A comprehensive introduction to the medieval languages and texts that inspired Tolkien's Middle-earth. Using key episodes in The Silmarillion , The Hobbit , and The Lord of the Rings , medieval texts are presented in their original language with translations. Essential for those who wish to delve deeper into the background to Tolkien's mythology.

Katherine Anne Porter's life closely paralleled that of her century not only in its span (1890-1980) but in its interests and contradictions. A communist sympathizer who became a quasi fascist, a cosmopolitan who embraced southern agrarianism, a femme fatale whose writings nonetheless evince feminist feeling, Porter embodied, often at their extremes, the major currents of her time and ours. In this new biography Janis P. Stout argues that these inconsistencies can be viewed as part and parcel of modernism itself.

Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word "poetics." But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous "spontaneous prose" only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Quebec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naive pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.

Novelists Against Social Change studies the writing of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell to show how these conservative authors put their fears and anxieties into their best-selling fiction. Resisting the threats of change in social class, politics, the freedom of women, and professionalization produced their strongest works.

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

In recent years, controversy has surrounded the narrative turn in history and the historical turn in fiction. This book clarifies what is at stake, tracing connections between historiography and life-writing, arguing that the challenges posed in representing the past illuminate issues which are central to all literary narrative.

The post-war redevelopment of London has been the most extensive in its history, and has been accompanied by a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. This book explores the literary re-imagining of the city in post-war fiction and argues that the image, history, and narrative of the city has been transformed alongside the physical rebuilding and repositioning of the capital. Drawing on the ideas of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Anthony Vigler and others as well as the latest work on urban representation, this book is an important contribution to the study of the intersection between place, lived experience, and the literary imagination. Texts covered include novels by some of the most significant and lesser known authors of the period, including Graham Greene, George Orwell, J. G. Ballard, Stella Gibbons, David Lodge, Doris Lessing, B. S. Johnson, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.

Through a detailed study of Mayy Ziyadah's literary salon, Boutheina Khaldi sheds light on salon and epistolary culture in early twentieth-century Egypt and its role in Egypt's Nahdah (Awakening). Bringing together history, women's studies, Arabic literature, post-colonial literature, and media studies, she highlights the important and previously little-discussed contribution of Arab women to the project of modernity.

Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd's writing, The Living World asks how literature might help us reimagine humanity's place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd's writing through an ecocritical lens, it reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new insights into Shepherd's distinctive environmental thought. More than this, this book reveals how Shepherd's ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of the multi-disciplinary environmental humanities, and may inform their future development. Broken down into chapters focusing on themes of place, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherd's writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modernist, accessible and relevant to a new community of readers.

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to "proper" behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women--however virtuous--are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints ofdomesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.

A fascinating contribution to the scholarship of both political science and literature, this book explores eight major genres of contemporary popular fiction generally assumed to be essentially devoid of political content--children's novels, Westerns, middle-class fiction, historical novels, small-town Americana, sports novels, American war fiction, and science fiction. By uncovering the often covert mythical themes and cultural symbols hidden in the plot formulas of these works--many of them bestsellers--the essays illustrate the debt of mass-market authors to cultural and political traditions that reach back to the origins of the American Republic.

Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.

Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

The detective, as a preeminent figure in all forms of American popular culture, has become the subject of a variety of theoretical exploration. By investigating that figure, these essays demonstrate how the genre embodies all the contradictions of American society and the ways in which literature and the media attempt to handle those contradictions. Issues of class, gender, and race; the interaction of film and literature; and generic evolution are fundamental to any understanding of the American detective in all of his or her forms. Beginning with essays about Raymond Chandler's treatment of women, Part I concentrates on writers of the genre whose detectives embody aspects of American culture in the 20th century. Through examination of the work of Elmore Leonard, Chester Himes, Sue Grafton, and others, these essays look at the influence of film on literature, how ethnicity affects the genre's conventions, and gender issues. Part II looks closely at specific detectives in the media and demonstrates how the film detective has gone from one who upholds the moral order to one who contributes to the continuation of evil. A study of television detectives confirms the necessity of formula and variation to sustain a detective over many seasons.

This book applies models that reflect the fluid, mediated, hybrid, and nomadic global scenes within which Generation X artists and writers live, think, and work in Spain. Henseler touches on critical insights in comparative media studies, cultural studies, and social theory, and conveys the nuances of multiple voices, facts, figures, and faces.

This valuable compilation of articles offers original, historical, biographical and literary perspectives on the works of Stendhal. Eleven essays plunge the reader into Stendhal's mythological universe, providing new insights into the network of symbols, images and obsessional themes that run through his works. This multi-faceted collection examines Stendhal as the problematic subject for a biography, as autobiographer in his own right, as journalist, novelist, and innovator in the realm of fictional devices, and as the great representative of that literature of ideas first acclaimed by Balzac. Topics addressed include the writer's own enigmatic persona, his autobiographical writings, his encounter with George Sand, and his journalistic career in Italy, as well as the structure imposed on his novels by an Oedipal conflict he himself perceives in pre-Freudian terms, his experiments with multiple narrative point of view, and a feminist perspective on his use of the epistolary form as a device to enhance the plot.

When Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, friends and admirers remembered him as an eccentric man whose outer life was continuously fed by deeper spiritual currents. But scholars have since focused almost exclusively on Thoreau's literary, political, and scientific contributions. This book offers the first in-depth study of Thoreau's religious thought and experience. In it Alan D. Hodder recovers the lost spiritual dimension of the writer's life, revealing a deeply religious man who, despite his rejection of organized religion, possessed a rich inner life, characterized by a sort of personal, experiential, nature-centered, and eclectic spirituality that finds wider expression in America today. At the heart of Thoreau's life were episodes of exhilaration in nature that he commonly referred to as his ecstasies. Hodder explores these representations of ecstasy throughout Thoreau's writings-from the riverside reflections of his first book through Walden and the later journals, when he conceived his journal writing as a spiritual discipline in itself and a kind of forum in which to cultivate experiences of contemplative non-attachment. In doing so, Hodder restores to our understanding the deeper spiritual dimension of Thoreau's life to which his writings everywhere bear witness.

The Reception of British Authors in Europe series includes literary and political figures, as well as philosophers, historians and scientists. Each volume provides new research on the ways in which selected authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining the breadth and significance of H. G. Wells's literary and political impact throughout 20th-century Europe H.G. Wells was described by one of his European critics as a 'seismograph of his age'. He is one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction, and as a novelist, essayist, educationalist and political propagandist his influence has been felt in every European country. This collection of essays by scholarly experts shows the varied and dramatic nature of Wells's reception, including translations, critical appraisals, novels and films on Wellsian themes, and responses to his own well-publicized visits to Russia and elsewhere. The authors chart the intense ideological debate that his writings occasioned, particularly in the inter-war years, and the censorship of his books in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain. This book offers pioneering insights into Wells's contribution to 20th century European literature and to modern political ideas, including the idea of European union.

This book looks at a wide range of fiction and film texts, from the 1950s to the present, in order to analyse the ways in which masculinity has been represented in popular culture in Britain and the United States. It covers numerous genres, including spy fiction, science fiction, the Western and police thrillers. Each chapter focuses on key forms of masculinity found in each genre, such as the 'double agent', the 'rogue cop' and the 'citizen-soldier'. Brian Baker takes a broad, contextual approach, placing a detailed discussion of key texts and issues concerning masculinity in their historical and cultural context. Written in a clear, accessible way, it explores the changing representation of men over the last fifty years.

In addition to contributing significantly to the growing field of Burroughs scholarship, Burroughs Unbound also directly engages with the growing fields of textual studies, archival research, and genetic criticism, asking crucial questions thereby about the nature of archives and their relationship to a writer's work. These questions about the archive concern not only the literary medium. In the 1960s and 1970s Burroughs collaborated with filmmakers, sound technicians, and musicians, who helped re-contextualized his writings in other media. Burroughs Unbound examines these collaborations and explores how such multiple authorship complicates the authority of the archive as a final or complete repository of an author's work. It takes Burroughs seriously as a radical theorist and practitioner who critiqued drug laws, sexual practice, censorship, and what we today call a society of control. More broadly, his work continues to challenge our common assumptions about language, authorship, textual stability, and the archive in its broadest definition.