Visions of post-apocalyptic worlds have proved to be irresistible for many 21st-century writers, from literary novelists to fantasy and young adult writers. Exploring a wide range of texts, from the works of Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Perrotta and Emily St. John Mandel to young adult novels such as Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games series, this is the first critical introduction to contemporary apocalyptic fiction. Exploring the cultural and political contexts of these writings and their echoes in popular media, Apocalyptic Fiction also examines how contemporary apocalyptic texts looks back to earlier writings by the likes of Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. Apocalyptic Fiction includes an annotated guide to secondary readings, making this an essential guide for students of contemporary fiction at all levels.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival - to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.

This title establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space. There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings. However, just as monuments mark their territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries, so these discourses set a boundary between their authority as platforms on which the interpretation of monumental space occurs and, in this respect, the different authority of the novel. This study crosses this boundary by means of dynamic interdisciplinary movements between selected novels by James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Rashid al-Daif, and Orhan Pamuk, on the one hand, and various theoretical perspectives, history, and cultural geography, on the other. Through the specific choice of literary texts that represent monumental space in atypical post-imperial geopolitical contexts, "Monumental Space and the Post-Imperial Novel" brings into question many postcolonial paradigms. Sakr establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and cultural geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space.

Proclaimed by H.L. Mencken as one of the great masterpieces of the world and by Ernest Hemingway as the source of all modern American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains firmly established in both the American and world literary canons as a classic work of literature. Yet it continues to have its critical detractors and still arouses the kind of impassioned controversy that banned it from the Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library on publication as trashy and vicious. The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn contains newspaper articles, book reviews, and scholarly essays spanning the period from the early response in the 1880s, through the centennial celebration, to the present. The collection reflects the major literary trends and issues of response to Huckleberry Finn, such as the persistent attempts to ban the book, the literary criticism concerning the book's ending, and the many thematic interpretations. Among the essayists included are literary figures such as T.S. Eliot and Twain specialist scholars such as Walter Blair, Leo Marx, and James Cox. The text of an ABC-TV Nightline News Special on the centennial, Huckleberry Finn: Literature or Racist Trash is printed. Editor Champion provides an introductory overview on the range and issues of critical response, a feature on the various adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, and a bibliography of additional scholarship. Of interest to any scholar or researcher of Mark Twain, the collection would be valuable to teachers and students reading Huckleberry Finn at any level from high school upward.

'Tristram is the Fashion', Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called 'this Shandy-Age'.

Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction--novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in eighteenth-century provincial England.
This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in eighteenth-century provincial England, not only about the class, profession, age, and sex of readers but also about the market of available fiction from which they made their choices--and some speculation about why they made the choices they did. Contrary to received ideas, in the provinces were the principal customers for eighteenth-century novels, including those written by women. Provincial customers preferred to buy rather than borrow fiction, and women preferred plays and novels written by women--women's works would have done better had women been the principal consumers. That is, demand for fiction (written by both men and women) was about equal for the first five years, but afterward the demand for women's works declined. Both men and women preferred novels with identifiable authors to anonymous ones, however, and both boys and men were able to cross gender lines in their reading. Goody Two-Shoes was one of the more popular children's books among Rugby schoolboys, and men read the Lady's Magazine. These and other findings will alterthe way scholars look at the fiction of the period, the questions asked, and the histories told of it.

This study confronts current influential theories that science fiction is either an American phenomenon or an international one. The study rejects the idea that British science fiction is distinguishable only by its pessimistic outlook--while also rejecting the idea that other designations, such as "scientific romance" or "speculative fiction," better fit the British product. Instead, the study traces the evolution of British science fiction, showing how H. G. Wells synthesized various strains in English literature, and how later writers, conscious of this Wellsian tradition, built upon Wells's literary achievement. An introduction defines what might reasonably be placed under the heading British science fiction, and why. Chapter 1 examines previous critical ideas about the nature of British science fiction, revealing that most of them are based on untested assumptions. Chapter 2 explores the significance of the dominant motif of the island in British SF --a motif that suggests that British SF and mainstream English literature have been long and fruitfully intertwined. Chapters 3 and 4 deal respectively with British disaster fiction before and after the Second World War. They focus on why British science fiction has so frequently seemed obsessed with catastrophe. Chapter 5, a polemical conclusion, deals with the future of British science fiction based on its current predicament. Ultimate Island forms a theoretical counterpart to the author's recently-published British Science Fiction: A Chronology 1478-1990 (Greenwood 1992), which defines the historical scope of the field.

The Clarendon edition of Adam Bede (1859) is the first critical edition of the work that established George Eliot's reputation. Its extensive textual apparatus lists manuscript and first edition variants from the copy-text, which is the corrected eighth edition of 1861--her last revision of the book. The introduction locates the genesis of the novel in Eliot's family history, her travels, and her reading of literature and biography, and describes the composition process.

This title offers a critical introduction to the contemporary American novel focusing on contexts, key texts, and criticism. Adventurous, engaging and politically urgent, contemporary American novels have come to enjoy a particular prestige and, through university courses, film adaptations and cultural controversies, a global circulation. This book provides a critical introduction to novels produced in the United States between 1980 and the present. Compact yet wide-ranging, and written in vivid, accessible prose, it registers the diversity of contemporary American writing and carefully situates this work in historical contexts that include Reaganomics, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 'War on Terror'. Detailed attention is given throughout to how America's current novelists have responded to shifting gender politics, changes in the nation's racial configuration, the increasing dominance of a commodity culture and to adjustments in the United States' place in the world following the end of the Cold War and the increased pace of globalisation. Complete with timelines of historical and literary events, detailed lists of secondary sources both in print and on the web, and suggestions for students' own research projects, this is the ideal resource for anyone beginning study of this vibrant 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.

In this first monograph on E. T. A. Hoffmann and opera, Francien Markx examines Hoffmann's writings on opera and the challenges they pose to established narratives of aesthetic autonomy, the search for a national opera, and Hoffmann's biography. Markx discusses Hoffmann's lifelong fascination with opera against the backdrop of eighteenth-century theater reform, the creation of national identity, contemporary performance practices and musical and aesthetic discourses as voiced by C. M. von Weber, A. W. Schlegel, Heine, and Wagner, among others. The book reconsiders the traditional view that German opera followed a deterministic trajectory toward Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk and reveals a cosmopolitan spirit in Hoffmann's operatic vision, most notably exemplified by his controversial advocacy for Spontini in Berlin.

Margaret Atwood is arguably the most renowned and internationally acclaimed Canadian writer, poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and environmental activist. In this incisive interpretation of Atwood's prose, Candy D'Cunha argues that the novelist's ecosophical vision provides valuable lessons that could help in creating a greater and more responsible awareness in the modern psyche about the environment. By exploring the works of Atwood, one can understand the need for a deeper rethinking and a clearer re-orientation in this area. Select novels, namely Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), bring out the principles of ecological philosophy by describing various aspects of the current ecological crisis. Duplicity in the norms and recognition, the degradation of the environment, consequent tragic dilemmas, and the general ghastliness of life are all found in Atwood's oeuvre. A number of studies have been made on the thematic works of Atwood, such as feminism, quest for identity, power and politics, dystopian and utopian elements, but this book is the first ecosophical exploration of Atwood's themes and concerns. This volume enables readers to propagate the requisite ecological wisdom for self-realization for the harmonious and just development of society. Interpreting Atwood's works from an Indian perspective also helps to promote Indian ecological justice.

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton provides scholarly and general readers with historical contexts that illuminate Wharton's life and writing in new, exciting ways. The essays in this volume expand our sense of Wharton as a novelist of manners and reflect the latest developments in new historicism and cultural studies.

York Notes for GCSE offer an exciting approach to English Literature and will help you to achieve a better grade. This market-leading series has been completely updated to reflect the needs of today's students. The new editions are packed with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam advice and much more. Written by GCSE examiners and teachers, York Notes are the authoritative guides to exam success.

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, "The Master," Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view.

Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the "Dublin Times," reviews in the "New York Review of Books," and other disparate venues.

With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten.

Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

What happens to detective fiction when the detective is 'post-colonial', a marginalized native or settler in a country recovering from colonialism? Post-colonial detection is an exciting hybrid of western-influenced police methods and plot conventions and indigenous cultural insights and wisdom in exotic settings. An introduction to the peculiarities of the post-colonial detective and to post-colonial theory establishes a context in which to view more than a dozen notable detectives and authors from around the world.

This book is the first full-scale edition of the so-called Liber spectaculorum by Martial. A comprehensive introduction addresses the role of epigram in commemorating monuments and occasions, the connection between spectacle and imperial panegyric in Martial's oeuvre, characteristics of the collection, possible circumstances of composition and "publication," transmission of the text, and related issues. Each epigram is followed by an apparatus criticus, an English translation, and a detailed commentary on linguistic, literary, and historical matters, adducing extensive evidence from epigraphy and art as well as literary sources. The book is accompanied by four concordances, five tables, two maps, 30 plates, and an appendix.

Julia Alvarez made her mark on the American literary horizon with the 1991 publication of her debut novel "How the Garc DEGREESD'ia Girls Lost Their Accents," a story based on her own family's bicultural experiences. Readers and critics alike quickly discovered the writer's penchant for extracting humor from hardship, and weaving personal history into vivid prose. Within a decade, Alvarez had published three more highly acclaimed novels, including " Yo " (1997), a delightful sequel to her first novel. This Critical Companion introduces readers to the life and works of Dominican American writer Alvarez and examines the thematic and cultural concerns that run through her novels. Full literary analysis is provided for each, including historical context for the factually based works, "In the Time of the Butterflies "(1994) and "In the Name of Salome" (2000). A brief biography and a chapter on the Latino novel help students to understand the personal and literary influences in Alvarez's writing.

This first full-length treatment of Julia Alvarez discusses her entire canon of writings including her poetry, short stories, children's fiction and nonfiction. The four novels are analyzed fully, each discussed in its own chapter with sections on plot, character development, literary device, thematic issues and narrative structure. Cultural and historical contexts of the work are also considered, and alternate critical perspectives are given for each novel. A select bibliography makes this volume a valuable research tool for students, educators and anyone interested in Latino literature.

A major American writer at the turn of this millennium, Leslie Marmon Silko has also been one of the most powerful voices in the flowering of Native American literature since the publication of her 1977 novel Ceremony. With chapters written by leading scholars of Native American literature, this guide explores Silko's major novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes as an entryway into the full body of her work that includes poetry, essays, short fiction, film, photography, and other visual artwork. In addition to placing Silko in the broad context of American literary history, the book serves to contextualize her pivotal role in unleashing the vast flood of other Native American, aboriginal, and Indigenous writers who have entered the conversations she helped to launch. Along the way, the book examines her tackling of such historical themes as land, ethnicity, race, gender, trauma, and healing, as well as her narrative forms and her mythic lyricism.

Henry James, the American-born writer who chose to live in Europe, occupies a major position as a dedicated artist and cultural historian who combined the strengths of American, English and French nineteenth century literary traditions with the aesthetic innovations that paved the way for modern and postmodern fiction. This collection of essays, prepared by an international team of scholars and translators, examines the ways in which James was translated, published and reviewed on the Continent of Europe, notably in France, Italy and Germany, but also in most of the languages of Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe.

Although scholars have widely acknowledged the prevalence of religious reference in the work of Cormac McCarthy, this is the first book on the most pervasive religious trope in all his works: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. Informed by postmodern theories of narrative and Christian theologies of sacrament, Matthew Potts reads the major novels of Cormac McCarthy in a new and insightful way, arguing that their dark moral significance coheres with the Christian theological tradition in difficult, demanding ways. Potts develops this account through an argument that integrates McCarthy's fiction with both postmodern theory and contemporary fundamental and sacramental theology. In McCarthy's novels, the human self is always dispossessed of itself, given over to harm, fate, and narrative. But this fundamental dispossession, this vulnerability to violence and signs, is also one uniquely expressed in and articulated by the Christian sacramental tradition. By reading McCarthy and this theology alongside postmodern accounts of action, identity, subjectivity, and narration, Potts demonstrates how McCarthy exploits Christian theology in order to locate the value of human acts and relations in a way that mimics the dispossessing movement of sacramental signs. This is not to claim McCarthy for theology, necessarily, but it is to assert that McCarthy generates his account of what human goodness might look like in the wake of metaphysical collapse through the explicit use of Christian theology.

Trollope and the Church of England is the first detailed examination of Trollop's attitude towards his Anglican faith and the Church, and the impact this had on his works. Jill Durey controversially explodes the myth that Trollope's most popular characters just happened to be clerical and were simply a skit on the Church, by revealing the true extent of his lifelong fascination with religion.