* Tracks the development of psychology as a discipline through the works of highly popular novelists: Wodehouse, Sayers and Christie. * Provides psychological context for the development of plot and character. Provides a unique view of the historical context in which Wodehouse, Sayers and Christie chose to include discourses of psychology. * Examines the way three bestselleing novelists of the 20th century wrote about psychiatry, psychology and psychiatrists and links their interest in these to their lives and their crises, personal and intellectual.

This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers' houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author's private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory.

Catherine and Maria are childhood friends who grow up on a farm in the 1920s in the then Eastern Transvaal. A crisis leads to Catherine's family leaving the farm. Catherine returns many years later, and finds herself drawn to the new owner, Tom, but shadows from the past threaten their relationship. This novel deals poignantly with themes of family, love, loss and betrayal.

First published in 1951, My Dear Holmes is a biography of Sherlock Holmes, which originated from the author's re-reading of the Sherlock Holmes stories to his daughter, supplies answers to mysteries such as when was Holmes born? Which was his university? How many times was Watson married and in what years? Why did he leave Baker Street without a word of explanation in 1896? Why did the two Moriarty brothers have the same Christian name? Why were there apparently different cases all known as "the Second Stain"? The author takes the sixty cases narrated by Watson, many of which are undated, deduces the year in each case, and weaves the whole into a single continuous story, with the intention of filling the gaps in our knowledge of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. To those who are partial to the London of gaslight, hansom cabs, feather boas and income tax at one shilling and twopence in the pound, this book can be recommended.

First published in 1970, The Novel in India traces the birth and development of prose fiction in Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam. It is addressed not only to academic students of Asian culture but to all who are interested in literary history. India and Pakistan have many great literatures, but they are almost unknown beyond their own boundaries. Language is a formidable barrier, and this book is offered in the hope that it can bridge the cultural divide that language has created. It has a fascinating story to tell of the endeavours, experiments and achievements of writers who deserve to be better known outside their native land.

* Tracks the development of psychology as a discipline through the works of highly popular novelists: Wodehouse, Sayers and Christie. * Provides psychological context for the development of plot and character. Provides a unique view of the historical context in which Wodehouse, Sayers and Christie chose to include discourses of psychology. * Examines the way three bestselleing novelists of the 20th century wrote about psychiatry, psychology and psychiatrists and links their interest in these to their lives and their crises, personal and intellectual.

A close reading of the life and letters of William Hale White shows that some misunderstandings have arisen in the interpretation of this important figure. The book offers such significant issues as doubt, loss of faith, and crises over vocation and church. This work represents a revisionist approach to William Hale White. It corrects previous studies at some important points, questions existing interpretations, and employs new theoretical strategies alongside fresh research in primary sources.

Examines a variety of texts from late Enlightenment Germany to provide a nuanced rethinking of women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers, creators of the cultural spaces of the home. Domesticity, a set of practices, emotions, and values culminating in a nourishing emotional and physical ambience - the "feel" of being at home and belonging - connects one's subjective experience to the material environment. In late Enlightenment Germany, writers from Joachim Heinrich Campe and Theodor von Hippel to Sophie La Roche imagined the home as a space where true "humanity" would be realized. The high-stakes cultural formation of domesticity was part of a complex discourse on the pursuit of happiness as a life well lived. As domesticity became a surrogate for the lost religious certainties of the vanishing pre-modern world, an obsessive anxiety concerning its delineation in discourse suggested its importance but also its fragility and the consequences of its failure. Karin A. Wurst examines didactic novels by female authors, autobiographical texts, popular philosophy, advice literature, periodicals, pedagogical tracts, and household manuals in pursuit of a nuanced rethinking of the relationship between women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers and as creators of the cultural spaces of the home. She finds that the high-value imaginary of domesticity encouraged women's agency insofar as they were tasked with turning theoretical ideals into everyday practice. At the same time, her book shows the under-illuminated contribution of women's work to social and political change from within the patriarchal structures of eighteenth-century Germany.

Maps can transport us, they are filled with wonder, the possibility of real adventure and travels of the mind. This is an atlas of the journeys that writers make, encompassing not only the maps that actually appear in their books, but also the many maps that have inspired them and the sketches that they use in writing. For some, making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale. A writer s map might mean also the geographies they describe, the worlds inside books that rise from the page, mapped or unmapped, and the realms that authors inhabit as they write. Philip Pullman recounts a map he drew for an early novel; Robert Macfarlane reflects on his cartophilia, set off by Robert Louis Stevenson and his map of Treasure Island; Joanne Harris tells of her fascination with Norse maps of the universe; Reif Larsen writes about our dependence on GPS and the impulse to map our experience; Daniel Reeve describes drawing maps and charts for The Hobbit trilogy of films; Miraphora Mina recalls creating The Marauder s Map for the Harry Potter films; David Mitchell leads us to the Mappa Mundi by way of Cloud Atlas and his own sketch maps. And there s much more besides.

Amidst a cornucopia of images, there are maps of the world as envisaged in medieval times, as well as maps of adventure, sci-fi and fantasy, maps from nursery stories, literary classics, collectible comics a vast range of genres.

This book interrogates and historicises eighteenth-century British women writers' responses to India through the novel and travel writing to bring out the polyvalent space arising out of their complex negotiation with the colonial discourse. Though British women enjoyed their privileged racial status as the utilisers of colonial riches, they articulated their voice of dissent when they faced the politics of subordination in their own society and identified them with the marginalised status of the colonised Indians. This brings out the complicity and critique of the colonial discourse of British women writers and foregrounds their ambivalent responses to the colonial project. This book provides detailed textual analysis of the works of Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Morgan, Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay through critical insights from the idea of the Enlightenment, postcolonial theory and feminist thought. It also foregrounds new perspectives to colonial discourse vis-a-vis the representation of India by locating the dialogic strain within the British narratives about India.

1) This book presents a comprehensive overview of teaching English literature in India. 2) It contains case studies of actual classroom practices. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of cultural studies and South Asian studies across UK

Katherine Mansfield has been widely recognised as one of the key authors of her generation, continuing to influence literary modernism and the short story genre through her nomadic existence, colonial perspective, eclectic interests and impressive range of literary acquaintances. This volume utilises these seemingly endless avenues for critical exploration, analysing Mansfield's influences, including the familial, historical and geographical as well as literary and artistic approaches. Some connections are well established and acknowledged, some controversial, many still undiscovered. This volume brings a fresh collection of original viewpoints on Katherine Mansfield's life and work, both of which, in her own case, are frequently indistinguishable. It investigates her fascinating connection with Poland which is explored in a complex and detailed way for the first time; suggests new or revised views on her connections to other English and American writers; and finally examines some of the aspects of her writing process, her engagement with the arts, imagination, memories and her constructions of different kinds of space.

Patrick White is a giant among the moderns. His massive novels, which chart the lonely paths to truth, challenge orthodox notions about fiction and reality. He has created a wholly new kind of prose to embody his prophetic visions of truth and his fierce denunciations of modern society. Originally published in 1984, John Colmer's study of the Nobel Prize winning Australian novelist was the first to survey all his published works. It differs from earlier studies in using fresh autobiographical material, in revealing the links between the plays and the fiction and in stressing White's vision of duality rather than his much praised affirmations of harmony. Where previous studies have been exegetical this one is also evaluative. It illustrates the process by which White has come to recognize the necessity for the reintegration of the alienated visionary into society.

Published in 1900, Conrad's Lord Jim can in many ways be seen as the first 'modern' novel. This important full study of the book, originally published in 1988, emphasizes the outstanding historical and artistic significance of Conrad's masterpiece. John Batchelor pursues the ways in which Conrad dramatizes with unprecedented fidelity a relationship between friends and also explores what for Conrad is clearly a central truth about the human condition, namely the inalienable loneliness of man. The book provides a full discussion of the biographical and literary contexts of the novel, making use of the original manuscript and tracing the literary influences and sources of Conrad's writing. It also considers the novel's technical innovations, including Conrad's 'impressionism' and its method of dramatization. Further chapters are devoted to a detailed commentary on the text and the book concludes with a study of the novel's critical reception since its first publication. This volume will be essential reading for all students of literature and particularly for those with an interest in Conrad's place in the development of modern fiction.

Margaret Drabble is a writer who plays a lively role in both popular and literary culture. Widely read and studied throughout the world her novels attract both the general reader and the literary critic. Originally published in 1985, Joanne Creighton examines this phenomenon and places particular emphasis on her "Englishness", her role as a woman writing credibly about modern women and her ability to mediate between the traditional and the modern. She argues that the resonances of Drabble's work grow put of her strong sense of the powers and resources of existing literary traditions coupled with her intelligent portrayal of the familiar problems of people in modern society, and that is precisely this mediating position which makes Drabble an important voice in contemporary fiction and links her with other writers of her generation. Challenging those critics who see Drabble as a fiction traditionalist. Creighton finds her work open-ended, inquiring, equivocal and unquestionably contemporary in spirit.

What helps a child overcome extraordinary obstacles? Why do some children surmount many difficulties and go on to live fulfilling lives while other children who face similar difficulties end up living desperate, sad lives? What helps children beat the odds? What builds resilience in children? These are critically important questions, yet for too long social scientists, doctors, psychologists and teachers have studied children who failed and tried to figure out what caused the failure. Only relatively recently have they begun to focus on what creates success. Originally published in 1997, this book is an effort to understand better what contributes to a child's "success" and "resilience". The source of information will be autobiographies of childhoods - autobiographical stories written by adults remembering their difficult childhoods. This is not a research study or case study, rather it is an attempt to read and listen to five stories about resilient children and see what they can tell us about supporting children and building resilience.

This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen Martin Gaite: 1) Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and Martin Gaite's Retahilas (1974) and 2) Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Martin Gaite's The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large.

Alain Robbe-Grillet had traditionally been seen as an austere experimentalist in fiction, addicted to arid and interminable descriptions of objects like coffee pots, erasers and pieces of string. His own rather bellicose theoretical pronouncements were partly to blame for this unattractive picture, belied by the immense popular success of the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (made by Alain Resnais from Robbe-Grillet's script) and the high critical esteem in which novels like Jealousy and The Voyeur are held. In his original study, first published in 1983, John Fletcher attempts to resolve this paradox by offering a new interpretation of Robbe-Grillet's work which stresses the subversive qualities of his imagination and the disturbing power of his vision of a world of labyrinths and bizarre sexual stereotypes, haunted by images of love and loss.

Doris Lessing was one of the most impressive, prolific and vital of twentieth century writers. Her fiction is obsessed with the workings of cultural change and she radically extended the novel's scope - most famously and influentially in The Golden Notebook - by questioning the realist tradition she inherited and the wider social beliefs about self, sexuality and authority which that tradition symbolized. This study, originally published in 1983, surveys her epic output from her early, African writings to her later experiments with space fiction. It traces her struggles to decentre imaginative life and to erase and to redraw the boundaries of our mental maps in favour of values on the margins of the official culture.

A woman is incomplete without a man, motherhood is a woman's destiny, and a woman's place is in the home. These conservative political themes are woven throughout teen romance fiction's sagas of hearts and flowers. Using the theory and interpretive methods of feminism and cultural studies, Christian-Smith explores the contradictory role that popular culture plays in constructing gender, class, race, age and sexual meanings. Originally published in 1990, Becoming a Woman through Romance combines close textual analyses of thirty-four teen romance novels (written in the United States from 1942-1982) with a school study in three midwestern American schools. Christian-Smith situates teen romance fiction within the rapidly changing publishing industry and the important political and economic changes in the United States surrounding the rise of the New Right. By analysing the structure of the novels in terms of the themes of romance, sexuality and beautification, and the Good/Bad and Strong/Weak dichotomies, she demonstrates how each has shaped the novels' versions of femininity over forty years. She also shows that although romance fiction is presented as a universal model, it is actually an expression of white middle class gender ideology and tension within this class. This high readable, comprehensive and coherent work was the first to combine in one volume three vital areas of cultural studies research: the political economy of publishing, textual analysis, and a study of readers. The first full-scale study of teen romance fiction, Becoming a Woman through Romance establishes the importance of the study of popular culture forms found in school for understanding the process of school materials in identity formation.

The campus novel is one of the best loved forms of fiction in the post-war period. But what are its characteristic themes? What are its prejudices? And what does it take for granted? Originally published in 1990, this is the first study to connect literary, historical, and sociological aspects of modern British universities. It shows that the culture celebrated in British university fiction represents a particular view of humane education which has its origins in the values of Oxbridge. Threats are seen to come from the 'redbrick' and 'new' universities, from proletarians, scientists (including sociologists), women, and foreigners. This exhilarating book makes a nonsense of sociology's reputation for turgid and plodding analysis. Sharp-witted, shrewd, and penetrating, it will be of interest to students of sociology, literature, and for the same wide audience that appears to have an insatiable appetite for stories about university life.

Originally published in 1988, the last few decades had seen the appearance of some brilliant and complex new kinds of fiction. The ambitious experiments of writers such as Greene, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Nabakov, Calvino, Beckett, Eco, Spark, Hoban, Murdoch, Bellow, Ozick, and Lessing among others had all proved the vitality of contemporary fiction in discovering exciting new forms and styles. Yet because of the difficulty of many of the texts, contemporary fiction as a genre had acquired an undeservedly unpopular reputation among students and other readers. In a very real way, the reader had become nervous rather than confident in the face of a literature that in fact is more aware of and generous to that reader than earlier and more apparently accessible literature ever managed to be. And the new fiction's seeming remoteness from the reader is exaggerated, in a sense, by the critical academic response at the time, which tended to obscure the texts themselves behind the many aesthetic and cultural theories which had sprung up in the study of fictionalizing or narrativity in general. Elizabeth Dipple is anxious to dispel readers' fears about these texts. She has chosen an international list of major writers of the time and presents a detailed discussion of each. Beginning each chapter with a brief explanation of the context in which each fictionist is to be examined, she then concentrates on an analysis of key texts, aiming always to look beyond jargon and theory back to the sources themselves. Professor Dipple's purpose was to convey to the reader some of her own admiration and enthusiasm for contemporary fiction and to persuade him or her to take a fresh look at a group of writers who were producing what she felt would surely be seen by future generations as among the most sophisticated and accomplished fiction of our time.

Originally published in 1982, this brilliant study provides a perceptive and up-to-date assessment of the novels of Iris Murdoch, up to and including Nuns and Soldiers, published in 1980. The Fire and the Sun, her book on Plato, is also considered in depth. It is not a critical biography, but rather shows how massive Murdoch's literary career was at the time and what her contribution has been to aesthetics, literary criticism, the realistic novel, and to the possibilities of ethical and religious action in a horror-filled and secular age. Above all, the book is interested in forwarding Murdoch's cause among her readers. It is not aimed simply at those who have read and studied all of her novels, the text will appeal to the readers of only a few of them, as well as literary scholars and students of contemporary fiction and modern culture.

Originally published in 1983, this title lists and annotates reference sources which will help readers select primary materials useful in studies of the literary portraits of women and their societal roles. The years 1961 to 1981 were set as boundaries for this volume because the author's initial research revealed that a twenty-year span was a manageable unit, because the novels published between those dates yielded abundant materials for such a reference work, and because significant changes in the way portraits of adolescent females were being drawn took place during the period - for example, sex-role stereotyping became a shade less prevalent, young women's sexuality was discussed more forthrightly, and some topics (such as single women's pregnancies and lesbianism) were treated more overtly, sometimes less judgementally.

Reviled by critics but loved by the readers, the bestseller has until recently provoked little serious critical interest. In The Myth of Superwoman, originally published in 1990, Resa Dudovitz looks at this international phenomenon, particularly at the origins of the bestseller system in the United States and France. Her cross-cultural study, including interviews with publishers, literary agents, and bestselling authors, gives a lively picture of the contrasting ways in which the bestseller is produced, marketed, and received in two countries. It pays special attention to the 'international bestsellers' of the 1980s, to writers like Judith Krantz, Colleen McCullough, and Barbara Taylor Bradford, all of whose novels are published in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The book presents a general analysis of women's bestsellers, ranging over a wide variety of novels, from popular nineteenth-century texts in France and the United States to the novels of today. Dudovitz shows how women's bestselling fiction has, over the last two hundred years, kept pace with the social evolution of contemporary women, culminating in the myth of superwoman in women's bestsellers of the 1980s. This fascinating account of an important aspect of popular culture will be of great value to students of women's studies and cultural studies, especially those interested in the myths which structure women's bestselling fiction.