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.

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.

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.

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.

A Literary Symbiosis studies the merger of science fiction/fantasy and mystery fiction from historical and critical perspectives. Pierce examines the problems and expectations raised by the various literary labels, particularly as regards definition, theme, conventions, stock characters, and setting. While she admits the difficulties inherent in merging idea-oriented, speculative science fiction with the situation-specific and present-time oriented mystery story, she argues that the two genres have much in common. The book examines critically the elements of mystery fiction which have been integrated with varying degrees of success, into science fiction/fantasy. This evaluation focuses on individual authors and novels or short stories which contributed to the original modes and to their synthesis.

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.

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.

The English novel written between 1700 and 1740 remains a comparatively neglected area. In addition to Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders" are landmarks in the history of English fiction, many other authors were at work. These included such women as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, and Eliza Haywood, who made a considerable contribution to widening the range of emotional responses in fiction. These authors, and many others, continued writing in the genres inherited from the previous century, such as criminal biographies, the Utopian novel, the science fictional voyage, and the epistolary novel. This annotated bibliography includes entries for these works and for critical materials pertinent to them.

The volume first seeks to establish the existing studies of the era, along with anthologies. It then provides entries for a wide-ranging selection of works which cover fictional, theoretical, historical, political, and cultural topics, to provide a comprehensive background to the unfolding and understanding of prose fiction in the early 18th century. This is followed by an alphabetical listing of novels, their editions, and any critical material available on each. The next section provides a chronological record of significant and enduring works of fiction composed or translated in this period. The volume concludes with extensive indexes.

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.

Bosha collects major, representative criticism of John Cheever's fiction, and his posthumously published Letters and Journals, from the earliest reviews of 1943, through to the present. The volume provides a clear and comprehensive assessment of Cheever's critical reputation both during his lifetime, as each of his books was published and reviewed, and retrospectively, by academics and literary historians who have sought to place Cheever's work in a larger literary context. In addition to several new essays written specifically for this volume, this book publishes, for the first time, a long interview which John Cheever gave less than a year before his death. This interview, according to Prof. Robert G. Collins, who conducted it, is almost certainly the last to be publicly heard. The book begins with a critical introductory essay that traces the dominant themes and patterns in Cheever criticism and comments on the critical reception of his work over the last five decades. A chronology highlights the chief events in Cheever's life and career. The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, with each chapter devoted to one of Cheever's works. Within each chapter are selections of criticism. The book concludes with a bibliography and index.

The death of Spain's Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, on July 24, 1568, remains an enigma. Several accounts insinuated that the Spanish Crown Prince was murdered while incarcerated by order of his father, King Philip II. The mystery of Don Carlos's death, supported by ambassadorial accounts that implied foul play, became a fertile subject for defamation campaigns against Philip, fostering an extraordinary fluidity between history and fiction. This book investigates three treatments of the Don Carlos legend on which this fluidity had a potent, transformational impact: Cesar Vichard de Saint-Real's novel, Dom Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672), Friedrich Schiller's play, Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien (1787), and Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Don Carlos (1867). Through these cultural variations on a historical theme, the authors and composer contributed innovative elements to their genres. In The Don Carlos Enigma, the exciting young scholar Maria-Cristina Necula explores how the particular blend of history and fiction around the personage of Don Carlos inspired such artistic liberties with evolutionary outcomes. Saint-Real advanced the nouvelle historique genre by developing the element of conspiracy. Schiller's play began the transition from the Sturm und Drang literary movement towards Weimar Classicism. Verdi introduced new dramatic and musical elements to bring opera closer to the realism of dramatic theatre. Within each of these treatments, pivotal points of narrative, semantic, dramatic, and musical transformation shaped not only the story of Don Carlos, but the expressive forms themselves. In support of the investigation, selected scenes from the three works are explored and framed by an engagement with studies in the fields of French literature, German theatre, French and Italian opera, and Spanish history. The enigma of the Spanish prince may never be solved, but Saint-Real, Schiller, and Verdi have offered alternatives that, in a sense, unburden history of truth that it could never bear alone. In the case of Don Carlos, history is in itself an encyclopedia of variations.

This work provides concise, accessible introductions to major writers focusing equally on their life and works. Written in a lively style to appeal to both students and readers, books in the series are ideal guides to authors and their writing. Charles Dickens is without doubt a literary giant. The most widely read author of his own generation, his works remain incredibly popular and important today. Often seen as the quintessential Victorian novelist, his texts convey perhaps better than any others the drive for wealth and progress and the social contrasts that characterised the Victorian era. His works are widely studied throughout the world both as literary masterpieces and as classic examples of the nineteenth century novel. Donald Hawes book will provide a short, lively but sophisticated introduction to Dickens's work and the personal and social context in which it was written.

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."

York Notes for GCSE offer an exciting approach to English Literature and will help you to achieve a better grade. This market-leading series has been completely updated to reflect the needs of today's students. The new editions are packed with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam advice and much more. Written by GCSE examiners and teachers, York Notes are the authoritative guides to exam success.

The 1950s are widely regarded as the golden age of American science fiction. This book surveys a wide range of major science fiction novels and films from the long 1950s--the period from 1946 to 1964--when the tensions of the Cold War were at their peak. The American science fiction novels and films of this period clearly reflect Cold War anxieties and tensions through their focus on such themes as alien invasion and nuclear holocaust. In this sense, they resemble the observations of social and cultural critics during the same period.

Meanwhile, American science fiction of the long 1950s also engages its historical and political contexts through an interrogation of phenomena, such as alienation and routinization, that can be seen as consequences of the development of American capitalism during this period. This economic trend is part of the rise of the global phenomenon that Marxist theorists have called late capitalism. Thus, American science fiction during this period reflects the rise of late capitalism and participates in the beginnings of postmodernism, described by Frederic Jameson as the cultural logic of late capitalism.

"I find myself talking to you about all the great joys, all the agonies, all my thoughts..." - Letter to Eva Konikova, 1946 Out of the thousands of letters Tove Jansson wrote a cache remains that she addressed to her family, her dearest confidantes, and her lovers, male and female. Into these she spilled her innermost thoughts, defended her ideals and revealed her heart. To read these letters is both an act of startling intimacy and a rare privilege. Penned with grace and humour, Letters from Tove offers an almost seamless commentary on Tove Jansson's life as it unfolds within Helsinki's bohemian circles and her island home. Spanning fifty years between her art studies and the height of Moomin fame, we share with her the bleakness of war; the hopes for love that were dashed and renewed, and her determined attempts to establish herself as an artist. Vivid, inspiring and shining with integrity, Letters from Tove shows precisely how an aspiring and courageous young artist can evolve into a very great one.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

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 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.

James A. Michener is one of the most widely read American authors of the 20th century. He worked as a social studies teacher and as an editor, and went on to write such memorable works as Tales of the South Pacific and Centennial. He also wrote numerous scattered short pieces. Though a popular writer, Michener's importance to the American literary, educational, social, and political scene is now slowly being recognized, and his writings are being used as guides and touchstones for study in American schools. This volume contains a checklist of Michener's major novels and his scattered minor writings, along with an extensive annotated bibliography of works about him. The first part is a checklist of his works, while the second is an annotated listing of books and articles published on Michener from the 1920s to the 1990s. The volume also contains a selected list of reviews of Michener's major works. Two reviews for each work have been selected at random, and they provide an overview of the critical response to Michener's writings over the years.

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.

This work explores this crucial period in the development of the English novel, integrating critical theory, historical background and close reading. Divided into two major sections, the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings. Thus the first part challenges such New Critical tenets as "exit author" and the "biographical fallacy" and discusses how the author becomes a formal presence in the text.;The second section is theoretical and speaks of the transformation in the way that we read and think about authors, readers, characters and form in the light of recent theory, offering an alternative to the deconstructive and Marxist trends in literary studies.

Each volume of the Platinum Vignettes series presents 50 ultra-high-yield case scenarios of frequently tested topics to give you a clear advantage on the vignette-based Step 1 exam. Plus, the case discussions provide a wealth of tips, insights, buzzwords, advice on handling distractors, and guidance on just what the boards will ask and how to answer.