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma, revealing new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature. How did German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursue literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society? How did their literary life writings reflect their postwar struggles? This monograph focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah - H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. It analyzes their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publishing, and publicizing Holocaust testimony. These case studies shed light on the devastating aftermaths of the Holocaust in different contexts. Adler depicts his attempts to overcome marginalization as a writer in Britain in the 1950s. Wander reflects on his failure to find a home either in postwar Austria or in the GDR. Hilsenrath satirizes his struggles as an emigrant to the US in the 1960s and after returning to Berlin in the 1980s. Finally, in her 2008 memoir, Ruth Klüger follows up her earlier, highly impactful memoir of the concentration camps by narrating the misogyny and antisemitism she experienced in US and German academia. Helen Finch analyzes how these under-researched texts intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma. Drawing on scholarship on Holocaust testimony, transnational memory, and affect theory, her book reveals new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature.

This book explores the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies. It shows how corpus methods can be used to compare literary texts to their translations, through the analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. The comparison focuses on stylistic features related to the major themes of Heart of Darkness. By combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, Mastropierro discusses how alterations to the original's stylistic features can affect the interpretation of the themes in translation. The discussion illuminates the manipulative effects that translating can have on the reception of a text, showing how textual alterations can trigger different readings. This book advances the multidisciplinary dialogue between corpus linguistics and translation studies and is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the application of corpus approaches to stylistics and translation.

'An utterly gorgeous romantic read. It made me want to pack my bags for Paris!' Sandy Barker Irena and Sacha come from two very different worlds. An heiress to a fortune, Ren's home-from-home is the Ritz, while the handsome and brooding Sacha has grown up in Paris's less salubrious suburbs. So when an accident brings them together, romance seems an unlikely outcome. When Ren's society engagement reaches a very public end, Irena's over-protective grandmother wants her home in London. Ren needs an excuse to stay in Paris, and so after some persuasion, Sacha agrees to pose as her new boyfriend. But only for the twenty-one days Ren's grandmother has allowed her to nurse her broken heart before heading home to face the music. Over the course of three weeks, Ren realises the world outside her exclusive bubble is more beautiful than she could have imagined. While Sacha reluctantly begins to see the goodness of the woman behind the wealth. When their time is up, will Ren want to return to her gilded cage, and will Sacha be able to let go of the woman he's been 'pretending' to fall in love with... Let Leonie Mack whisk you off to the City of Lights for a tale of love against the odds, and of following your dreams. Perfect for fans of Mandy Baggot, Jo Thomas and Sarah Morgan. 'I love her beautiful settings and brooding heroes!' Sarah Bennett What readers are saying about Leonie Mack: 'This is one of those books where you want to get to the end but you also don't want it to end because you know you're going to miss it when it's done. A great read.' 'Ah the romance - I really loved every moment, as the two main characters I'd really taken to my heart fought that magnetic pull between them when you really, really wanted them to have their happy ending. This was one of those perfect summer reads, but with a depth and emotion that was particularly satisfying - most definitely one I'd recommend to others.' 'A burst of pure joy... It has all the feel good elements needed for an irresistible romance you can't help but root for, even though you know the odds aren't in their favour! 'Beautifully written, this is a great take on the opposites attract theme.'

Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read,writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas toletters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.

The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how-and to what end-U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel. Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 are specifically designed for AS & A2 students to help you get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced experts to give you an in-depth understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. -An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades. -A wealth of useful content like key quotations, revision tasks and vital study tips that'll help you revise, remember and recall all the most important information. -The widest coverage and the best, most in-depth analysis of characters, themes, language, form, context and style to help you demonstrate an exhaustive understanding of all aspects of the text. York Notes for AS & A2 are available for these popular titles: The Bloody Chamber (9781447913153) Doctor Faustus (9781447913177) Frankenstein (9781447913214) The Great Gatsby (9781447913207) The Kite Runner (9781447913160) Macbeth (9781447913146) Othello (9781447913191) Wuthering Heights (9781447913184) Jane Eyre (9781447948834) Hamlet (9781447948872) A Midsummer Night's Dream (9781447948841) Northanger Abbey (9781447948858 Pride & Prejudice (9781447948865) Twelfth Night (9781447948889)

"Joyce and Company" is a comparative study which encourages a way of thinking about Joyce not as an isolated figure but as someone who is best understood in the company of others whether from the past, the present or, indeed, the imagined future. Throughout, Pierce places Joyce and his time in dialogue with other figures or different historical periods or languages other than English. In this way, Joyce is seen anew in relation to other writers and contexts. The book is organised in four parts: Joyce and History, Joyce and Language, Joyce and the City, and Joyce and the Contemporary World. Pierce emphasises Joyce's position as both an Irish and a European writer and shows Joyce's continuing relevance to the twenty-first century, not least in his commitment to language, culture and a discourse on freedom.

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader. Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Literature in a Time of Migration offers a profound rethinking of British fiction in light of the new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Examining works by Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and George Eliot, as well as popular contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, this volume demonstrates how literary texts overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration that they also helped to shape. Debates about assisted emigration, 'forced' and 'free' migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in fictions in complex ways. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts for colonization, fictional texts reveal a powerful and sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

Winner of the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan, Ellen Gilchrist has entertained audiences with her vivid fictional portraits of strong women, eccentric lives, and the difficulties of love and life. Known both for her short fiction and her novels, Gilchrist has been awarded several honors throughout her career, and her work continues to receive both critical and popular acclaim. This book examines her fiction, book by book, and offers an appreciation of her craft through a careful analysis of the stories themselves, their critical reception, and their lasting effect on the reader. Hooper offers the first complete evaluation of Gilchrist's entire fiction oeuvre. Author of such works as In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, The Annunciation, Go Hunting with My Daddy, and several other novels and collections of short stories, Ellen Gilchrist has transcended the bounds of Southern writing, appealing to audiences in all corners of the nation. Here, Hooper celebrates her fiction, focusing on the strong, feisty female characters that populate her works, exerting their will and independence regardless of traditional restraints on their activities. In addition, he pays special attention to her strengths and weaknesses as both a short fiction writer and a novelist, arguing that while her novels may entertain, her lasting contribution to American letters can more easily be found in her short fiction.

Engaged with the paradigms of cultural geography, local history, spatial politics, and everyday life, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren unveils a Sichuan writer's lifelong quest: an independent historical fiction writing project on Chengdu from the turn of the century through China's 1911 Revolution. Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng's study illuminates the crisis of writing home in a globalized age by rescuing Li Jieren's repeatedly revised but never finished river-novel series written from Republican to Communist China, struggling to liberate local memory from the national cum revolutionary currents. The book undercuts official historiography and rewrites Chinese literary history from the ground up by highlighting Li's resilient geopoetics of writing that decenters the nation by adopting the place-based view of a distant province.

This title provides an insight into the original context, qualities and influence of George Orwell's essays and provides the first extended examination of his genius as an essayist. George Orwell ranked his essays among his greatest literary achievements. In modern English literature they are praised as the finest accomplishments of the form. More than half a century after his death, Peter Marks gives them the scholarly attention they merit. We gain a better understanding of Orwell by properly understanding his essays. Mark's sophisticated account of the essay form explains why its flexible properties are the ideal tool for Orwell's critical and political thinking. Situating the essays in their original periodical contexts we see how Orwell manipulates his approach across a range of journals so as to entertain, convince or provoke his expected readers. We are privy to the rhetorical tactics a master uses to convince his audience. Exploring the popularity of the essay's beyond his death, we realize how the essays have influenced Orwell's posthumous reputation. A major contribution to our interpretation of Orwell, this critical study unravels the variety, complexity and, occasional inconsistency, of essays by one of the greatest writers of the form.

Too often Eudora Welty is known to the general public as Miss Welty, a "perfect lady" who wrote affectionate portraits of her home region. Yet recent scholarship has amply demonstrated a richer complexity. Welty was an innovative artist with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, a woman who maintained close friendships with artists and intellectuals throughout the world, a writer as unafraid to experiment as she was to level her pen at the worst human foibles. The essays collected in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty seek to move Welty beyond a discussion of region and reflect new scholarship that remaps her work onto a larger canvas. The book offers ways to help twenty-first-century readers navigate Welty's challenging and intricate narratives. It provides answers to questions many teachers will have: Why should I study a writer who documents white privilege? Why should I give this "regional" writer space on an already crowded syllabus? Why should I teach Welty if I do not study the South? How can I help my students make sense of her modernist narratives? How can Welty's texts help me teach my students about literary theory, about gender and disability, about cultures and societies with which my students are unfamiliar?

Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works. Included are more than 350 alphabetically arranged entries, such as: Beale Street Belgium Black Boy Chicago Renaissance Civil Rights Movement Ralph Waldo Ellison Sigmund Freud Harlem Martin Luther King, Jr. Marxism Native Son Edgar Allan Poe Segregation Sharecropping And many more. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with an extensive bibliography. Literature students will value this work for its thorough overview of Wright's canon, while students in history and social studies classes will welcome it as a means of understanding the African American struggle for civil rights through literature.

The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere.

The Introspective Art of Mark Twain is a major new assessment of a towering American writer. Seeking to trace the development of Mark Twain's imagination, Douglas Anderson begins near the end of Twain's life, with the long dialogue What Is Man? that Twain published anonymously in 1906. In Twain's view, the little-read What Is Man? lies at the heart of his creative life. It is the central aesthetic testament that he employed to tell the story of his artistic evolution. Anderson follows the contours of that story as it unfolds over Twain's career. The portrait that emerges addresses the full scope of Twain's achievement, drawing on his autobiographical and travel writings, as well as the published and unpublished works of fiction that are by now deeply embedded in the world literary canon. "Steer by the river in your head," Mark Twain's master pilot, Horace Bixby, once advised him, when the opaque atmosphere of the outer world made it impossible to see the actual Mississippi through which Twain was trying to guide his steamboat. For the purposes of this book, the river in one's head is not a mental construct of the physical world but the riverine networks of consciousness itself: the river that is the mind. The detailed discussions of individual books that structure each chapter direct the attention of Mark Twain's students and admirers, through inward rather than outward channels, toward a fuller appreciation for his legacy.

This book investigates a new form of fiction that is currently emerging in contemporary literature across the globe. 'Novels of the extreme' - from North and South America, from Europe, the Middle East and Asia - are set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper-real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction. While their writing is commonly classified as 'hip' or 'underground' literature, authors of contemporary extreme novels have often been the center of public controversy and scandal; they, and their work, become international bestsellers. This collection of essays indentifies and describes this international phenomenon, investigating the appeal of these novels' styles and themes, the reason behind their success, and the fierce debates they provoked. Alain-Philippe Durand is Associate Professor of French, Film Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Rhode Island. Naomi Mandel is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Rhode Island.

American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. Even the most celebrated figures of the industry, such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Jackson, William Gaines, Stan Lee, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, and Frank Miller, have not been able to distance themselves from the problematic racism embedded in their narratives despite their intentions or explanations. Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels provides a sober assessment of these creators and their role in perpetuating racism throughout the history of comics. Josef Benson and Doug Singsen identify how whiteness has been defined, transformed, and occasionally undermined over the course of eighty years in comics and in many genres, including westerns, horror, crime, funny animal, underground comix, autobiography, literary fiction, and historical fiction. This exciting and groundbreaking book assesses industry giants, highlights some of the most important episodes in American comic book history, and demonstrates how they relate to one another and form a larger pattern, in unexpected and surprising ways.

Born to Polish parents in what is now known as the Ukraine, Joseph Conrad would become one of the greatest writers in the English language. With works like Lord Jim, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," and Heart of Darkness, he not only solidified his place in the panethon of great novelists, but also established himself as a keen-eyed chronicler of the social and political themes that animated the contemporary world around him. The original essays assembled here by John G. Peters showcase the abundance of historical material Conrad drew upon to create his varied literary corpus. Essays show how the author mined his early life as a sailor to pen gripping, realistic tales of nautical life while issuing scathing indictments of colonialism and capitalist cupidity in works like Almayer's Folly and Heart of Darkness. His unique sense of himself as an outsider is explored in relation to his pointed political novels that critiqued corruption and terrorism, most notably in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. In addition to his major works, essays consider Conrad's contributions as an innovative modernist and his unique role in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Complete with an up-to-date bibliography and illustrated chronology, A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad provides an invaluable resource to the life and work of the major novelist.

Stephen King is Richard Bachman by Michael R. Collings. This is the whole story of how Stephen King s Richard Bachman came to life, and when King finally had to give up the ghost and come forth with the truth that he was writing under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. This of course came about when the fifth novel, Thinner, was released and a reader discovered King s pseudonym. Now Michael Collings takes us from the beginnings of this unusual fiction side-show of Stephen King s body of work, to what we thought would be the last Bachman release, The Regulators. Updated and completely revised with new information and Richard Bachman releases since it s original publication almost twenty-five years ago. Chapters Featured: A History for Richard Bachman. Genre, Theme, and Image in Richard Bachman. Rage. The Long Walk. Roadwork. The Running Man. Thinner. Regulators... and Desperation. Pipe-Dreams and Possibilities. Original cover art commisioned by Erik Wilson. Profusely illustrated with covers of Bachman books from around the world.