This book reveals the lesser-known figure in a famous American friendship.Bewilderment often follows when one learns that Mark Twain's best friend of forty years was a minister. That Joseph Hopkins Twichell (1838-1918) was also a New Englander with Puritan roots only entrenches the ""odd couple"" image of Twain and Twichell. This biography adds new dimensions to our understanding of the Twichell-Twain relationship; more important, it takes Twichell on his own terms, revealing an elite Everyman - a genial, energetic advocate of social justice in an era of stark contrasts between America's ""haves and have-nots.""After Twichell's education at Yale and his Civil War service as a Union chaplain, he took on his first (and only) pastorate at Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, then the nation's most affluent city. Courtney tells how Twichell shaped his prosperous congregation into a major force for social change in a Gilded Age metropolis, giving aid to the poor and to struggling immigrant laborers as well as supporting overseas missions and cultural exchanges. It was also during his time at Asylum Hill that Twichell would meet Twain, assist at Twain's wedding, and preside over a number of the family's weddings and funerals.Courtney shows how Twichell's personality, abolitionist background, theological training, and war experience shaped his friendship with Twain, as well as his ministerial career; his life with his wife, Harmony, and their nine children; and his involvement in such pursuits as Nook Farm, the lively community whose members included Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dudley Warner. This was a life emblematic of a broad and eventful period of American change. Readers will gain a clear appreciation of why the witty, profane, and skeptical Twain cherished Twichell's companionship.

'Heartfelt, emotional and uplifting' Faith Hogan, author of The Gin Sisters' Promise 'Written with warmth, humour, sincerity and so much heart' Hazel Prior, author of Away with the Penguins One lost suitcase. Two strangers. And a notebook that will change lives. For almost fifty years, sisters Dolly and Greta have lived together - getting each other through the good times and the bad. Except this year, Greta isn't there and Dolly is feeling lost and alone. In memory of her sister, Dolly heads to the lost luggage auction where she and Greta go each Christmas. But her bid reveals a gift she never imagined. Amongst the clothes is the notebook of a reclusive woman who has hardly been outside for an entire year, but who isn't ready to give up on life. The notebook's contents resonate with Dolly. With the support of her neighbours, retired Leroy and eleven year old Flo, Dolly decides to take on the year of firsts Phoebe had planned. But, can you have a year of firsts when you're seventy-two? And is Dolly ready to discover the notebook's secrets, or are some secrets better left lost at the airport? ________ 'Deeply satisfying. Dolly's story will stay with me for a long, long time' Celia Anderson 'Inspirational and incredibly uplifting' NetGalley Reviewer 'This was just such a lovely, heartfelt, joyous and emotional book' This Hannah Reads 'A truly heartwarming, moving and outstanding story' Amazon Reviewer 'Real curl up on the sofa with a hot drink stuff! NetGalley Reviewer 'Just gorgeous - tremendously engaging . . . and life-affirming in every way' Being Anne 'An uplifting and emotional book' Amazon Reviewer 'An emotional story full of hope' NetGalley Reviewer 'The story is written with such sensitivity and I was so touched by it' Jan's Book Buzz

Looking closely at a group of writers who rejected the industrial West in favor of the expatriate life and made that quest the subject of their work, Marilynn Papayanis reveals their concerns to be ethical as well as aesthetic. Her book brims with fresh insights into such works as Paul Bowles's "The Sheltering Sky," Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet," and Michael Ondaatjes "The English Patient."

This study offers new perspectives on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer too often consigned to the margins of post-1945 literary history. Examining the interaction of the personal and the social in Koeppen's writings, this book demonstrates that the politics of his works are inherent to their form. Through a series of close readings, the book explores the positive and negative aspects of liminality, a dominant trope in Koeppen's works. Stressing the thematic and formal continuities of his oeuvre, the first section illustrates how his protagonists perpetually establish a space for themselves 'in between' states. The second section examines how Koeppen negotiates with the discourse of 'nation' during two central periods of his career. It shows how his experiences in the Third Reich and his reappraisal of the years prior to 1933 determine his perspective on modernity, modernism and Germany after 1945. Having defined the location of culture in his works, the book concludes by resituating Koeppen's writings within post-war West German literary culture.

In the first half of the nineteenth century most leading French Romantic authors wrote travel books. French Romantic Travel Writing is the first study exclusively devoted to surveying the travelogues they produced and the reasons for, and significance of, this trend. Whilst 'the journey' was one of Romanticism's central images, suggesting as it did a dynamic, expanding, and evermore complex world in which artists' lives were increasingly experienced as wanderings and endless quests, the fashion for Romantic travel books was more marked in France than in Germany or England. Chateaubriand, Stael, Stendhal, Nodier, Hugo, Lamartine, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Custine, Quinet, Merimee, Dumas, and Tristan all wrote one or more travelogues, including at least four masterpieces-Hugo's Le Rhin (1842), Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851), and Stendhal's two Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 and 1826). The book explores the reasons for this difference from England and Germany. These include French foreign and cultural policies, as well as the particular needs of Parisian publishers. It puts forward the case for the collective achievement of these Romantic travel books, compared to those of most later writers in nineteenth-century France. A distinctive feature of the survey is its belief in the value of concentrating on the text of these books as published by their authors, as opposed to manuscript and peripheral material.

Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father's until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad's old photographs. For years in the 1940s and '50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back. How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths--her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author? This question sparked a journalist's quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little-known interest of Aldous Huxley. Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author's father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley's research and discussion circle. This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20th-century's foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world.
Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.

Lewis Carroll is one of the world's best-loved writers. His immortal Wonderland and delightful nonsense verses have enchanted generations of children and adults alike. The wit and imagination, the wisdom, sense of absurdity and sheer fun which fill his books shine just as clearly from the many letters he wrote. '...each is a miniature Wonderland... They reveal a truly delightful man...the combination of intense goodness and unselfishness with a magic, nonsense wit is unique'. The Scotsman '...a magnificent collection of delightful and entertaining letters reflecting all that was embraced in that remarkable character...all his charm, inventive fun, wisdom, generosity, kindliness and inventive mind'. Walter Tyson, Oxford Times.

Breaks new ground by both analyzing the literary qualities of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth and contextualizing their concern with climate change within the wider crises of the Anthropocene. With the rise of concern about global warming in recent years, climate-change fiction, or cli-fi, has become increasingly important both as a publishing phenomenon and as an area of academic study and research. Flood narratives have become a subsection of cli-fi in their own right. This book proposes new readings of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth, Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall, and The Flood by Maggie Gee. Helen E. Mundler's book takes into account the wealth of criticism that has appeared on these texts in recent years, acknowledging important contributions from critics including Adam Trexler, Adeline Johns-Putra, and Astrid Bracke. However, her book's strength is that it takes a new approach, going beyond the topicality of the texts and treating them not just as ideological statements but giving them their due as literary artifacts. While the importance of climate change is beyond debate, this book takes a more balanced approach that places it within a wider context of the multiple crises of the Anthropocene.

Still the most popular book of Hemingway's to teach, The Sun Also Rises captures the quintessential romance of the expatriate Americans and Britains in Paris after World War I. As the international vacationers move from Paris to Pamplona for the bullfight festival, the characters wend their various narratives through the impressionistic colours of modern European life. The text provides a way for discussions of war, sexuality, personal angst, and national identity to be linked inextricably with the stylistic traits of modern writing. Both in theme and style, this novel has become synonymous with modernism and is often used as either a starting point for courses in modernism or as a representative modernist novel in broader survey courses. This volume, to be edited by one of Hemingway's most eminent scholars, will present the best in critical essays written about The Sun Also Rises.

"Pierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire" offers an original analysis of patterns of unconscious desire observable in the life and work of the French orientalist writer Pierre Loti. It aims to reconcile attitudes and conduct that have been regarded as contradictory and not amenable to analysis by locating the unconscious urges that motivate them. It looks at the ambiguous feelings Loti expresses towards his mother, the conflicting desires inherent in his bisexuality, and his deeply ambiguous sense of a cultural identity as expressed through his cross-cultural transvestism. The political implications of this reappraisal are also considered, offering a potential reassessment of the apparently exploitative nature of much of Loti's writing. This new reading in terms of the unconscious not only serves as a way of understanding inconsistencies, but also suggests how such new interpretations can offer an alternative way of viewing the hierarchies of power his work portrays on both a sexual and political level. This volume is consequently of interest to those interested in gender studies and sexual politics, and offers a way of appreciating writing that might otherwise appear dated and embarrassingly sexist and colonialist in content to twenty-first century readers.

This is a concise but comprehensive student guide to studying Emily Bronte's classic novel "Wuthering Heights". After its relatively modest reception in 1847, Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" has become one of the most widely-read novels of the nineteenth century. Seen as one of those rare works that has transcended its literary origin to become part of the lexicon of popular culture, its uncompromising awareness of the powers of both love and selfishness, landscape and revenge has made it a popular choice of text for 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. "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 first bookto investigate Jane Austen's popular significance today, Everybody's Jane considers why Austen matters to amateur readers, how they make use of hernovels, what they gain from visiting places associated with her, and why theycreate works of fiction and nonfiction inspired by her novels and life.The voices of everyday readers emerge fromboth published and unpublished sources, including interviews conducted with literary tourists and archival research into thefounding of the Jane Austen Society of North America and the exceptional Austencollection of Alberta Hirshheimer Burke of Baltimore.Additional topics include new Austenportraits; portrayals of Austen, and of Austen fans, in film and fiction; andhybrid works that infuse Austen's writings with horror, erotica, or explicitChristianity.Everybody's Jane will appeal to all those who care about Austen and will change how we think about theimportance of literature and reading today.

Darling of the Jazz Age, the globe-trotting diplomat and acclaimed writer Paul Morand and his literary and political careers underwent a radical shift following his collaboration with the Vichy government during the Occupation of France. Abandoning the terse, glittering portraits of the contemporary era that had garnered him early fame, he turned to the past and to historical fiction, biography and autobiography.Paul Morand: The Politics and Practice of Writing in Post-War France, the first full-length study of Morand in English and the first ever of his post-war works, traces Morand's politically charged explorations of history as he obsessively rewrites the Occupation in historical guise. From Napoleonic Spain to the court of Louis XIV, nineteenth-century California, Revolutionary France and Venice across the ages, Morand probes the limits of historiography and genre as he constructs a curiously Benjaminian model of redemption for his collaborationist heroes. This book analyses Morand's post-war project, placing it within the highly-politicized context of writing during the de Gaullian era. Many issues are at stake in Morand's late oeuvre, from the genres of historical fiction, biography and autobiography, to the very act of historicization itself in the context of the post-war era. Morand's handling of these issues suggests that literature furnishes perhaps the best space within which the complex and highly political question of our ties to the past may be most tellingly examined.

For the past twenty years, evangelical prophecy novels have been a powerful presence on American bestseller lists. Emerging from a growing conservative culture industry, the genre dramatizes events that many believers expect to occur at the end of the age - the rapture of the saved, the rise of the Antichrist, and the fearful tribulation faced by those who are "left behind."
Seeking the forces that drove the unexpected success of the Left Behind novels, Crawford Gribben traces the gradual development of the prophecy fiction genre from its eclectic roots among early twentieth-century fundamentalists. The first rapture novels came onto the scene at the high water mark of Protestant America. From there, the genre would both witness the defeat of conservative Protestantism and participate in its eventual reconstruction and return, providing for the renaissance of the evangelical imagination that would culminate in the Left Behind novels.
Yet, as Gribben shows, the rapture genre, while vividly expressing some prototypically American themes, also serves to greatly complicate the idea of American modernity-assaulting some of its most cherished tenets. Gribben concludes with a look at "post-Left Behind" rapture fiction, noting some works that were written specifically to counter the claims of the best-selling series. Along the way, he gives attention not just to literary fictions, but to rapture films and apocalyptic themes in Christian music. Writing the Rapture is an indispensable guide to this flourishing yet little understood body of literature.

Harvey J. Satty and Curtis C. Smith have painstakingly assembled a complete bibliographic description of the literary career of an author they rank among the giants of twentieth-century science fiction. Following a biographical preface, they have recorded all of Stapledon's independent English language publications. In addition to complete descriptions of all first editions, citations are given for later editions, omnibus volumes, and books to which Stapledon contributed chapters or poems. The dust jackets of all first editions and books to which Stapledon contributed are described in detail, giving the reader unique insight into the manner in which Stapledon's books have been presented. A previously unpublished Stapledon work, The Peak and the Town, is included in the bibliography. An allegorical autobiography, it depicts the author's view of his own life. A brief secondary bibliography concludes the book. The comprehensive author index provides further access to this bibliography of the intricate body of Stapledon's work.

This book offers an in-depth study of iconic literary narratives and images of religious transformation and secularisation in the Netherlands during the 1960s and 1970s. Jesseka Batteau shows how Gerard Reve, Jan Wolkers and Maarten 't Hart texts and performances can be understood as instances of religious and post-religious memory with a broad public impact. They contributed to a widely shared perspective on the Dutch religious past and a collective understanding of what secularisation consists of. This uniquely interdisciplinary approach combines insights from literary studies, memory studies, media studies and religious studies and traces the complex dynamics of the circulation of memory and meaning between literary texts, mass media and embodied performances within a post-religious society.

Jan Gordon proposes that a reviled communicational 'interest' in gossip and its purveyors be given its proper due in the development of the novel in Britain. Commencing with Sir Walter Scott's historically persecuted (but economically and politically necessary) androgynous voices in caves and concluding with Oscar Wilde's premature celebration of gossip at the very moment it is transformed from public opinion to public judgment, the author finds gossip to be both deforming and shaping nineteenth century 'letters' in surprising ways. Like the ignominious orphan-figure of nineteenth-century fiction, gossip is the 'unacknowledged reproduction' searching for a political antecedence which might lend a legitimacy to its often discontinuous testimony, for a culture historically resistant to obtrusive voices.

"Take up the white man's burden " So wrote the English writer Rudyard Kipling in 1899, in a poem aimed at Americans at a time when colonial ambitions were particularly high. The poem proved especially popular among white southern men, who saw in its vision of America's imperial future an image that appeared to reflect and even redeem the South's plantation past.

"Romances of the White Man's Burden" takes on works in American literature in which the proverbial "old plantation" is made to seem not a relic but a harbinger, a sign that the South had arrived at a multiracial modernity and harmony before the rest of the United States. Focusing on writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry W. Grady, Thomas Dixon, and William Faulkner, Jeremy Wells reveals their shared fixation on the figure of the white southern man as specially burdened by history. Each of these writers, in his own way, presented the plantation South as an emblem, not an aberration, of America.

Axelsson provides an overview of American war and military novels set between 1945 and 1962. These are novels informed and inspired by the conditions and background of postwar occupation, the Korean War, and the early phases of the Cold War. More than 120 narratives are considered and evaluated from a literary point of view and discussed in terms of their contribution to the understanding of the period. The ultimate goal is a clear delineation of this period in American life and literature. In view of this orientation, the study will be useful to researchers and teachers of American history and literature as well as students of the Korean War. Of the books considered, 27 are given extended treatment; they were selected as being representative of socio-literary phenomena. The major part of the action in the novels takes place between V-E Day and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time in America characterized by restraint and measured response to unprecedented demands and dangers, accompanied by valiant efforts to rise to the occasion and find new ways of meeting new challenges to American values and ideals. Although the key concept throughout is American military experience, the wide field of civilian-military relations is used as an overlay to achieve a balanced perspective on the period. The book includes two appendices: the first is a list of key data and summaries of all works in the investigation; the second is a list of the works broken down by geographical settings and thematic considerations following categories outlined by chapters. A bibilography of secondary sources is also outlined.

The most supportive, easy-to-use and focussed literature guides to help your students understand the texts they are studying at GCSE and A Level

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a 'heritage industry' during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade's own set of fundamental crises.

Bartter surveys 250 American science-fiction stories, and American SF novels--with occasional overlaps of stories made into episodic novels--that have some relationship, often direct, sometimes marginal, to atomic weapons and their effects. . . . Highly recommended for popular literature collections. Choice Divided into three principal parts, The Way to Ground Zero begins by exploring The Way to Hiroshima. Through a detailed analysis of the works included, Bartter reveals the sociopolitical assumptions that authors took for granted and develops a method by which these assumptions can be disclosed. She shows that encoded in these fictions we can find the patterns that led us to create and use the atomic bomb. In the second section, Bartter looks at the deeper assumptions on which these sociopolitical assumptions rest, focusing particularly on those which perpetuate considerations of nuclear war--both in science fiction and in actual policy making. Finally, Bartter explores alternative assumptions proposed by innovative science fiction writers. Throughout, an attempt is made to forge a deeper understanding of the ways in which science fiction both reflects and influences human and international relations. Students of science fiction and of literature and politics will find Bartter's work enlightening, provocative reading. Bartter argues that a close examination of American fiction, particularly science fiction, can offer important new insights into the events surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The use of an atomic bomb to end the war followed a scenario long established in science fiction--defeating our enemy with a super-weapon developed by native technological genius. By examining the interrelationship between this persistent plot-device and the development and use of a real super-weapon, Bartter sheds new light on the transactional role of literature and real life. Her analysis is based on a comprehensive theory of human nature, substantiated by exhaustive research in science fiction archives and libraries and covers a large number of stories--both well-known and relatively obscure--featuring super weapons or super war and published by American authors.