The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in this critical study, Robert Tally argues that Vonnegut himself is actually a modernist, who is less interested in indulging in the free play of signifiers than in attempting to construct a model that could encompass the American experience at the end of the twentieth century. As a modernist wrestling with a postmodern condition, Vonnegut makes use of diverse and sometimes eccentric narrative techniques (such as metafiction, collage, and temporal slippages) to project a comprehensive vision of life in the United States. Vonnegut's novels thus become experiments in making sense of the radical transformations of self and society during that curious, unstable period called, perhaps ironically, the American Century.' An untimely figure, Vonnegut develops a postmodern iconography of American civilization while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of a truly comprehensive representation.

?? [[ Best known as the author of imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, and as the author of hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe was a leading practitioner of the American Gothic and helped popularize the short story as a genre. This reference work assembles in dictionary format a complete and current body of information on Poe's life and work. More than 1900 entries cover all phases of Poe's art and literary criticism, his family relationships, his numerous travels and residences, and the abundance of critical responses to his works. Each entry provides bibliographical information, and the volume concludes with an extensive listing of works for further consideration. ]] ?? Best known for his mysterious and imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, as well as hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe has secured a lasting place in the American literary canon. He was one of the first American authors to be given serious attention in Europe, and his works popularized the Gothic, the short story, and detective fiction in America. Poe's works are frequently studied in schools and colleges, but he also retains his appeal as one of America's most demanding popular authors. His works reflect his vast and sometimes arcane erudition, his probing insights into the workings of the mind, his theories of literature and aesthetics, and his interest in science and the supernatural. Through more than 1900 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference book provides complete and current coverage of Poe's life and work. Some entries treat Poe's known reading and his responses to literary contemporaries and international literary figures. Others comment on the impact of various writers and literary traditions on Poe's imagination. Still others address Poe's views on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to mesmerism to phrenology. Each entry is supplemented by a bibliographical note which gives the basis for the entry and suggests sources for further investigation. Each entry for Poe's fiction and poetry contains a critical synopsis, and an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume lists the most important critical and biographical studies of Poe.

This study confronts current influential theories that science fiction is either an American phenomenon or an international one. The study rejects the idea that British science fiction is distinguishable only by its pessimistic outlook--while also rejecting the idea that other designations, such as "scientific romance" or "speculative fiction," better fit the British product. Instead, the study traces the evolution of British science fiction, showing how H. G. Wells synthesized various strains in English literature, and how later writers, conscious of this Wellsian tradition, built upon Wells's literary achievement. An introduction defines what might reasonably be placed under the heading British science fiction, and why. Chapter 1 examines previous critical ideas about the nature of British science fiction, revealing that most of them are based on untested assumptions. Chapter 2 explores the significance of the dominant motif of the island in British SF --a motif that suggests that British SF and mainstream English literature have been long and fruitfully intertwined. Chapters 3 and 4 deal respectively with British disaster fiction before and after the Second World War. They focus on why British science fiction has so frequently seemed obsessed with catastrophe. Chapter 5, a polemical conclusion, deals with the future of British science fiction based on its current predicament. Ultimate Island forms a theoretical counterpart to the author's recently-published British Science Fiction: A Chronology 1478-1990 (Greenwood 1992), which defines the historical scope of the field.

Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.

The Pharsalia is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of immense energy and intelligence in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. The author shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid: where Virgil writes the foundation myth for the new regime and celebrates the connections between Augustus and Aeneas, Lucan produces a savagely republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome.

This study traces the connection of infinity and Levinasian ethics in 21st-century fiction. It tackles the paradox of how infinity can be (re-)presented in the finite space between the covers of a book and finds an answer that combines conceptual metaphor theory with concepts from classical narratology and beyond, such as mise en abyme, textual circularity, intertextuality or omniscient narration. It argues that texts with such structures may be conceptualised as infinite via Lakoff and Nunez's Basic Metaphor of Infinity. The catachrestic transfer of infinity from structure to text means that the texts themselves are understood to be infinite. Taking its cue from the central role of the infinite in Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, the function of such 'fictions of infinity' turns out to be ethical: infinite textuality disrupts reading patterns and calls into question the reader's spontaneity to interpret. This hypothesis is put to the test in detailed readings of four 21st-century novels, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, Ian McEwan's Saturday and John Banville's The Infinities. This book thus combines ethical criticism with structural aesthetics to uncover ethical potential in fiction.

Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-siecle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development - never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel -- takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsroman undergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire."

Clarke takes a new look at how life, consciousness, and death are dealt with in the poems of Homer. Modern assumptions about human identity are cast aside to allow Homer's view of man to emerge. The reader of Greek poetry is encouraged to take a deeper look at words that at first seem simple and easy to translate with the result that new insights are offered on early Greek beliefs about the things that are called in English by the names of body and soul.

Lexicon Urthus is an alphabetical dictionary for the complete Urth Cycle by Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer; The Claw of the Conciliator; The Sword of the Lictor; The Citadel of the Autarch; the sequel Urth of the New Sun; the novella Empires of Foliage and Flower; the short stories "The Cat," "The Map," and "The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun"; and Gene Wolfe's own commentaries in The Castle of the Otter. The first edition was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. This second edition includes over 1,200 entries. When the first edition was published, Science Fiction Age said: "Lexicon Urthus makes a perfect gift for any fan of [Wolfe's] work, and from the way his words sell, it appears that there are many deserving readers out there waiting." Gary K. Wolfe, in Locus, said: "A convenient and well researched glossary of names and terms. . . . It provides enough of a gloss on the novels that it almost evokes Wolfe's distant future all by itself. . . . It can provide both a useful reference and a good deal of fun." Donald Keller said, in the New York Review of Science Fiction: "A fruitful product of obsession, this is a thorough . . . dictionary of the Urth Cycle. . . . Andre-Driussi's research has been exhaustive, and he has discovered many fascinating things . . . [it is] head-spinning to confront a myriad of small and large details, some merely interesting, others jawdropping."

This title explores the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels. Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics' unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, "Graven Images" explores with real insight the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels. In essays by scholars and comics creators, "Graven Images" observes the frequency with which religious material - in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts - occurs in both independent and mainstream comics. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages; analyze how comics communicate such messages; place the religious messages contained in comics books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks; and, articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics.

As an essayist, philosopher, ex-pencil manufacturer, notorious hermit, tax protester, and all-around original thinker, Thoreau led so singular a life that he is in some ways a perfect candidate for the historical and biographical treatments made possible by the Historical Guides to American Authors series format. William E. Cain, the volume editor, includes contributions on his relationship with 19th century authority and concepts of the land, which should help the volume's reach beyond those who read Thoreau for illumination to those general readers who love him for embodying the spirit of American rebellion.

The late D. F. McKenzie worked on this comprehensive edition of the works of the playwright, poet, librettist, and novelist William Congreve for more than twenty years, until his sudden death in 1999. This was a task he had taken over from Herbert Davis, to whom this edition is dedicated. During that time McKenzie uncovered new verse and letters, collated Congreve's texts, recorded their complicated textual history, constructed appendices that shed light on the dramatic context in which Congreve worked, and examined how his contemporaries received Congreve's work. More importantly, McKenzie has convincingly re-evaluated Congreve's works and life to transform our image of the man and his reputation.
McKenzie here follows the editorial practice suggested in two early editions of the Works published by Congreve's friend, the bookseller Jacob Tonson, in 1710 and 1719. These three volumes follow a plan similar to that in the Tonson edition, with The Old Batchelor, The Double-Dealer, and Love for Love collected in the first, a central volume with The Way of the World, and a final volume with Congreve's novel Incognita, some of his prose works, letters, and later verse. In each case, Congreve's work is left to speak for itself, unencumbered by intrusive notes, textual apparatus, or collations, which are gathered instead near the end of each volume.
This edition will be an invaluable resource for scholars for many years to come. It is a monument to McKenzie's own scholarship as well as to the integrity of William Congreve.

By examining the representation of urban space in contemporary British fiction, this book argues that key to the political left's strategy was a model of action which folded politics into culture and elevated disenfranchisement to the status of a political principle.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of articles on Bunyan as well as including several broader views of the Nonconformist tradition.

Working from the premise that the Puritan construction of America as a return to Eden endures into American literature of the 20th century, Medoro focuses on the rhetoric of cyclical regeneration, blood, and damnation that accompanies this construction. She argues that a semiotics of menstruation infuses this rhetoric and informs the figuration of a feminine America in the nation's literary tradition: America, as a New World Eden, is haunted not only by the Fall, but also by the Curse of Eve. Placing Thomas Pynchon, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison within this tradition, this book demonstrates that their novels link variations on the figure of the menstruating woman both to the bloody history of the United States and to a vision of the nation's redemptive promise.

Detailed readings of 9 novels--3 by each author--track references to menstruation and illuminate its tropological prevalence. The readings then develop a theory of menstruation as a kind of antidote functioning within narratives of violently spilled blood and blood purity. Each chapter draws on a range of disciplines--from medical history and mythography to anthropology and psychoanalysis--and situates its analysis of menstruation in relation to contemporary theories of female sexuality, human evolution, and the sacred.

Jane Austen significantly shaped the development of the English novel, and her works continue to be read widely today. Though she is best known for her novels, "Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, " and "Persuasion," she also wrote poems, letters, prayers and various pieces of juvenalia. These writings have been attracting the attention of scholars; her major works have already generated a large body of scholarly and critical studies. This reference is a guide to her works and the response to them.

Austen's works are fraught with ambiguity. Because she was adept at displaying numerous aspects of an issue, her writings invite multiple interpretations. In light of the ambiguity of her texts, each of her major works is approached from a reader-response perspective, in which an expert contributor illuminates the reader's relationship to her writing. And because so many readers have had such varied responses to her novels, the volume also includes chapters summarizing the critical response to each of her major works. In addition, the book includes separate chapters on her poems, letters, and prayers.

Dickens, Religion and Society examines the centrality of Dickens's religious attitudes to the social criticism he is famous for, shedding new light in the process on such matters as the presentation of Fagin as a villainous Jew, the hostile portrayal of trade unions in Hard Times and Dickens's sentimentality.

This collection of fifteen original essays offers new perspectives on armed conflict as a central aspect of science fiction and fantasy writing. Looking past the superficial conventions associated with ray guns and aliens, swords and sorcerers, the contributors show how writers in the genre today are not so much imagining war more fully as they are completely re-imagining it. Science fiction and fantasy writing is no longer mired in epic or chivalric models but is responding to new and more complex ""real-world"" motivations for armed aggression: advances in weaponry, shifts in the theaters of war, and changes in battlefield conditions. Most of the papers were presented at the annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. The trend throughout the book is away from critical interest in stories of spatial or territorial conquest and toward works that deal with topics related to wars of temporal logistics and the internationalization of the combat zone, including urban street violence, gender conflicts, and resistance to runaway technology. The essays range from studies of the semantics and linguistics of warfare in science fiction to a critique of Osip Senkovsky's Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus; from writer Joe Haldeman's assessment of the impact of his Vietnam experiences on his fiction to inquiries into a shared author/reader agenda in novels concerning potential mass destruction, including Stephen King's Dead Zone and M. J. Engh's Arslan. The collection also charts new directions in writing, such as the anti-apocalyptic science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, and embraces new modes of presentation, particularly computer animation and the bande dessinee, or illustrated narrative, as exemplified by French novelist Phillippe Druillet's La Nuit. Musician Bob Marley, film actor/directors Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Lee, and the cyberpunk film classics Terminator and the Road Warrior series are among other topics discussed. Together, the essays reinforce the editors' contention that the true function of these fantasies and science fictions is neither nostalgia nor fancy, but analysis. The contributors treat the texts they examine as a means not of playing war games but of understanding the role of war in the present and the future.

Although John Steinbeck's novellas Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Pearl are works of fiction, they provide a window on the history of the times and places they portray. Studying the historical, social, economic, and regional background of each novella is important to fully understanding each work. This interdisciplinary collection of rich collateral materials features a variety of primary documents that shed light on the background of each of these novellas--the pioneer days and life on the Western frontier, the early history of California, the gold rush, the plight of the migrant worker during the Great Depression, the problems of the homeless and the hopeless, and oppression in Mexico in the early 20th century. Documents include memoirs of mountain men and pioneers, books of travel, sociological studies, a political treatise, a journal, reports of U.S. commissions, a comic memoir, and an interview with a Salvation Army general who worked with the downtrodden during the 1930s. Most of these materials are not available in printed form anywhere else. The purpose of this volume is to explore through analysis and collateral readings the pervasive theme in these novellas: the universality of humankind's often futile struggle for a better existence. Steinbeck shows that the American vision is shaped by the dream of a better life represented in the myth of the West. A social and political commentator, he dramatizes in all three novellas the social issues of the time. The first chapter of this study, a literary analysis, examines key themes common to all three novellas. The remaining chapters place the works in historical context. "Old California and the West" includes accounts of18th- and 19th-century travelers to California who dreamed of a better life. "Land Ownership" examines the meaning of land ownership in the West and its corruption. "The Vagrant Farm Worker: Homeless in Paradise" features memoirs and journals of itinerant workers as well as Mark Twain's Roughing It and a study of the hobo. "Losers of the American Dream" deals with the homeless and hopeless during the early years of this century and the Great Depression. "The American Dream in a Mexican Setting" illuminates the lives of the oppressed in Mexico which provoked a century of revolutions. Each chapter concludes with study questions, ideas for class discussion and student projects and papers, and a list of books for further reading. This is an ideal companion for teacher use and student research in English and American history classes.

Emphasizing Frances Burney's professionalism and her courage, the author of this work aims to show the protean writer who recognized her abilities and exercised them, always carefully shaping her career. Though now frequently depicted as retiring, even fearful, Burney forced on her reading public themes they were scarcely ready for, flamboyantly mixing genres, writing comically about intimate violence. Not content in old age to be merely a literary icon, she privately recorded with increasing clarity the moments when the world lacerates the self.

This major study of a Markan genre, represented in the central section 8.27-10.4, ranges through Greek, rabbinic and early Christian literature, providing detailed comparison with the anecdotes in Lucian's Demonax and the Mishnah.Moeser concludes that the Markan anecdotes clearly follow the definition of, and typologies for, the Greek chreia. His analysis indicates that while the content of the three sets of anecdotes is peculiar to its respective cultural setting, the Greek, Jewish and Christian examples all function according to the purposes of the genre.

While crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres, this is the first book to treat it in its full global is the first book to treat crime fiction in its full global and plurilingual dimensions, taking the genre seriously as a participant in the international sphere of world literature. In a wide-ranging panorama of the genre, twenty critics discuss crime fiction from Bulgaria, China, Israel, Mexico, Scandinavia, Kenya, Catalonia, and Tibet, among other locales. By bringing crime fiction into the sphere of world literature, Crime Fiction as World Literature gives new insights not only into the genre itself but also into the transnational flow of literature in the globalized mediascape of contemporary popular culture.

A diverse and multinational volume, this book showcases the passages of Joseph Conrad's narratives across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the transtextual and transcultural elements of his fiction. Featuring contributions from distinguished and emergent Conrad scholars, it unpacks the transformative meanings which Conrad's narratives have achieved in crossing national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Featuring studies on the reception of Conrad in modern China, an exploration of Conrad's relationship with India, a comparative study of the hybrid art of Conrad and Salman Rushdie, and the responses of Conrad's narratives to alternative media forms, this volume brings out transtextual relations among Conrad's works and various media forms, world narratives, philosophies, and emergent modes of critical inquiry. Gathering essays by contributors from Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this volume constitutes an inclusive, transnational networking of emergent border-crossing scholarship.

Books 38-40 of Livy's History of Rome cover the years 189-179 BC. They contain two famous and much-discussed episodes: the trials of the Scipios, and the so-called Bacchanalian conspiracy. Other notable matters described are the end of the war with the Aetolian League and Manlius Vulso's campaign in Asia Minor, the censorship of the elder Cato, and the fatal quarrel in the Macedonian royal house. This commentary, conceived on the same scale as Briscoe's earlier commentaries on Books 31-33 and 34-37, aims to elucidate historical, literary, textual, and linguistic aspects of Livy's narrative. When Polybius, Livy's main source for events in the Hellenistic world, full references to the relevant passages of the former are given, with citation of the opening and closing words. A substantial Introduction discusses sources and methods of composition, language and style, the manuscripts, the calendar and chronology, Roman policy in northern Italy, and the Roman legions of the period.

Novelist and cultural commentator C.P. Snow was a large and controversial presence in his lifetime but his work has been largely neglected since his death in 1980. This is the first 21st-century book to offer a clear, informed and sympathetic survey of all his novels and major non-fiction books and to affirm their importance for the world today.