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.

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.

Sixdiary notebooks kept by Samuel Beckett during his1936-7 trip through Nazi Germany were discovered in 1989. Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 is the first study to explore the relevance of these diaries to Beckett's development as a writer. Using the diaries as the central point of focus, Nixon draws on unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, reading notes from the 1930s to reflect on both Beckett's creative evolution prior to 1936 and the direction his writing took after his return to Dublin in April 1937. As well as gaining an insight into Beckett's reading of classical German literature, Nixon shows how the pared-down style of writing, the self-examination and the importance of the visual arts that govern Beckett's post-war works traces back to the pages of these notebooks. By illuminating how Beckett's writing and aesthetics underwent a far-reaching change during the 1930s, Nixon's study is crucial to our understanding of the emergence of Beckett as a radical writer in the post-war years.

In Black South African Autobiography After Deleuze: Belonging and Becoming in Self-Testimony, Kgomotso Michael Masemola uses Gilles Deleuze's theories of immanence and deterritorialization to explore South African autobiography as both the site and the limit of intertextual cultural memory. Detailing the intertextual turn that is commensurate with belonging to the African world and its diasporic reaches through the Black Atlantic, among others, this book covers autobiographies from Peter Abrahams to Es'kia Mphahlele, from Ellen Kuzwayo to Nelson Mandela. It proceeds further to reveal wider dimensions of angst and belonging that attend becoming through transcultural memory. Kgomotso Michael Masemola successfully marshalls Deleuzean theories in a sophisticated re-reading that makes clear the autobiographers' epistemic access to wor(l)ds beyond South Africa.

Widely regarded as the most important narrative of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford's "Of Plimmoth Plantation" is one of the founding documents of American literature and history. In "William Bradford's Books" this portrait of the religious dissenters who emigrated from the Netherlands to New England in 1620 receives perhaps its sharpest textual analysis to date--and the first since that of Samuel Eliot Morison two generations ago. Far from the gloomy elegy that many readers find, Bradford's history, argues Douglas Anderson, demonstrates remarkable ambition and subtle grace, as it contemplates the adaptive success of a small community of religious exiles. Anderson offers fresh literary and historical accounts of Bradford's accomplishment, exploring the context and the form in which the author intended his book to be read.

Gide's Bent investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of Andre Gide, one of the first "out" modern writers. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political interests. Provocative examination of one of the first openly homosexual writers, Andre Gide.

"Examining the global dimensions of Neo-Victorianism, this book explores how the appropriation of Victorian images in contemporary literature and culture has emerged as a critical response to the crises of decolonization and Imperial collapse. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire explores the phenomenon by reading a range of popular and literary Anglophone neo-Victorian texts, including Alan Moores Graphic Novel From Hell, works by Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood, the films of Jackie Chan and contemporary Steampunk science fiction. Through these readingsElizabeth Ho explores how constructions of popular memory and fictionalisations of the past reflect political and psychological engagements with our contemporary post-Imperial circumstances. "

This is a study of the novels by and for middle-class women that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Agatha Christie, Nancy Mitford, Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm) and many others are considered alongside cultural products such as cookery books, child-care manuals and women's magazines. The middlebrow women's fiction of this period is argued to be richer, subtler, and more socially influential than has previously been recognised.

Despite feminist reassessments to the contrary, the conventional view that Elizabeth Gaskell personified the Victorian feminine ideal is still very much in place today. Challenging that view in an experimental biography, Felicia Bonaparte proposes that there lived in ""Mrs. Gaskell"" another, antithetical self, a daemonic double, that was not an angel in the house but instead a creature born to be a ""gypsy-bachelor."" Bonaparte does not dispute that ""Mrs. Gaskell"" did exist, but she suggests that Gaskell conceived her, as much as any fictional character, out of a desperate need produced by her childhood experience of rejection and abandonment, in order to gain the love of friends and family and the approval of the world. Gaskell herself, Bonaparte argues, told the story of her double in images encoded in her letters, fiction, and life. Using the methods of literary criticism for biographical ends, Bonaparte traces a pattern of these images, showing how a metaphor that may turn up as a figure of speech in one of Gaskell's letters may be embodied in a character in one of her short stories, dramatized in an incident or plot in one of her novels, and even actualized in an action or a relationship in her life. To reach the inner woman, Bonaparte claims, it is necessary to ""read"" Gaskell's letters, fiction, and life as a single poetic text. In addition to presenting a radically different interpretation both of Gaskell and of her literary work, Bonaparte's unique approach opens up interesting possibilities in a number of other areas: in the writing of biography, in the analysis of metaphor in the nineteenth-century novel, in the study of the relationship between literature and life, in the exploration of links between the inner and outer self, and in women's studies generally.

As one of the first English novelists to employ "stream of consciousness" as a narrative technique, Dorothy Richardson ranks among modernism's most important experimentalists, yet her epic autobiographical novel "Pilgrimage" has rarely received the kind of attention given to the writings of her contemporaries James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.

Kristin Bluemel's study explores the relationship between experimental forms and oppositional politics in "Pilgrimage," demonstrating how the novel challenged the literary conventions and cultural expectations of the late-Victorian and Edwardian world and linking these relationships to the novel's construction of a lesbian sexuality, its use of medicine to interrogate class structures, its feminist critique of early-twentieth-century science, and Richardson's short stories and nonfiction.

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century - a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. In this study, Tate explores this apparent paradox through an examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history - a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history". Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. Instead, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative - a domestic allegory - about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into fictive consummations of civil liberty. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is cultural criticism, cutting across the traditional disciplines of history, sociology, literature, and ethnology. By examining lost works, this book recovers the domestic heroine as a signifier of citizenship for African Americans, and domesticity as a discourse ofblack political agency. With this important work, Tate joins the ranks of leading scholars of African-American culture. It is essential reading for those interested in the intersection of race, gender, and class in American, African-American, and women's studies.

Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking "Companion" surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages.
Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day
Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance's special relation to women readers
Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres
Challenges the idea that the appeal of romance is exclusively escapist
Draws on a wide range of specific and influential literary examples

Post-9/11 fiction reflects how the September 11, 2001, attacks have influenced our concept of public space, from urban behavior patterns to architecture and urban movement. It also suggests a need for remapping the real and imagined spaces where we live and work. Through close readings of novels from both sides of the Atlantic, this analysis of the literary 21st century metropolis explores the fictional post-9/11 city as a global space not defined or contained by its physical limits.

The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East by Antony Goedhals offers radical rereadings of a misunderstood and undervalued Victorian writer. It reveals that at the metaphysical core of Lafcadio Hearn's writings is a Buddhist vision as yet unappreciated by his critics and biographers. Beginning with the American writings and ending with the essay- and story-meditations of the Japanese period, the book demonstrates Hearn's deeply personal and transcendently beautiful evocations of a Buddhist universe, and shows how these deconstruct and dissolve the categories of Western discourse and thinking about reality - to create a new language, a poetry of vastness, emptiness, and oneness that had not been heard before in English, or, indeed, in the West.

This anthology offers an introduction to the first major flowering of Russian women's writing between 1835 and 1860. The work produced during this period, like nearly all writing by Russian women, has been, until very recently, 'hidden from history'. None of the ten stories have been translated before and several have not been republished since their original publication in the nineteenth century. These works bear witness to the great, but hitherto neglected, contribution made by women to the overall development of Russian fiction in its formative period. The selection shows the diversity of women's writing in the period, as well as the inevitably interconnected nature of theme and treatment among the different authors. It will demonstrate to the reader, specialist and amateur alike, that women's writing in nineteenth-century Russia is an area that certainly repays further exploration.

In this timely new study, Catherine Davies provides a critical analysis of post-Franco Spain's most successful women novelists. Delving first into the development of feminism and women's writing and its critical reception in Spain since 1970, the author then focuses on two of the most popular and influential feminist novelists: Barcelona's Montserrat Roig (1946-1991) and Madrid's Rosa Montero (b. 1951). These writers' works share woman-centered themes such as family relationships, the search for self-fulfillment in a restrictive society, and the hope for the construction of a new world order. Catherine Davies provides a critical analysis of their complete oeuvre and a fascinating overview of contemporary women's writing in Spain.

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 intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

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.

This book argues that the source of Gothic terror is anxiety about the boundaries of the self: a double fear of separateness and unity that has had a special significance for women writers and readers. Exploring the psychological, religious, and epistemological context of this anxiety, DeLamotte argues that the Gothic vision focuses simultaneously on the private demons of the psyche and the social realities that helped to shape them. Her analysis includes works of English and American authors, among them Henry James, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, and a number of often neglected popular women Gothicists.

IN THE DIM VOID: SAMUEL BECKETT

This book considers Samuel Beckett's 1980-83 trilogy of short texts, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Wortstward Ho, otherwise known as the Company or Nohow Trilogy. These are dense, complex, allusive, highly lyrical and emotional pieces which contain many of Beckett's key philosophies and approaches to writing.

Includes photographs of Beckett and his plays, and a bibliography.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE

The emotional core of Company is a nostalgic yearning, manifested in those vignettes or memories, which some see as having correlations with Beckett's own life, so that Company is the closest thing in the Beckett canon to autobiography. Certainly many of the sections in Company have the whiff of autobiography, but these are memories mediated, edited, shaped, compressed and transformed by Samuel Beckett's various voices. For in Company we find a narrator, a voice, a remembering self, in fact a complex hierarchy of various levels of consciousness and self-consciousness. Some of the passages are Beckett at his most lyrical, his most self-indulgently lyrical, one might add, for no sooner is lyricism evoked than it is stamped out. Ornamental writing is detested by Beckett, yet he can be as poetic in the ecstatic sense as any other poet. Here is a powerful sequence from Company:

the light there was then. On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. A nook in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of high mountain. Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For the third or fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and were derided. All you had seen was clod. So now you heard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water until they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light. (20)

This memory sequence is a kind of ecstasy. An everyday sort of ecstasy, perhaps, but even Beckett's rigorous control of language and his hyper-realist outlook on life cannot hide the joy in this passage. For there is joy in Beckett's art, though always, as in Thomas Hardy's fiction, very brief joy, soon smothered by all manner of other concerns.

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment. Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign - especially French - authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

The Cherryh Odyssey brings together a dozen essays about respected science fiction and fantasy author C. J. Cherryh. Fellow author and academic Edward Carmien has gathered top voices in the field to discuss the literary life and career of Cherryh, including Burton Raffel, Jane Fancher, Janice Bogstad, Betsy Wollheim, and many others. A substantial bibliography rounds out this collection. The Cherryh Odyssey is a text fans of the author will find invaluable, as will writers new to the field, as it presents a readable yet in-depth examination of many issues relevant to this award-winning author's literary life and career. Scholars will find this blend of academic and professional voices a compelling resource for further research.

This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of "black" subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship. The title promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction. -- .