The late 19th and early 20th century was a key period of cultural transition in Ireland. Fiction was used in a plainly partisan or polemical fashion to advance changes in Irish society. Murphy explores the outlook of certain important social classes during this time frame through an assessment of Irish Catholic fiction. This highly original study provides a new context for understanding the works of canonical authors such as Joyce and George Moore by discussing them in light of the now almost forgotten writing from which they emerged--the several hundred novels that were written during the period, many of them by women writers.

At Macedonio Fernandez's funeral in 1952, Jorge Luis Borges delivered the following elegy: "In those years I imitated him to the point of transcription, to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, Macedonio is literature." This is the first book available in English that collects essays by the world's leading scholars on Macedonio Fernandez, one of Borges's most important mentors and a still enigmatic thinker of the early 20th century. Macedonio's philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and experimental writing laid the foundations for Borges's own theoretical and literary matrix. Nonetheless, Borges helped shape a myth of Macedonio as a thinker who could not translate his oratorial geniality into written intelligibility. So, despite the centrality of Macedonio to Borges's thought, his work has remained almost unknown to English-speaking readers. Contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, that this myth reduces the complexities of Macedonio's life and creative process, as each chapter shines new light on his texts. Conceived as both a companion for new readers of Macedonio's writings and an invitation for specialists to revisit his work through new perspectives, essays in this volume provide extensive background and bibliographical references, as well as English translations of Macedonio's original texts. This collection seeks to serve as a catalyst for the continued discovery and rediscovery of Macedonio Fernandez's texts and the ways they might help us to rediscover the singularities of our own present moment.

This book explores the idea of a new cosmopolitan Japanese identity through a socio-cultural analysis of contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It is the first monograph to apply the idea of cosmopolitanism to this writer's global popularity widely known as the "Haruki phenomenon".By pioneering an enquiry into Murakami's cosmopolitanism, this book aims to overcome the prevailing myth of "Japaneseness"(Nihonjinron) as a form of self-identification for Japanese, and propose an alternative approach for contemplating contemporary Japanese cultural identity. Socio-cultural analysis of this author and his works shall establish Murakami's cosmopolitan qualities and how they contribute to the cultural phenomenon of globalization. Furthermore, this book will introduce the idea of "everyday cosmopolitanism" as a relevant concept to address an emergent global cultural sphere. Unlike the traditional model of cosmopolitanism, which is sometimes regarded as idealist and elitist, "everyday cosmopolitanism" encompasses the everyday spheres of ordinary people. Tomoki Wakatsuki argues that the Haruki phenomenon, as a global and local event, echoes this important social trend today. Murakami's departure from conventional notions of Japanese identity offers an alternative perception of identity and belonging that is useful for situating Japanese identity within a global context. This text will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, global literature, contemporary Japanese literature, cultural cosmopolitanism and the global cultural sphere.

Do you want a better understanding of the text? Do you want to know what the critics say? Do you want to know how to improve your grade? Whatever you want, York Notes can help. York Notes Advanced offers a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading 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. Key Features: Summaries with detailed commentaries Extended commentaries on key passages Discussion of themes and literary techniques Author biography Historical and literary background Check the net/film/book features Glossary of literary terms Self-test questions

This is the first full-length analysis of Gothic to draw on the ideas of the noted Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Historical analyses of works including Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein demonstrate how the Gothic novel incorporates a range of contemporary literary and non-literary discourses. The book also analyses the question of whether Gothic can be seen as a characteristically female genre.

Do you want a better understanding of the text? Do you want to know what the critics say? Do you want to improve your grade? Whatever you want, york notes can help.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading 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.

This is an accessible guide to Jane Eyre that explores its literary and historical contexts and discusses its critical reception. Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" is one of the most famous literary works of the nineteenth century and has inspired generations of students. This concise but comprehensive guide to the text introduces its contexts, language, reception and adaptation from its first publication to the present. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading. This introduction to the text is the ideal companion to study, offering guidance on: Literary and historical context; Language, style and form; Reading the text; Critical reception and publishing history; Adaptation and interpretation; and, Further 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.

Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares: Reading their Lessons from His Time to Ours offers a fresh approach to the Novelas ejemplares (1613) of Cervantes in which the twelve novelas are not analyzed individually nor on the basis of generic definitions but rather from a thematic perspective. In this way, certain pertinent themes and problems are explored by grouping the relevant novelas as they dramatize these problems, often leaving the reader with unresolved "conclusions," and in other instances offering an affirmative solution. The issues examined include the ironies and injustices of social class, the problem of honra and justice, the complex hostilities and interactions of distinct cultures, and the problem of finding a seventeenth-century work of fiction relevant and stimulating to the twenty-first-century reader.

This is the first exploration of the performative and theatrical force of Austen's work and its afterlife, from the nineteenth century to the present. It unearths new and little-known Austen materials: from suffragette novels and pageants to school and amateur theatricals, passing through mid-twentieth-century representations in Scotland and America. The book concludes with an examination of Austen fandom based on an online survey conducted by the author, which elicited over 300 responses from fans across the globe. Through the lens of performative theory, this volume explores how Austen, her work and its afterlives, have aided the formation of collective and personal identity; how they have helped bring people together across the generations; and how they have had key psychological, pedagogical and therapeutic functions for an ever growing audience. Ultimately, this book explains why Austen remains the most beloved author in English Literature.

Alexander Kluge's revolutionary storytelling for the 21st-century pivots on the production of anti-realist hope under conditions of real catastrophe. Rather than relying on possibility alone, his experimental miniatures engender counterfactual horizons of futurity that are made incrementally accessible to lived experience through narrative form. Innovative close readings and theoretical reflection alike illuminate the dimensional quality of future time in Kluge's radical prose, where off-worldly orientation and unnatural narrative together yield new sensory perspectives on associative networks, futurity, scale, and perspective itself. This study also affords new perspectives on the importance of Kluge's creative writing for critical studies of German thought (including Kant, Marx, Benjamin, and especially Adorno), Holocaust memory, contemporary globalization, literary miniatures, and narrative studies of futurity as form. Cosmic Miniatures contributes an experiential but non-empirical sense of hope to future studies, a scholarly field of pressing public interest in endangered times.

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.

Graham Greene remarked that 'politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God' (The Other Man). This study is the first to provide a detailed consideration of the impact of his political thought and involvements on his writings both fictional and factual. It also offers the first detailed consideration of Greene's involvements in espionage and British intelligence from the 1920s until the late-1980s. It incorporates material not only from his major fictions but also from his prolific journalism, letters to the press, private correspondence, diaries and working manuscripts and typescripts, as well as consideration of the diverse political involvements and writings of his extended family network. It shows how the full range of Greene's writings was inspired and underpinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal.

Trollope and the Magazines examines the serial publication of several of Trollope's novels in the context of the gendered discourses in a range of Victorian magazines - including Cornhill, Good Words, Saint Pauls , and the Fortnightly Review . It highlights the importance of the periodical press in the literary culture of Victorian Britain, and argues that readers today need to engage with the lively cultural debates in the magazines, in order better to appreciate the complexity of Trollope's popular fiction.

Ashley Crawford investigates how such figures as Ben Marcus, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch-among other artists, novelists, and film directors-utilize religious themes and images via Christianity, Judaism, and Mormonism to form essentially mutated variations of mainstream belief systems. He seeks to determine what drives contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a 'secular' context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language, and the mutations within those, have impacted American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalyptism that underwrites it.

A work which discusses Storm's significance and artistic stature as a champion of democratic humanitarian traditions and aspirations in 19th century Germany. It highlights his critique of Christianity, his vision of capitalism and his analysis of class relationships. The study contends that his literary form, techniques and strategies were shaped by the need to respond to specific socio-political constraints and prejudices of publishers, editors and readers. The book advocates new approaches to Storm's work and uses many unpublished primary materials.

This book offers a fundamental and comprehensive re-evaluation of one of Joyce's most pervasive themes. By showing that betrayal was central to how Joyce understood and depicted the difficulties and terrors at the heart of all relationships, this book re-conceives Joyce's approach to history, politics, and the other. Leaving behind the pathologizing discourses by which Joyce's interest in betrayal has been treated as an 'obsession,' this book offers a vision of Joyce as both dramatist and theorist of betrayal. It demonstrates that, rather than being compelled by some unconscious urge to produce and reproduce textual betrayals, Joyce had a deep and hard-won conception of the specific dramatic energies wrapped up in the language and structures of betrayal and repeatedly found ways to make use of this understanding in his work.

This book looks at the inception, composition, and 1907 publication of The Secret Agent, one of Joseph Conrad's most highly regarded political novels and a core text of literary modernism. David Mulry examines the development and revisions of the novel through the stages of the holograph manuscript, first as a short story, then as a serialized sensation fiction in Ridgway's Militant Weekly for the American market, before it was extensively revised and published in novel form. Presciently anticipating the climate of modern terror, Conrad's text responds to the failed Greenwich Bombing, the first anarchist atrocity to occur on English soil. This book charts its historical and cultural milieu via press and anarchist accounts of the bombing, to place Conrad foremost among the dynamite fiction of revolutionary anarchism and terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is a fine edition of Jospeh Conrad's most acclaimed novel, printed on cream, acid-free paper. As the narrator Marlow journeys ever deeper into the Congo's 'heart of darkness', so he also penetrates deeper into the folly of western corruption and absurdity that characterises both the collision of European and African cultures, and the conflicts in his own inner nature. The story that tells of Marlow's mission to find the mysterious but missing Mr Kurtz, as he travels along the Congo River into the interior of the 'dark continent', tells also a second dark story of what happens when white westerners intrude into, and try to dominate, the continent of Africa without understanding either its people or their culture; but at its most penetrating level, Conrad's story reveals that the 'heart of darkness' lies at the core of human nature itself, that the journey to find Kurtz, is Marlow's journey to his own darkness that, viewed at its most bleak is the darkness that we all share.

Schor traces the development of Ralph Ellison's fiction from the earliest experiments to the major accomplishment of his novel Invisible Man, the mature prose of the Hickman stories and other published portions of his novel-in-progress. The study considers the two-fold obligation Ellison felt in committing himself to literature: to contribute at once to the growth of literature and also to the shaping of the culture as he would like it to be. His stories, read sequentially, reflect his struggle to encompass this aim in his writing. In describing that fragment of American experience he knew best, he learned to use the rich resources of his African-American heritage; from his passionate involvement with his craft came the discovery that, in literature, values turn in their own way, not in the service of politics or ideology. The early stories mark Ellison's "mazelike" route that developed the skill, talent, and imagination and personal vision needed to transform experience into art. The novel demonstrates the flowering of his talent, and the Hickman stories add a fine patina. In her discussion of Ellison's work, Professor Schor uses his essays and interviews as well as the insights of other critics to comment directly on his fiction. The study concludes with a bibliography of Ellison's fiction and nonfiction and a selective bibliography of criticism and related sources.

In this companion guide, Michael Andre-Driussi illuminates Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun science fiction series through dictionary-style entries on the characters, gods, locations, themes, and timelines of the novels. Gate of Horn, Book of Silk, is organized in two parts, with the first half covering the Long Sun series (Nightside the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun, and Exodus from the Long Sun) and the second half covering the Short Sun series (On Blue's Waters, In Green's Jungles, and Return to the Whorl) half covering one of the two series. "Languages of the Whorl," a section between the two parts, covers all the dialect, slang, and foreign terms used in the books--thieves' cant, flier language, Tick's talk, and more. Ten maps and diagrams are included. This is Michael Andre-Driussi's third guidebook to the rich tapestries of Gene Wolfe's worlds. As fans of of Lexicon Urthus and The Wizard Knight Companion have noted, that each book is both a convenient tool for a question while re-reading the novels but also an enjoyable read in its own right, from A to Z.

In this first full-length study of Emecheta's fiction, Fishburn highlights the difficulties inherent in reading across cultures. She challenges the notion that all we need to understand African texts is a willingness to be open to them, arguing that too many of the cultural and critical preconceptions we bring to these texts interfere with our ability to understand them. Directly responding to Western feminist criticism written about Emecheta, this study argues that Emecheta herself is not a feminist in the Western sense and that her novels should not be construed as reflecting this political interest. In close readings of eight of her best known works, this study reveals a complex narrative voice which is far more supportive of Emecheta's own African culture and its tradition than has been recognized previously.

Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship shows how many young adult novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them. Jonathan Alexander examines not only young adult texts and their media ecologies but also young people's multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young people's literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.

Introducing The JG Ballard Book, an oversized collection of articles, ideas, interviews, insights and a travelogue... as well as uniquely featuring hi-rez reproductions of over 60 pages of handwritten and typed letters from JG Ballard himself. The JG Ballard Book is 192 (count 'em) full-colour large format pages of fun and fascinating insights into "The Seer of Shepperton" -- his life, his work and his planar intersections. The JG Ballard Book features contributions from some well-known denizens of the Ballardian universe: Toby Litt suggests Ballard's political ideology may be as inverted as his plots; David Pringle offers up his thoughtful 1984 interview, "JG Ballard: Psychoanalyst of the Electronic Age"; Michael Bonsall cuts it open with "JG Ballard in the Dissecting Room"; Michael Holliday stitches together all the disconnected Atrocity Exhibition bits in "Desperate Measures: A History of the Atrocity Exhibition"; seminal Ballard bibliographer James Goddard contributes actual Ballard documents from his extensive collection, a total of 56 pages of Ballard's handwritten text, interview corrections, lists and more from JGB's intense and experimental late 1960s and 1970s; Rick Poynor paints a picture of how Ballard has been treated by the visual media in "What Does JG Ballard Look Like?"; Sam Francis, fresh from his acclaimed study, The Psychological Fictions of JG Ballard, amuses us with an unpublished 2005 Ballard interview; Prof Peter Brigg clocks in with "JG Ballard: Time Out of Mind"; Jordi Costa, the creative force behind the JGB exhibition in Barcelona, takes a big screen look with "Ballardoscope: Some Attempts at Approaching the Writer as a Visionary"; Paul A. Green amazingly paints a pure Ballard pastiche with "The Impossibility Exhibition"; and Rick McGrath re-imagines his 2007 journey to Shanghai to visit the few remains of JG Ballard's youth in the "wicked city," with original letters, maps and drawings by Ballard. The book features original cover art by Luca del Baldo and 10 delicious photographs by Ana Barrado. The JG Ballard Book is a large format, full-colour, must-have collection for any Ballard fan

Although Smollett's obvious masculine sensibility has become a commonplace in criticism of the 18th-century novel, the basis and particularities of that sensibility have never been examined. In actuality, his treatment of women--heroines, victims, and comic or grotesque--proves far more complex than conventional commentary suggests. This study attempts to show that in each category Smollett's treatment depends on the fictional purposes that these characters serve in his novels.