F Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of twentieth century America. His reputation is infinitely more lustrous since his untimely death than it was for much of his twenty-year literary career and is largely based on his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as on the colourful and tragic incidents of his personal life. His alcoholism; his fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Zelda Sayre, and her gradual descent into schizophrenia; the incandescent blossoming and dissipation of his literary gifts have all added to his legend. Fitzgerald was an individual who seemed to be composed of opposites and who, fittingly, could have been one of his own characters. He was charming, witty and in love with the magic and splendour of life, but also felt compelled to embrace the darkness. As a writer, his perception of the world around him was so finely tuned and acute that his life and career were a mirror of the 1920s and 30s, so that just as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, Fitzgerald's dazzling and youthful success yielded to drunkenness, despair and what he termed 'emotional bankruptcy'. This Pocket Essentials examines both Fitzgerald's life and writing and probes the infinitely complex and symbiotic relationship between the two, revealing the man behind the myth and behind some of the finest prose of all time.

An examination of how Faulkner's work has been analyzed, elucidated, and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades. William Faulkner seems to have sprung a full-blown genius from a remote part of the American South. Yet Faulkner spent much of his life striving to emulate and overshadow - both as a writer and as a person - his great-grandfatherand namesake, Colonel William Falkner, a dueling, railroad-building, soldiering figure who loomed not just as a legend in Faulkner's family and community but also as a literary forebear, a published novelist, travel writer, and poet. Looking back on his career, Faulkner would mention that early on he had ridden his great-grandfather's coattails, but by the mid-twentieth century it was clear that it was the great-grandson who was leading the literary world:readers, young writers of fiction, and literary critics were following him as one who had found extraordinary ways to capture and express the most challenging aspects of modern life. Taylor Hagood's book centers on the concept of following to examine how Faulkner's work has been analyzed, elucidated, and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades. It narrates the development of Faulkner criticism, taking as its premisethe idea that Faulkner forges a fiery path through modernism and into postmodernism that literary critics have been constantly rushing to follow. Taylor Hagood is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. His book Faulkner: Writer of Disability (LSU Press, 2014) won the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Literary Studies in 2015.

This is the most extensive account of Moore's fiction to date that considers his many works from the early stories to the recent novel, No Other Life. Moore, who was born in Ireland but is a Canadian citizen and resides predominantly in the United States, has earned an international reputation as an important novelist. This book sets out to demonstrate a discernible pattern of concerns that cut across Moore's fictive output over the last 40 years. It argues that the concerns of love and faith (and the interplay between them) form the backbone of Moore's oeuvre. Sullivan draws from interviews with Moore and presents a study that convincingly demonstrates how Moore's fictions, from first to last, take their place in a larger thematic and formal masternarrative.

Conversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen's authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen's development as a novelist and cultural critic. Jen's insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen's sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.

Elizabeth Gaskell's work and life are being rediscovered against a backdrop of Victorian middle-class women's experience by many feminist scholars. Viewed in this century as conventional and conservative, Gaskell may instead be regarded as a radical for her time, because she challenged widely-held assumptions about the nature of women, their proper sphere, and their participation in the public realm. Examining the theme of work in Gaskell's novels, Colby presents this Victorian novelist as an effective advocate of change as she tried to create space for women within the world of work.

Science fiction occupies a peculiar place in the academic study of literature. For decades, scholars have looked at science fiction with disdain and have criticized it for being inferior to other types of literature. But despite the sentiments of these traditionalists, many works of science fiction engage recognized canonical texts, such as the "Odyssey, " and many traditionally canonical works contain elements of science fiction. More recently, the canon has been subject to revision, as scholars have deliberately sought to include works that reflect diversity and have participated in the serious study of popular culture. But these attempts to create a more inclusive canon have nonetheless continued to marginalize science fiction. This book examines the treatment of science fiction within the academy.

The expert contributors to this volume explore a wide range of topics related to the place of science fiction in literary studies. These include academic attitudes toward science fiction, the role of journals and cultural gatekeepers in canon formation, and the marginalization of specific works and authors by literary critics. In addition, the volume gives special attention to multicultural and feminist concerns. In discussing these topics, the book sheds considerable light on much broader issues related to the politics of literary studies and academic inquiry.

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.

Wilkie Collins is the only leading Victorian novelist whose letters have not been published. This two-volume edition, edited by William Baker and William Clarke, fills a gaping hole in any assessment of one of the nineteenth century's most loved novelists. It is also extremely timely. Two recent biographies have re-assessed his private life and his literary achievements. His best-known novels, The Women in White and The Moonstone , continue to feature on television, and most of his thirty-odd novels are still in print. This authorised edition reproduces his selection of around 700 key letters of the 2,000 known to be in existence, some recently discovered. Summaries and sources of the remaining letters are provided in an appendix.

'York Notes for GCSE' offers a useful approach to English Literature and aims to help readers achieve a better grade. Updated to reflect the needs of today's students, the new editions are filled with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam advice and much more.

This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns. Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand's foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

A detailed chronology of the life of H.G. Wells, tracing his career from his earliest writings to his world fame as a novelist, prophet and popular educator. This Chronology brings vividly to life his extraordinary energy and industry, and the wide range of his friendships and interests. Written by one of the leading authorities on Wells, this Chronology offers a definitive outline of the life and times of a major twentieth-century writer.

A detailed examination of Proverbs 1-9, an early Jewish poetic work. Stuart Weeks incorporates studies of literature from ancient Egypt and from the Dead Sea scrolls, but his focus is on the background and use of certain key images in the text. Proverbs 1-9 belongs to an important class of biblical literature (wisdom literature), and is less well known as a whole than the related books of Job and Ecclesiastes, partly because it has been viewed until recently as a dull and muddled school-book. However, parts of it have been profoundly influential on the development of both Judaism and Christianity, and occupy a key role in modern feminist theology. Weeks demonstrates that those parts belong to a much broader and more intricate set of ideas than older scholarship allowed.

Imaginary beasts have figured prominently in literary works ever since the ancient world, when these myths were first formulated. But the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of science, the discovery of geological findings that challenged the biblical myth of creation, and the birth of Darwin's theory of evolution. Since then, monsters have evolved from supernatural creatures to natural ones endowed with exceptional size, strength, or intelligence. This book explores both literary and cinematic texts that are especially explicit in their Darwinian portrayal of monstrous beasts, though these creatures retain an archaic mythological quality. The myth of Leviathan and Behemoth, for instance, is as central to Jaws as it is to Moby-Dick; indeed, Jaws inherits the myth directly from Moby-Dick, as does King Kong. These and other monster tales, such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Grendel, keep the ancient myth alive and relevant by recasting it in the context of biological and cultural evolution. There is a pattern of alternating bestialization and anthropomorphism in many monster tales, suggesting that these images are being displayed in repeated attempts to define who we are in relation to animals. Thus the more beastly the monster, the more insistently we erect the old paradigm of the Ladder of Being, placing ourselves on a higher and separate rung; but the more human-like the creature, the more readily we shift to the paradigm of the Tree of Life, in which all creatures are more closely related. Since the matter of distinctions between species also involves questions of race, the monster myth is often conscripted to serve racist agendas. But more often than not, the myth has ananti-racist subtext that undercuts the hierarchy. The closing chapters of the volume consider the notion of artificial evolution in works such as The Island of Dr. Moreau, and human-machine interaction in Gravity's Rainbow. As fables of identity, monster tales dramatize our anxieties and fears about our own animal nature and provide a means of coming to terms with our evolution.

Presenting the first English-language collection of essays on Jorge Semprun, this volume explores the life and work of the Spanish Holocaust survivor, author, and political activist. Essays explore his cultural production in all its manifestations, including the role of testimony and fiction in representations of the Holocaust.

George Eliot is one of the most important women novelists of the 19th century. Throughout her writings, she explores the interconnectedness of the self and society. This theme of interconnectedness creates the social, psychological, and religious worlds of her fictional communities. Eliot distinguished herself from other Victorian novelists through her realism, her use of an engaging narrator, and her indebtedness to thinkers such as Comte, Mill, and Darwin.

The essays assembled in this book represent the best criticism of Eliot's novels from the 19th century to the present day. The essays are grouped in sections devoted to particular novels, and within each section the essays are arranged chronologically to chart the evolving critical response to her work. An introductory chapter briefly overviews the philosophical influences on Eliot's novels, and a bibliography of selected additional readings concludes the book. The volume summarizes the critical response to Eliot's work and documents changing views toward her novels.

In this new collection of interviews, some of America's most prominent novelists identify the key intellectual developments that led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel, discuss the kind of historical 'truth' this novel communicates, indicate why this narrative form is superior to the traditional historical novel, and reflect on the ideas and characters central to their individual works. These interviews do more than just define an innovative genre of contemporary fiction. They provide a precise way of understanding the complicated relationship and pregnant tensions between contextualized thinking and historical representation, interdisciplinary studies and 'truth' production, and fictional reality and factual constructions. By focusing on classical and contemporary debates regarding the nature of the historical novel, this volume charts the forces that gave birth to a new incarnation of this genre.

The volume approaches Greeleys novels by comparing him to the 19th-century French writer Honore de Balzac. A prolific and popular author, Balzac recorded his milieu in tremendous detail, created a fictional universe peopled by hundreds of characters, and explored the role of Catholicism in his world. Because of his training as a sociologist, Greeley brings to his novels a thorough knowledge of popular culture and social theory. And because of his experience as a Roman Catholic priest, he has gained special knowledge of vice, virtue, and the workings of the Church. Like Balzac-now a major canonical author-Greeley has created a world of numerous fictional persons, mapped the details of his culture, and explored the place of Catholicism in contemporary life.

While neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce "female moral art," writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works. Unlike comparable writers of their time, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view are deeply but obviously embedded within character, plot, and theme. Papke begins with a brief examination of the ideology of true womanhood, which, she argues, permeates Chopin's and Wharton's fiction and world views. The remainder of her work offers an ideological reading of their social fiction in which their characters search for states of liminality, where they might achieve, however momentarily, autonomy. Repeatedly, Papke argues, these states of liminality are literally encoded into images of characters positioned on the edge of an abyss that then becomes a repository of multiple meanings. The author presents Chopin's and Wharton's female discourse as radical art because it dares to defy that which is both alienating and destructive. Papke's provocative analysis will be of interest not only to Wharton and Chopin scholars, but also to those working in the fields of feminist and women's studies. It will also interest scholars and students of American studies, particularly those working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature.

Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence is a wide-ranging examination of Lawrence's adoption and adaptation of stereotypes about minorities, with a focus on three particular 'racial' groups. This book explores societal attitudes in England, Europe, and the United States and Lawrence's utilization of cultural norms to explore his own identity.

Readers have long been enthralled by the novels of Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone is considered the first modern detective novel. This book by Tamar Heller--the most comprehensive study of Collins' work ever written--places Collins within Victorian literary history, showing how his fiction transforms the conventions of the traditionally female genre of the Gothic novel and can be read as a critique of the gender and class distinctions that structured Victorian society. Heller offers an insightful account of the ways in which Collins' work in the female Gothic tradition influenced his characteristic themes and imagery. She also explores how this association with the genres of the Gothic and with controversial "sensation fiction" linked Collins with women writers and literary and social marginality during an era when novel writing was increasingly a male-defined and male-dominated profession. Heller argues that Collins' fictions reflect his own contradictory status as a Victorian writer; his novels focus on the relation of the writer to the literary marketplace and also on the intricate and ambivalent dialectic of masculine literary authority and feminine marginality. This study of Collins makes an original contribution to feminist literary criticism by demonstrating its value for the reexamination of an important male writer. In addition, by exploring the complexity of the relationship of a male writer to a feminine literary tradition, the book breaks new ground in the study of literary influence and in critical discussions of the literary canon.

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a potent metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects - migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons - are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this impacts on their ability to develop agency. From detailed readings of films (Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, Nick Broomfield's Ghosts and Robert Altman's Gosford Park), a television series (Upstairs, Downstairs) and novels (Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, Sarah Waters's Affinity, Ian McEwan's The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park) emerges an inventive account of how the spectral metaphor, in its association with various modes of invisibility, can signify both dispossession and empowerment. In reworking the spectral insights of, among others, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri and Achille Mbembe, Peeren suggests new responses to the practices of marginalization and exploitation that characterize our globalized world.

History and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts; specifically, the writings of several figures in antebellum US literary historysome, but not all of whom, associated with the period's romantic movement. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves, as opposed to those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book recovers some of the political force of romanticism. Through close readings of texts by Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the book argues that these writers practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant 'other', but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and linear past, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls 'romantic presentism' insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience-and hence of ethics and democratic possibility.

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

This collection of essays addresses a number of facets of George Orwell, examining both Orwell the man of letters and Orwell the political man. In his preface, Courtney Wemyss asserts that Orwell may not receive the recognition he is due because at present he is appreciated for the wrong reasons. The author of other fine novels (such as Burmese Days and Coming up for Air), Orwell should also be recognized for his literary criticism, book reviews, and documentaries, which depict the England of his times in the manner of Samuel Pepys. The Less-recognized--and equally important--facets of George Orwell's works and impact on English culture presented in this collection will prove informative to Orwell specialists and to scholars of twentieth-century English literature and politics.