Since the publication of his first novel in 1974, J. M. Coetzee has attained a reputation as one of the world's most respected novelists. The demand for his works is related to the world's interest in the politics, literature, culture, and society of South Africa. However, Coetzee's fictions remain significant, according to Penner, apart from their South African context, because of their artistry and because they transform urgent societal concerns into more enduring questions regarding colonialism and the relationships of mastery and servitude between cultures and individuals. Penner provides an in-depth, critical reading of Coetzee's five novels, drawing upon primary and critical texts on Western and South African literature and society. He argues that Coetzee's writings subvert traditional novel forms and thus become self-reflexive commentaries on the nature of fiction and fiction writing. Despite the diversity of their forms, Coetzee's novels all deal with the Cartesian division between the self and others that is at the base of all colonial and master/slave relationships. Many of Coetzee's protagonists who struggle to escape this Cartesian dichotomy and the colonizing mentality it fosters also hold a privileged status within their societies. As a result, they face a moral dilemma: even if they are personally innocent of any acts of oppression, they still share responsibility as members of the colonizing group. If Coetzee does not provide solutions or a direct call to action to resolve South Africa's enormous problems, Penner suggests, it is because Coetzee is striking at a more fundamental problem: the psychological, philosophical, and linguistic foundations of the colonial dilemma. Penner also deals with the question of Coetzee's identity as a South African writer, arguing that his tradition is the broader Western literary tradition of which South Africa is a part. This book should be read by anyone interested in Coetzee's fiction, modern fiction, and Third World and South African literature.

In the last two decades, the glorification of sewing - whether involving needlework, tailoring, or fashion design - has thrived in Latin American and Iberian cultural works, particularly literature. In the last two decades, the glorification of sewing - whether involving needlework, tailoring, or fashion design - has thrived in Latin American and Iberian cultural works, particularly literature. While fast fashion has relegated the handicraft to maquiladoras in the Global South, Spanish and Latin American authors have created protagonists whose skill with needle and thread allows them to break out of culturally confining roles and spaces. In this fictional realm, seamstresses and tailors enter exciting adventures as spies, peacemakers, or explorers, all facilitated by their artistry and expertise. This book examines the depiction of women and the textile arts in contemporary Hispanic and Brazilian literature. Employing space and gender theories, the book explores how sewing, traditionally viewed as respectable only if practiced at home, gives agency and encourages self-reflection and mobility,allowing protagonists to transgress physical and socially prescribed limits. Texts analyzed include Maria Duenas's El tiempo entre costuras (2009), Cesar Aira's La costurera y el viento (1994), Pedro Lemebel's Tengo miedo torero (2001), Frances Ponte de Peebles's The Seamstress (2009), and children's literature. Encouraging readers to look behind garments to the agents of production, the book shows how contemporary authors, through their celebrations of an age-old skill, help to renew interest in sewing, tailoring, upcycling, and embroidery.

Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain's work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain's career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain's early writings about Chinese immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain's ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully crafted assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, including African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations. Drawing on recent legal scholarship, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting in Darkness engages Twain's best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as well as his lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the allegorical tale "A Fable of the Yellow Terror" and the yellow face play Ah Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of Chinese Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.

The conventional lineage of World Literature starts with Goethe and moves through Marx, Said, Moretti, and Damrosch, among others. What if there is another way to trace the lineage, starting with Simone de Beauvoir and moving through Hannah Arendt, Assia Djebar, Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Gayatri Spivak? What ideas and issues get left out of the current foundations that have institutionalized World Literature, and what can be added, challenged, or changed with this tweaking of the referential terminology? Feminism as World Literature redefines the thematic and theoretical contents of World Literature in feminist terms as well as rethinking feminist terms, analyses, frameworks, and concepts in a World Literature context. Other ideas built into World Literature and its criticism are viewed here by feminist framings, including the environment, technology, immigration, translation, work, race, governance, image, sound, religion, affect, violence, media, future, and history. The authors recognize genres, strategies, and themes of World Literature that demonstrate feminism as integral to the world-making gestures of literary form and production. In other words, this volume looks to readings and modes of reading that expose how the historical worldliness of texts allows for feminist interventions that might not sit clearly or comfortably on the surfaces.

African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical study by examining the tensions between generic conventions and the impulses that created and reinforced them. The introduction and opening chapter offer clear and accessible discussions of the social, political, cultural, and literary conditions influencing the slave narrative genre. Subsequent chapters are built on this theoretical framework and present close analytical readings of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass's Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft. The volume probingly traces the relationship between rhetorical self-creation and social ideology to show how that relationship was mediated within the fugitive slave narrative genre.

Herodotus, one of the earliest and greatest of Western prose authors, set out in the late fifth century BC to describe the world as he knew it - its peoples and their achievements, together with the causes and course of the great wars that brought the Greek cities into conflict with the empires of the Near East. Each subsequent generation of historians has sought to use his text and to measure their knowledge of these cultures against his words.
This commentary by leading scholars, originally published in Italian, has been fully revised by the original authors and has now been edited for English-speaking readers by Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno. It is designed for use alongside the Oxford Classical Text of Herodotus, and will replace the century-old historical commentary of How and Wells (1912) as the most authoritative account of modern scholarship on Herodotus.
Books I-IV cover the history and cultures of Lydia, Egypt, Persia, and the nomads of Scythia and North Africa, in their contacts with the Greeks from mythical times to the start of the fifth century BC; these themes, with many digressions, are woven into an account of the expansion of the Persian Empire and its relations with the Greeks.

Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men's tailoring journals). Fictional masculinity performs a symbolic role in representing and negotiating the contradictions male novelists often encountered in their attempts to professionalize not only as writers, but also as businessmen, professors, lawyers, and politicians. Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality. Significant chapter sections on the used clothing trade (in the Rastro flea market in Madrid, also called "Las AmEricas" during the nineteenth century) and the "indiano businessman" (the colonial returnee) discuss the racial implications of fashion of the period-in the first example, through the racialized discourse of contagion that hygienists used to frame the market. In the second example, the book discusses the ways the Catalan indiano "accessorizes" himself with racialized commodities like pocket watches and tobacco and objectified/infantilized figures like Black house servants and footmen.

Jane Austen's novels portray a leisured society of gentlemen and ladies who do not need to work. Even the men with professions, such as sailors and soldiers, are almost never seen working; though leisure was not meant to be an excuse for idleness. The proper uses of leisure are to fulfill duties, to read and think, and to pursue social relations in a world where family and marriage for the propertied were of central importance. The activities pursued in Jane Austen's novels, and the way they apply themselves to them, are significant to the understanding of her characters and the roles they play. The working of society depended on a round of visits, dinners and evening parties. Bath and other spas were active centres of entertainment of all kinds; and the seaside resorts were growing in importance. Jane Austen experienced these and put them to use in her novels; but she also registered the fact that quiet, solitary pursuits such as reading, walking or needlwork might be more to the taste of a Fanny Price or Anne Elliot. Male characters enjoy their leisure in a number of sports, often glimpsed off stage - John Thorpe drives his gig wildly through Bath and Tom Bertram is nearly killed by a fall at Newmarket. This text identifies leisure and its use as a central characteristic of Austen's work.

Around the turn of the century, the United States was still experiencing the mass migration of millions of Jews and other immigrants escaping oppression and poverty in Europe. Set against this historical backdrop, author Louis Harap examines the development of the Jewish American, as both writer and character, from 1900 to the 1950s. Creative Awakening traces fifty years' development of Jewish American fiction, poetry and humor, as it analyzes fictional portrayals of Jews themselves.

Romain Rolland's life coincided closely with the span of the French Third Republic, an age of which he was an acute and critical observer. A mind combining an unusual breadth of sympathies with uncompromisingly lofty values and a novelist's eye for detail, his interests cover a wide range of areas - history, musicology, biography, politics, religion, the East - and his correspondence with both the famous and the obscure, is exceptionally rich. He is remembered for his plays on the French Revolution, his work on Beethoven, his novels, his biographies, his opposition to the First World War, his desperate attempts between the wars to reconcile Gandhism and Leninism and, during the Occupation, his nostalgia for the Catholic faith of his forbears. Drawing on the wealth of the unpublished Archives Romain Rolland, this book offers a fresh perspective on the events of an often turbulent life and traces the changing patterns of his thought, which disconcerted his friends by its constant evolution. Rolland's work is unified by a fierce desire for independence, an insistence that the psychological force of faith is more important than its content, by an obsession with historical process and by a constant musicianly quest for harmony, or the reconciliation of discords within a synthetic whole. The author attempts to do justice to every side of Romain Rolland's output, showing how each of his works in their diverse genres contributes to the overall thrust of his developing thought. Though covering his political thought, the author avoids over-stressing it, as much previous criticism has done, and gives due weight to the work of his last years, which so far has been very imperfectly studied.

Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but science and utopia are frequently at odds. Ranging from Galileo's observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-human and the human-animal boundary, this study brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato.

"Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century" considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. "Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century" will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

Discover Rosie Clarke's bestselling Blackberry Farm series! A story of life and survival during the war which is heart-rending and bitter-sweet, bringing you laughter and tears. Cambridgeshire - 1941 As the war rages on in Europe, it brings untold heartache to the Talbot family at Blackberry Farm. First Tom is missing in action and then his brother John. leaving the family distraught with worry. Faith finds herself in trouble and turns to Lizzie for support as fear and grief bring them closer together. But tragedy is never too far away and when it strikes, it may not be those who fight that suffer the most. Will Pam's prayers be answered and will both her sons return home? And can the family at Blackberry Farm unite to overcome their heartache and find hope for the future?

Examines portrayals of plants and landscapes in recent German novels and films, addressing the contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, and social and ecological injustice that they expose. Plants, Places, and Power is a study of plants and landscapes in and beyond contemporary German-language literature and film. Stories and images of plants and landscapes in cultural productions are key sites for exposing the violent legacies of German colonialism and Nazism and for addressing contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, social and ecological injustice, and gender inequity. The novels and films discussed in this book address these key political issues in contemporary Europe and propose alternative ways for people to live together on this planet by formulating more inclusive and sustainable concepts of belonging. The book has two main objectives: to offer new approaches to contemporary literature and film from an intersectional, ecological perspective, and to form a canon. All of the works focused on, from Mo Asumang's documentary film Roots Germania (2007) through Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020) and from Yoko Tawada's novel Das nackte Auge (2004) to Sasa Stanisic's Herkunft (2019), are by female artists, artists of color, artists who have experienced forced displacement, and/or queer artists. In five chapters, Maria Stehle reads artworks in reference to ecological systems, develops forms of eco- and social criticism based on art, and intertwines ecological and critical thinking with questions of form, affect, and aesthetics.

Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is widely regarded as the most important of the numerous African novelists who gained global attention in the second half of the 20th century. Achebe is certainly the African writer best known in the West, and his first novel, Things Fall Apart, is a founding text of postcolonial African literature and regarded as one of the central works of world literature of the last 50 years. Though best known as a novelist, Achebe is also a critic, activist, and spokesman for African culture. This reference is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to his life and writings. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries. Some of these are substantive summary discussions of Achebe's major works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Other topics include: * All of his major fictional characters and settings * Important concepts and issues central to his writings * Historical persons, places, and events relevant to his works * Influential texts by other writers Entries are written by expert contributors and close with brief bibliographies. The volume also provides a general bibliography and chronology.

Unique in its scope of coverage, this reference work provides students and scholars interested in researching modern American leftist and working-class culture with a convenient starting place for examining American leftist and working-class novels of the past century. The book begins with a brief historical survey of the development of this cultural phenomenon. It then offers brief descriptions of selected critical, historical, and theoretical works that are a useful background to the novels. The bulk of the book comprises detailed alphabetically arranged discussions of more than 170 modern American novels of the Left, along with brief considerations of more than 240 other works.

The novels discussed in detail include a number of works by major American authors, including John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Also covered are works by a number of other writers in the rich but neglected tradition of American leftist literature. These writers naturally include 1930s proletarian novelists such as Mike Gold, Agnes Smedley, Myra Page, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, Jack Conroy, and Thomas Bell. But they also include figures ranging from early twentieth-century socialists such as I. K. Friedman and Leroy Scott, to African American novelists such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, to Chicano writers such as Alejandro Morales and Americo Paredes.

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. Great Expectations (1861) is not only one of the last great novels to be written by Dickens but is also one which centres around his primary themes: the importance of childhood in relationship to adult life, concepts of guilt and imprisonment and an analysis of individualism as opposed to the increasing bureaucracy of nineteenth-century England.This guide isan ideal introduction tothe textincluding its contexts, Dickens's style and imagery, its critical reception from the time of publication to the present, a guide to illustrated editions and film adaptations and a guide to further reading.

The Life of Our Lord" is a life of Jesus written by Dickens for his children in the 1840s but not published until 1934. This is the first major study to carefully and seriously consider the work and its place in the Dickens corpus. While Dickens' religion and religious thought is recognized as a significant component of his work, no study of Dickens' religion has carefully considered his often ignored, yet crucially relevant, "The Life of Our Lord". Written by a biblical studies scholar, this study brings the insights of a theological approach to bear on "The Life of Our Lord" and on Dickens' other writing. Colledge argues that Dickens intended "The Life Of Our Lord" as a serious and deliberate expression of his religious thought and his understanding of Christianity based on evidences for his reasons for writing, what he reveals, and the unique genre in which he writes. Using "The Life of Our Lord" as a definitive source for our understanding of Dickens' Christian worldview, the book explores Dickens' Christian voice in his fiction, journalism, and letters. As it seeks to situate him in the context of nineteenth-century popular religion - including his interest in Unitarianism - this study presents fresh insight into his churchmanship and reminds us, as Orwell observed, that Dickens 'was always preaching a sermon'.

The first study of George Sand and vision, this book considers the pull between the visual and the visionary in nineteenth-century France through an examination of Sand's novels. With an extensive corpus ranging from Sand's early texts through to her later, less familiar works, it repositions Sand's oeuvre alongside that of the major realist authors and demonstrates her distinctive understanding of the novel as a combination of the concrete and the abstract. By studying Sand's engagement with visual models associated with realism-the mirror, the model of painting, and the scientific gaze-this book proposes a more sustained dialogue between Sand's work and realism than has hitherto been acknowledged, but argues that Sand radically reworks these models to depict a dynamic, mysterious and ever-changing world. Whereas Sand has been read as an author bypassing reality in favour of the ideal, this study shows that she is committed to physical observation, but that she consistently ties this process with the conceptual and the visionary. The book breaks new ground in particular by examining Sand's literary engagement with the visual arts, and it also offers the first sustained consideration of Sand as a scientific writer. By examining Sand's oeuvre from the perspective of vision, this study not only reassesses Sand's writing practice, but also rethinks the relations between the visual and the novel in this period. More specifically, it argues that Sand's work challenges our means of theorizing these relations. In her rejection of binaries and her syncretic understanding of vision, Sand breaks conventional categories and writes novels that are at once realist, visionary, mystical and scientific.

This is the first book-length study of best-selling writer John Saul's psychological and supernatural thrillers. Author Paul Bail compares John Saul's novels to a cocktail: (mix) one part, one part "The Exorcist," a dash of "Turn of the ScreW," blend well, and serve thoroughly chillingly. Bail traces John Saul's literary career from his 1977 debut novel "Suffer the Children"--the first paperback original ever to make the New York Times best seller list--to his most recent novel, "Black Lightning" (1995). It features detailed analyses of eleven of his novels. The study includes never-before-published biographical information, drawing an original interview with John Saul, and a chapter on the history of tales of horror and the supernatural and how these genres have influenced Saul's fiction.

Each chapter in this study examines an individual novel. The novels are analyzed for plot structure, characterization, thematic elements, and their relationship to prior and later novels by Saul. In addition, Bail defines and applies a variety of theoretical approaches to the novels--feminist, deconstructionist, Freudian, Jungian, and sociopolitical--to widen the reader's perspective. Bail shows how John Saul enlarged his repertoire from stories of supernatural possession to science-fiction based horror. A complete bibliography of John Saul's fiction and a bibliography of reviews and criticism complete the work. Because of John Saul's great popularity among teenagers and adults, this unique study is a necessary purchase by secondary school and public libraries.

This book considers how and why German authors have used the child's viewpoint to present the Third Reich. Given the popularity of this device, this study asks whether it is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the era, or a means of discovering a new language. This raises issues central to the post-war German aesthetic.

Roger Whitlow demonstrates that the negative criticism about the women characters in Ernest Hemingway's fiction is often misguided, perhaps entirely wrong. He argues that most of Hemingway's female characters have strengths that have been consistently overlooked by critics prejudiced by earlier Hemingway criticism or influenced in their evaluations by the male characters with whom Hemingway's women often associate. For example, Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls have been uniformly typed "passive sex kittens," when, in fact, each is engaged in a serious struggle to retain her mental balance. Whitlow reexamines Hemingway's critically acclaimed "bitches" such as Brett Ashley and Margot Macomber. He ends his reassessment with a chapter devoted to the "minor" women in Hemingway's "Up in Michigan" series and other short stories.

This book is a literary study of the Cyropaedia, Xenophon's fictional account of Cyrus the Great and the founding of his empire. The Cyropaedia is a complex blend of various literary forms, and this book examines several of its literary genres. General discussions of the works of Xenophon's predecessors and contemporaries, in particular Herodotus, Plato, and Ctesias, are combined with a detailed commentary on select passages. Socrates-his life, ideas, and techniques of argument, is an indirect presence in the work, and the Socratic tenor of several of the dialogues in it is the subject of one chapter. The lovely Panthea, the fairest woman in Asia, is Xenophon's most colourful heroine and her story, along with the dramatic tales of the eunuch Gadatas, bereaved Gobyras, and defeated Croesus, are the focus of another section; special attention is paid to the question of Xenophon's originality in fashioning these tales. The symposia of the Cyropaedia, an intricate blend of Greek and Persian elements, are also investigated at length. The book concludes with an examination of Xenophon's ambivalent attitude towards his hero, Cyrus the Great: the author argues that both Xenophon and his hero are more complex than they might seem.

York Notes Advanced have been written by acknowledged literature experts for the specific needs of advanced level and undergraduate students. They offer a fresh and accessible approach to the Study of English literature. Building on the successful formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. York Notes Advanced help to make the study of literature more fulfilling and lead to exam success. They will also be of interest to the general reader, as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles. Key Features: Study methods - Introduction to the text - Summaries with critical notes - Themes and techniques - Textual analysis of key passages - Author biography - Historical and literary background - Modern and historical critical approaches - Chronology - Glossary of literary terms. General Editors: Martin Gray - Head of Literary Studies, University of Luton; Professor A.N. Jeffares - Emeritus Professor of English, University of Stirling.