Hailed by book reviewers as a "masterpiece," "gorgeous and fascinating," and "sheer pleasure," Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape was published in fall 2006 in hardcover. It was met with outstanding reviews and strong sales, going into three printings. A language-lover's dream, this visionary reference revitalized a descriptive language for the American landscape by combining geography, literature, and folklore in one volume. This is a totally redesigned, near-pocket-sized field guide edition of the best-selling hardcover. Home Ground brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers draw from careful research and their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional diversity to portray in bright, precise prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit. Includes an introductory essay by Barry Lopez. At the heart of the book is a community of writers in service to their country, emphasizing a language suggesting the vastness and mystery that lie beyond our everyday words.

HandiLand looks at young adult novels, fantasy series, graphic memoirs, and picture books of the last 25 years in which characters with disabilities take center stage for the first time. These books take what others regard as weaknesses-for instance, Harry Potter's headaches or Hazel Lancaster's oxygen tank-and redefine them as part of the hero's journey. HandiLand places this movement from sidekick to hero in the political contexts of disability rights movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ghana.Elizabeth A. Wheeler invokes the fantasy of HandiLand, an ideal society ready for young people with disabilities before they get there, as a yardstick to measure how far we've come and how far we still need to go toward the goal of total inclusion. The book moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities. As a disabled person and parent of children with disabilities, Wheeler offers an inside look into families who collude with their kids in shaping a better world. Moving, funny, and beautifully written, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth is the definitive study of disability in contemporary literature for young readers.

Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov brings together candid, revealing interviews with one of the twentieth century's master prose writers. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian American scientist, poet, translator, and professor of literature. Critics throughout the world celebrated him for developing the luminous and enigmatic style that advanced the boundaries of modern literature more than any author since James Joyce. In a career that spanned over six decades, he produced dozens of iconic works, including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and his classic autobiography, Speak, Memory. The twenty-eight interviews and profiles in this collection were drawn from Nabokov's numerous print and broadcast appearances over a period of nineteen years. Beginning with the controversy surrounding the American publication of Lolita in 1958, he offers trenchant, witty views on society, literature, education, the role of the author, and a range of other topics. He discusses the numerous literary and symbolic allusions in his work, his use of parody and satire, as well as analyses of his own literary influences. Nabokov also provided a detailed portrait of his life-from his aristocratic childhood in prerevolutionary Russia, education at Cambridge, apprenticeship as an emigre writer in the capitals of Europe, to his decision in 1940 to immigrate to the United States, where he achieved renown and garnered an international readership. The interviews in this collection are essential for seeking a clearer understanding of the life and work of an author who was pivotal in shaping the landscape of contemporary fiction.

Within the realm of American culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Southern queers on screen often reflect the fantasy of cultural stereotypes. Editor Tison Pugh contends that when southern queers appear in films and on television, and when southern queers watch these portrayals, the inherent contradictions of these cultural depictions reveal the fault lines of gender, geography, and desire. These underlying schisms point to the infinite, if infrequently portrayed, possibilities of actual queer southern life. Examining a range of materials, including gothic horror films and drag queens on public-access television, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct ideological fantasies of southerners regardless of the complexity of their lives.

Richard Holloway is one of our most beloved public thinkers. Throughout his life he has turned to poets and writers to help answer the big questions, and for solace and guidance in the face of life's challenges. Now he shares those poems and words which have been his own guide, offered in the hope they will help us too. This is a book to turn to for inspiration, guidance and comfort. It offers lessons from those who, in Richard's words, 'know best how to listen and teach us to listen', all united by 'the sensual appeal of words, the pain and pleasure they impart'. It is a book to treasure.

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus was among the most celebrated authors of the Second Sophistic and an important figure in the transmission of Hellenism. Born to wealthy landowners in Mysia in 117, he studied in Athens and Pergamum before he fell chronically ill in the early 140s and retreated to Pergamum's healing shrine of Asclepius. By 147 Aristides was able to resume his public activities and pursue a successful oratorical career. Based at his family estate in Smyrna, he traveled between bouts of illness and produced speeches and lectures, declamations on historical themes, polemical works, prose hymns, and various essays, all of it displaying deep and creative familiarity with the classical literary heritage. He died between 180 and 185. This edition of Aristides, new to the Loeb Classical Library, offers fresh translations and texts based on the critical editions of Lenz-Behr (Orations 1-16) and Keil (Orations 17-53). Volume II contains Orations 3 and 4, which along with Oration 2 (A Reply to Plato) take issue with the attack on orators and oratory delivered in Plato's Gorgias.

Capital Letters sheds new light on how literature has dealt with society's most violent legal institution, the death penalty. It investigates this question through the works of three major French authors with markedly distinct political convictions and literary styles: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Albert Camus. Working at the intersection of poetics, ethics, and law, Eve Morisi uncovers an unexpected transhistorical dialogue on both the modern death penalty and the ends and means of literature after the French Revolution. Through close textual analysis, careful contextualization, and the critique of violence forged by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and RenE Girard, Morisi reveals that, despite their differences, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus converge in questioning France's humanitarian redefinition of capital punishment dating from the late eighteenth century. Conversely, capital justice leads all three writers to interrogate the functions, tools, and limits of their art. Capital Letters shows that the key modern debate on the political and moral responsibility, or autonomy, of literature crystallizes around the death penalty. Inflecting traditional modes of representation and writing self-reflexively or self-critically, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus unsettle the commonly accepted divide between strictly aesthetic and politically committed writing. Form, rather than overtly political argument, at once conveys an ethical critique of justice and reflects on the possibilities, and duties, of literature.

Discover the truths, the history, the myths and the magic behind the bestselling All Souls trilogy. Fall under the spell once more with this all-encompassing insider's guide to A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. The All Souls trilogy by Deborah Harkness, featuring historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont, delves into mythology, alchemy, literature and architecture. And history is brought to life. With her signature historian's touch, Deborah Harkness offers an encyclopaedic look at the series, complete with synopses, character biographies, maps, recipes, and even the science behind creatures, magic and alchemy. Bursting with fascinating facts and original artwork, The World of All Souls is the ultimate companion for fans of the All Souls trilogy and unlocks this fantastical world, letting you in on all its secrets and mysteries. Praise for the All Souls trilogy: 'This is a glorious, finely-wrought gem of a book: intelligent, thoughtful, intricate. . . Utterly enchanting on every level' Manda Scott on A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES 'Deborah Harkness writes as if she's the hugely more talented love child of Diana Gabaldon and J. K. Rowling' thebookbag.co.uk on SHADOW OF NIGHT 'Rich in arcane detail, fans will relish this exotic cauldron of romantic fantasy' Sunday Mirror on THE BOOK OF LIFE

Since the publication of his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) has been considered an important new voice in American literature. His seven subsequent books have done little to contradict that initial assessment, especially after 2016's The Underground Railroad spent numerous weeks at the top of bestseller lists and won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Ranging from 2001 to 2016, the twenty-three interviews collected in Conversations with Colson Whitehead reveal the workings of one of America's most idiosyncratic and most successful literary minds. Through these interviews, it is clear that none of this well-earned praise has gone to his head. If anything, he still seems inclined to present himself as an awkward misfit who writes about such offbeat subject matter as rival groups of elevator inspectors, the insufficiency of off-brand "flesh-colored" bandages, or a literalized alternate version of the Underground Railroad. Whitehead speaks at length about matters related to his craft, including his varied literary and nonliterary influences, the particular methods of researching and writing that have proved valuable to telling his stories, and the ways in which he has managed the rollercoaster life of a professional writer. He also opens up about popular culture, particularly the unconventional blend of music, genre-fiction, B movies, and comic books that he gleefully identifies as a passion that has persisted for him since his childhood.

"That is the thing about New York," wrote Dorothy Parker in 1928. "It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day." Now you can journey back there, in time, to a grand city teeming with hidden bars, luxurious movie palaces, and dazzling skyscrapers. In these places, Dorothy Parker and her cohorts in the Vicious Circle at the infamous Algonquin Round Table sharpened their wit, polished their writing, and captured the energy and elegance of the time. Robert Benchley, Parker's best friend, became the first managing editor of Vanity Fair before Irving Berlin spotted him onstage in a Vicious Circle revue and helped launch his acting career. Edna Ferber, an occasional member of the group, wrote the Pulitzer-winning bestseller So Big as well as Show Boat and Cimarron. Jane Grant pressed her first husband, Harold Ross, into starting The New Yorker. Neysa McMein, reputedly "rode elephants in circus parades and dashed from her studio to follow passing fire engines." Dorothy Parker wrote for Vanity Fair and Vogue before ascending the throne as queen of the Round Table, earning everlasting fame (but rather less fortune) for her award-winning short stories and unforgettable poems. Alexander Woollcott, the centerpiece of the group, worked as drama critic for the Times and the World, wrote profiles of his friends for The New Yorker, and lives on today as Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Explore their favorite salons and saloons, their homes and offices (most still standing), while learning about their colorful careers and private lives. Packed with archival photos, drawings, and other images--including never-before-published material--this illustrated historical guide includes current information on all locations. Use it to retrace the footsteps of the Algonquin Round Table, and you'll discover that the golden age of Gotham still surrounds us.

Kerouac. Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation, but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World War II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era.

Decadence and Literature explains how the concept of decadence developed since Roman times into a major cultural trope with broad explanatory power. No longer just a term of opprobrium for mannered art or immoral behaviour, decadence today describes complex cultural and social responses to modernity in all its forms. From the Roman emperor's indulgence in luxurious excess as both personal vice and political control, to the Enlightenment libertine's rational pursuit of hedonism, to the nineteenth-century dandy's simultaneous delight and distaste with modern urban life, decadence has emerged as a way of taking cultural stock of major social changes. These changes include the role of women in forms of artistic expression and social participation formerly reserved for men, as well as the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, a development with a direct relationship to decadence. Today, decadence seems more important than ever to an informed understanding of contemporary anxieties and uncertainties.

Tales featuring anthropomorphic animals have been around as long as there have been storytellers to spin them, from Aesop's Fables to Reynard the Fox to Alice in Wonderland. The genre really took off following the explosion of furry fandom in the 21st century, with talking animals featuring in everything from science fiction to fantasy to LGBTQ coming-out stories. In his lifetime, Fred Patten (1940-2018)-one of the founders of furry fandom and a scholar of anthropomorphic animal literature-authored hundreds of book reviews that comprise a comprehensive critical survey of the genre. This selected compilation provides an overview from 1784 through the 2010s, covering such popular novels as Watership Down and Redwall, along with forgotten gems like The Stray Lamb and Where the Blue Begins, and science fiction works like Sundiver and Decision at Doona.

One of the most important novels of the eighteenth-century, Sir Charles Grandison [1753] shaped the English courtship novel, and was loved and admired by both Jane Austen and George Eliot. The book follows the life of Sir Charles, a man parallel in virtue with Richardson's female paragons Clarissa and Pamela; and a response to the fallible protagonist Tom Jones in Fielding's popular satire of moralising novels. Forming part of the first full scholarly edition of Richardson's complete works, comprehensive general and textual introductions significantly revise and advance understanding of the composition and printing history of Richardson's final novel, and reveal the central place of Sir Charles in the literature of the period. Including Richardson's Historical Index for the first time in any edition, extensive annotations and expansive notes also give readers crucial context, and provides scholars with paths to follow for future research.

Contributions by Amylou Ahava, Jeff Ambrose, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Daniel P. Compora, Penny Crofts, Keith Currie, Erin Giannini, Diganta Roy, Hannah Lina Schneeberger, Shannon S. Shaw, Maria Wiegel, and Margaret J. Yankovich First published in 1986, Stephen King's novel IT forever changed the legacy of the literary clown. The subject of a TV miniseries and a two-part film adaptation and the inspiration for a resurgence of the evil clown figure in popular culture, IT's influence is undeniable, yet scholarship to date is almost exclusively devoted to the adaptations rather than the novel itself. Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King's "IT" considers the pronounced cultural fluctuations of IT's legacies by centering the novel within the theoretical frameworks that animate it and ensure its literary and cultural persistence. The collection explores the ways the novel, so like its antagonist, replicates (or disavows) the icons of various canons and categories in order to accomplish specific psychological and cultural work. Gathering the work of scholars from diverse professional and disciplinary vantage points, editor Whitney S. May has curated an anthology that spans discussions of American surveillance culture, intergenerational conflict, the legacies of settler colonialism and Native American representation, serial-killer fanaticism, and more. In this volume, we read the protagonists' constellations of countermoves against Pennywise as productive outlines of critique effectuated by the richness of the clown's reflective power. The essays are therefore thematically arranged into a series of four categories of "counter"-countercurrents, countercultures, counterclaims, and counterfeits-where each supplies a specific critical lens through which to view Pennywise's disruptions of both culture and cultural critique.

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiqueing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with western poetics. The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two pulished collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley's introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of diaspora and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an afterword written by the poet with Chris Dunton.

The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate Cobain's texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions of his art. Cobain's distinctive version of grunge, understood as a subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an understanding of the self as part of a larger social order. Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain's writings independently of the artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

Imagine a world without Principia Mathematica, Rights of Man, the Bible, Shakespeare, or the Mahabharata. Books that Changed History features 75 of the world's most momentous titles - from The Art of War to Anne Frank's Diary - and reveals their far-ranging impact. Books are the medium through which scientists, storytellers, and philosophers introduce their ideas. Discover seminal religious and political titles, cornerstones of science such as On the Origin of Species, and ancient texts such as the I Ching, which is still used today to answer fundamental questions about human existence. Get up close to see fascinating details, such as Versalius' exquisite anatomical illustrations in Epitome, Leonardo da Vinci's annotated notebooks, or the hand-decorated pages in the Gutenberg Bible. Discover why Euclid's Elements of Geometry was the most influential maths title ever published, and marvel at rare treasures such as the Aubin Codex, which tells the history of the Aztecs and the early Spanaish colonial period in Mexico. Books that Changed History gathers stories, diaries, scientific treatises, plays, dictionaries, and religious texts into a stunning celebration of the power of books.

The book focuses on popular genres of romance, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, thriller, and What-if historical fiction in popular books, in artistic literature and on the borderline between the two. The author analyses the work of writers such as Jennifer Greene, Barbara Delinsky, and Lilian Darcy, Jennifer Lee Carrel, Michael Crichton, Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, Michel Faber and William Golding. She applies an analytical approach based on semiotics, structuralism and narratology and discusses genre mixture, adaptation and intertextuality, as well as world modelling.

This book is set to explore and develop a theory of Swedish Marxist Noir. In order to expose the dialectics of crime fiction, going from then (the American 1930s) to now (the Swedish post-1990s), we must explore, through a Marxist reading of several central works of crime fiction, the Marxist connection between the writings of Raymond Chandler and the Swedish wave of crime fiction since the 1960s. This dialectic, thus, consists of a long-term transition of ideas from Chandler, via the founders of Swedish social crime fiction, Sjoewall-Wahloeoe, to modern bestseller phenomena such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Roslund & Hellstroem, Jens Lapidus, Arne Dahl and others. Marxist theories have had a profound influence on the crime genre ever since the American 1930s and there is a strong link between the Swedish writers and the work of chandler, both in terms of direct influence and philosophy: Their view on society and the ambition to write about a modern world gone wrong. Consequently, a Marxist view on existence, makes all these writers a part of the same tradition. Despite the eighty years that have passed since Chandler initiated his Marlowe novels.

African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

This Element traces the varied and magical history of Christmas publications for children. The Christmas book market has played an important role in the growth of children's literature, from well-loved classics to more ephemeral annuals and gift books. Starting with the eighteenth century and continuing to recent sales successes and picturebooks, Christmas Books for Children investigates continuities and new trends in this hugely significant part of the children's book market.

Clear all moorings, one-half impulse power, and set course for a mare incognitum. A popular culture artifact of the New Frontier/Space Race era, Star Trek is often mistakenly viewed as a Space Western. However, the Western format is not what governs the actual worldbuilding of Star Trek, which was, after all, also pitched as `Hornblower in space'. The future of Star Trek is modeled on the world of the British Golden Age of Sail as it is commonly found in the genre of sea fiction. Star Trek and the British Age of Sail re-historicizes and remaps the origins of Star Trek and subsequently the entirety of its fictional world-the Star Trek continuum-on an as yet uncharted transatlantic bearing.

This companion to Frank Herbert's six original Dune novels-Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune-provides an encyclopedia of characters, locations, terms and other elements, and highlights the series' underrated aesthetic integrity. An extensive introduction covers themes of ecology, chaos theory, concepts and structures, and Joseph Campbell's monomyth in Herbert's narrative.