This exploration of author Laurell K. Hamilton's work examines the many novels of her series and shows how her writing has been a major influence on contemporary visions of the vampire-an ideal reference text for book club leaders. Long before Twilight achieved epic levels of popularity, Laurell K. Hamilton was reshaping the image of the vampire with her own take on the vampire mythos in her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter fantasy novel series. While Hamilton's work draws on traditional vampire and fairy lore, her interpretation of these subjects brought new dimensions to the genres, influencing the direction of urban fantasy over the past two decades. Reading Laurell K. Hamilton focuses upon Hamilton's two bestselling series, the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series and the Merry Gentry series. The volume is intended as a resource for leaders of book clubs or discussion groups, containing chapters that examine Hamilton's role in the current vampire literature craze, the themes and characters in her work, and responses to Hamilton on the Internet. The book also provides a brief overview of Hamilton's life. Presents a chronology of major milestones in vampire literature and film Contains images of Hamilton's book covers Provides a bibliography of Hamilton's works, secondary sources, and websites, as well as a detailed "What Do I Read Next" listing of other writers who may be of interest to Hamilton's fans Includes a glossary of terms and major characters for each of Hamilton's two major series

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.

"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.

This book traces the artistic trajectories of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, examining their literary representations of the nomadic ethic pervading the twentieth-century expatriate movements in and out of America. The book argues that these authors contribute to the nomadic aesthetic of American modernism: its pastoral ideographies, (post)colonial ecologies, as well as regional and transcultural varieties. Mapping the pastoral moment in different temporalities and spaces (Barnes representing the 1920s expatriation in Europe while Bowles comments on the 1940s exodus to Mexico and North Africa), this book suggests that Barnes and Bowles counter the critical trend associating American modernity primarily with urban spaces, and instead locate the nomadic thrust of their times in the (post)colonial history of the American frontier.

During the last decade, women's narrative has become a recognized force in Mexican letters. The essays in this collection explore the recent work of nine contemporary Mexican women writers. Many of the works have been translated into English; some, like Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate," have become international best sellers. The unprecedented commercial success of these novels has generated mixed reactions: at the same time that the secondary status afforded women's narrative has come to be questioned in many academic circles, some authors are dissociating themselves from women's writing. The essays in this volume address these issues, providing a much needed contribution to the study of women's narrative.

Into Woods is an exuberant, profound, and often wonderfully funny account of ten years in the life of author Bill Roorbach. A paean to nature, love, family, and place, it begins with his honeymoon on a wine farm in France's Loire Valley and closes with the birth of his daughter and he and his wife's return to their beloved Maine. These essays blend journalism, memoir, personal narrative, nature writing, cultural criticism, and insight into a flowing narrative of place, a meditation on being and belonging, love and death, wonder and foreboding.

The success of The Shipping News and the film of Brokeback Mountain brought Proulx international recognition, but their success merely confirms what literary critics have known for some time: Proulx is one of the most provocative and stylistically innovative writers in America today. She is at her best in the short story format, and the best of these are to be found in her Wyoming trilogy, in which she turns her eye on America's West--both past and present. Yet despite the vast amount of print expended reviewing her books, there has been nothing published on the Wyoming Stories. There is appetite for such a work; the plethora of critical work on McCarthy's Border Trilogy indicates that the reinvention of the West is a subject for serious academic study. Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories fills this critical void by offering a detailed examination of the key stories in the trilogy: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way it Is (2008). The chapters are arranged according to western archetypes--the Pioneer, Rancher, Cowboy, Indian, and, arguably, the most important character of them all in Proulx's fiction: Landscape. Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories offers students a clear sense of the novelist's early life and work, stylistic influences and the characteristics of her fiction and an understanding of where the Wyoming Stories, and Annie Proulx's work as a whole, fits into traditional and contemporary writing about the American West.

American environmental literature has relied heavily on the perspectives of European Americans, often ignoring other groups. In Black on Earth, Kimberly Ruffin expands the reach of ecocriticism by analyzing the ecological experiences, conceptions, and desires seen in African American writing. Ruffin identifies a theory of "ecological burden and beauty" in which African American authors underscore the ecological burdens of living within human hierarchies in the social order just as they explore the ecological beauty of being a part of the natural order. Blacks were ecological agents before the emergence of American nature writing, argues Ruffin, and their perspectives are critical to understanding the full scope of ecological thought. Ruffin examines African American ecological insights from the antebellum era to the twenty-first century, considering WPA slave narratives, neo-slave poetry, novels, essays, and documentary films, by such artists as Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Henry Dumas, Percival Everett, Spike Lee, and Jayne Cortez. Identifying themes of work, slavery, religion, mythology, music, and citizenship, Black on Earth highlights the ways in which African American writers are visionary ecological artists.

By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last twenty years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities, but rather she has considered the different forms of (social) landscape in which Italian crime novels are set. Through the analysis of the way in which cities, the "urban sprawl," and islands are represented in the serial novels of eleven of the most important contemporary crime writers in Italy of the 1990s, Pezzotti articulates the different ways in which individual authors appropriate the structures and tropes of the genre to reflect the social transformations and dysfunctions of contemporary Italy. In so doing, this volume also makes a case for the genre as an instrument of social critique and analysis of a still elusive Italian national identity, thus bringing further evidence in support of the thesis that in Italy detective fiction has come to play the role of the new "social novel."

In this study of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Lawrence Miller traces Beckett's attempt to voice the expressive dilemma that is posed by the assumptions of modernist art and art criticism. A preliminary examination of Beckett's critical writings on literature and painting reveals a growing suspicion of modernist ambitions; it is the trilogy of novels, however, which represents Beckett's most sustained rejection of the feasible aspirations of an expressive theory of art. Still, the goal of expression cannot be abandoned since it represents the essence of the human condition; the compulsion inevitably triumphs over the longing to end.

This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production. Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges includes the Argentine specificities to Borges's work-specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings. This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges is the ultimate stepping stone into the deeper Borgesian world.

Realistic writers seek to render accurate representations of the world, and their novels contain authentic details and descriptions of their characters and settings. Like Realistic authors, Naturalistic ones similarly try to portray the world accurately, but they tend to depict the darker side of life. Realism was born in Europe in the nineteenth century and soon became popular in the United States, while Naturalism became prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both traditions have continued in one form or another to the present day, and Realistic and Naturalistic novelists include some of America's most significant authors, such as Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Ambrose Bierce, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, and Jack London. This reference includes biographical and critical entries for more than 120 American Naturalistic and Realistic novelists.

An introductory essay discusses the history of the Realistic and Naturalistic traditions, points to the difficulty of defining them, and surveys the many authors who have been associated with the two movements. The entries that follow are arranged alphabetically to facilitate use. Each includes basic biographical information and a narrative overview of the writer's educational background, professional career, and published works. The writer's works are briefly discussed in relation to the Realistic and Naturalistic traditions. Entries include primary and secondary bibliographies, and the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

This book explores the concepts of nationality and culture in the context of nineteenth-century Scottish fiction, through the writing of Walter Scott, James Hogg, R. L. Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant. It describes the relationship between speech writing as a foundation of the literary construction of a particular national identity, exploring how orality and literacy are figured in nineteenth-century preoccupations with the definition of `culture'. It further examines the importance of romance revival in the ascendancy of the novel and the development of that genre across a century which saw the novel stripped of its female associations and accorded a masculine authority, touching on the sexualization of language in the discourse between women's narrative (oral) and men's narrative (written). The books importance for literary studies lies in the investigation of some of the consequences of deconstruction. It explores how the speech/writing opposition is open to the influence of social and material forces. Focusing on the writing of Scott, Hogg, Stevenson, and Oliphant, it looks at the conflicts in narratological experiments in Scottish writing, constructions of class and gender, the effects of popular literacy and the material condition of books as artefacts and commodities. This book is the first to offer a broad picture of the interaction of Scottish fiction and modern theoretical thinking, taking its roots from a combination of deconstruction, narrative theory, the history of orality, linguistics and psychoanalysis.

In 1989, Steven Moore published the first scholarly study of all three of William Gaddis's novels and since then it has been generally regarded as the best book on this difficult but major writer's work. This revised and expanded edition includes new chapters on the novels Gaddis published after 1989, the National Book Award-winning A Frolic of His Own and the posthumous novella Agape Agape, along with updated introductory and concluding chapters. This introduction offers a clear discussion of all five of Gaddis's novels, providing essential biographical information, two chapters each on his most significant novels, The Recognitions and J R, and a chapter each devoted to his later three novels. A concluding chapter locates his place in American literature and notes his influence on younger writers. Each chapter focuses on the main themes of each novel and discusses the literary techniques Gaddis deployed to dramatize those themes. Since Gaddis is an erudite, allusive novelist, Moore clarifies his references and explains how they enhance his themes.

The central concern of the book is the impact of global terror networks and state counterterrorism on twentieth-century fiction. A unique contribution of this book is the comparative approach, as opposed to the single author focus of most of the edited collections on terrorism in literature.

For much of her own century, Elizabeth Gaskell was recognized as a voice of Victorian convention&emdash;-the loyal wife, good mother, and respected writer&emdash;-a reputation that led to her steady decline in the view of twentieth-century literary critics. Recent scholars, however, have begun to recognize that Mrs. Gaskell's high standing in Victorian society allowed her to effect change in conventional ideology. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund focus this reevaluation on issues pertaining to the Victorian literary marketplace.

Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work portrays an elusive and self-aware writer whose refusal to grant authority to a single perspective even while she recirculated the fundamental assumptions and debates of her era enabled her simultaneously to fulfill and deflect the expectations of the literary marketplace. While she wrote for money, producing periodical fiction, major novels, and nonfiction, Mrs. Gaskell was able to maintain a tone of warmth and empathy that allowed her to imagine multiple social and epistemological alternatives. Writing from within the established rubrics of gender, narrative, and publication format, she nevertheless performed important cultural work.