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.

This innovative book examines the emergence of a memory discourse in Spain since the millennium, taking as its point of departure recent grave exhumations and the Law of Historical Memory. The chapters focus on cultural products that interrogate the processes and pitfalls of traumatic remembrance. Through an analysis of exhumation photography, novels, films, television shows, and comics, the volume examines a substantial body of works in which there is a focus on overcoming the notion that Spanish history is pathological.

This book is a re-examination of the fertile years of early modernism immediately preceding the First World War. During this period, how, where, and under whose terms the avant-garde in Britain would be constructed and consumed were very much to play for. It is the first study to look in detail at two little magazines marginalised from many accounts of this competitive process: Rhythm and the Blue Review. By thoroughly examining not only the content but the interrelated networks that defined and surrounded these publications, Faith Binckes aims to provide a fresh and challenging perspective to the on-going reappraisal of modernism. Founded in 1911, and edited by John Middleton Murry with assistance from Michael Sadleir and subsequently from Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm and The Blue Review featured a series of pivotal moments. Rhythm was the arena for a challenge to Roger Fry's vision of Post-Impressionism, for the introduction of Picasso to a British audience, for early short stories and reviews by Lawrence, and for Mansfield's discovery of a voice in which to frame her breakthrough writing on New Zealand. A further context for many of these experiments was the extended and acrimonious debate Rhythm conducted with A.R. Orage's New Age, in which issues of the proper gender, generation, and formulation of modernity were debated month by month. However, reading magazines as vehicles for avant-garde development can only provide half the story. The book also pays close attention to their dialogic, reproductive, and periodical nature, and explores the strategies at work within the terminology of the new. Crucially, it argues that they offer compelling material evidence for the consistently mobile and multiple boundaries of the modern, and puts forward a compelling case for focusing upon the specificity of magazines as a medium for literary and artistic innovation.

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.

This study contends that American writer Cormac McCarthy not only is philosophical, or a "writer of ideas," but rather that he has a philosophy. Devoting one main chapter to each facet of McCarthy's thought - his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, respectively - the study engages in focused readings of all of McCarthy's major works. Along the way, the study brings McCarthy's ideas into conversation with a host of philosophers who range from Plato to Alain Badiou, with figures such as William James, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Slavoj Zizek featured prominently. Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, literary theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, and theology, the appeal of Cormac McCarthy's Philosophy is widespread and deeply interdisciplinary.

What can we learn from the novels of Graham Greene? This book argues that Greene's writings have much to teach us about fighting evil here and now, and about endeavoring to live a worthy life. In novels that span half of the twentieth century, Greene related stories of evil persons who destroyed the freedom of others and of a few simple people who fought them. Through these stories he showed us three basic truths: first, evil exists; second, it is possible to fight it; and third, one may attain wisdom and sometimes a very limited glory by undertaking such a struggle. Gordon's study sets forth its own important lesson: thinking and assuming responsibility for the world, guided by the reading of great literature, are keystones of any worthy life.

This book draws on the tools of literary analysis and cultural geography to investigate Ernest Hemingway's sophisticated construction of physical environments. In doing so, Laura Gruber Godfrey revises conventional approaches to Hemingway's literary landscapes and provides insight about his fictional characters and his readers alike.

This book analyses the success and adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel War Horse to stage, radio, live events, and feature film, in different cultures, on tours, and in translation. In under a decade, War Horse has gone from obscure children's novel to arguably one of the world's most recognisable theatrical brands, thanks to innovative puppet designs from South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company in an acclaimed stage production from the National Theatre of Great Britain. With emphasis on embodied spectatorship, collaborative meaning-making, and imaginative 'play,' this book generates fresh insights into the enduring popularity of the franchise's eponymous protagonist, Joey, offering the most in-depth study of War Horse to date.

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.

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

Featuring essays by scholars from around the globe, Kate Chopin in Context revitalizes discussions on the famed 19th-century author of The Awakening . Expanding the horizons of Chopin's influence, contributors offer readers glimpses into the multi-national appreciation and versatility of the author's works, including within the classroom setting.

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.

The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.

The Moor and the Novel engages music, literature, and history from the early modern period to reveal fundamental connections between nationalist violence, religious identity, and the origins of the novel. Through fresh interpretations of ballads, histories, and novellas, this book argues that the expulsion of Muslims from Spain produced a cultural vacuum, one that demanded a response. Juxtaposing close readings of well-known and obscure texts, this book illuminates the literary consequences of ethnic cleansing. Expulsion not only transformed the population of Iberia, it also altered early modern notions of the self and of authorship while creating a space for new kinds of narrative strategies. The absent Muslim created a physical, historic, and artistic aperture that was addressed in new literary forms, including Cervantes's Don Quijote. Nuanced and insightful, The Moor and the Novel provides an essential genealogy for understanding early modern narrative.

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.

In Flaubert: Writing the Masculine Mary Orr offers a new approach to Flaubert's fiction and to the field of gender studies. Close readings of his six major works build towards a much wider picture, in which definitions of the masculine emerge from the complex context of nineteenth-century France and from current debates within gender studies. Various received ideas about Flaubert, his novels, patriarchy, realism, and the primacy of gender over sex are re-evaluated to show a writer aware of the logic and contradictions of male power.

Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the `evolution' of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages from the Essais. The author tracks their operation in Montaigne's text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse (through his practice of interpolating new material in successive editions and adding new chapters) as well as that of other authors (through quotation, paraphrase, commentary). Rather than merely negative features, the author argues that such `differences' are essential to a practice of writing that both defines and challenges a notion of `unity', and can be seen as an uneasy and disturbing element related to a historical shift from earlier ways of controlling meaning, to one based on `the author function'. This careful and lucid book presents a fresh and significant interpretation of the Essais and shows how Montaigne's work might profitably and illuminatingly be read in a `different' way.

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.

America's new millennial interest in multiraciality coincides with South Africa's postapartheid push towards greater visibility as the Rainbow Nation. Here, Diana Adesola Mafe argues that the recent celebration of the mulatto as an avatar of positive change for multiracial nations like South Africa and the United States overlooks the complex global trajectories that resulted in this watershed moment. Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature examines the popular literary stereotype, the tragic mulatto, from a comparative perspective. Mafe considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization. The result is a transnational dialogue between these respective national literatures, both of which use tragic mulatto fiction as a locus for broader questions about race and belonging.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people's novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over seventy years, both as a very young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety-year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky's career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts, interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters, as well as important work that has not appeared in English before.

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.

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.