Mark Twain In Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of one of the most celebrated American writers. It is a collection of short, lively contributions covering a wide range of topics on Twain's life and works. Twain lived during a time of great change, upheaval, progress, and challenge. He rose from obscurity to become what some have called 'the most recognizable person on the planet'. Beyond his contributions to literature, which were hugely important and influential, he was a businessman, an inventor, an advocate for social and political change, and ultimately a cultural icon. Placing his life and work in the context of his age reveals much about both Mark Twain and America in the last half of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first century.

William Blake, poet and artist, is a figure often understood to have 'created his own system'. Combining close readings and detailed analysis of a range of Blake's work, from lyrical songs to later myth, from writing to visual art, this collection of thirty-eight lively and authoritative essays examines what Blake had in common with his contemporaries, the writers who influenced him, and those he influenced in turn. Chapters from an international team of leading scholars also attend to his wider contexts: material, formal, cultural, and historical, to enrich our understanding of, and engagement with, Blake's work. Accessibly written, incisive, and informed by original research, William Blake in Context enables readers to appreciate Blake anew, from both within and outside of his own idiom.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was one of the most influential and controversial women of her age. No writer, except perhaps her political foe, Edmund Burke, and her fellow reformer, Thomas Paine, inspired more intense reactions. In her brief literary career before her untimely death in 1797, Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as impressive as her expansive range was the profound evolution of her thinking in the decade when she flourished as an author. In this collection of essays, leading international scholars reveal the intricate biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft's social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels.

The New York Times bestselling author of the beloved classic How to Read Literature Like a Professor teaches you how to write everything from a report for your community association to a meaningful memoir in this masterful and engaging guide. Combing anecdotes and hard-won lessons from decades of teaching and writing-and invoking everyone from Hemingway to your third-grade teacher-retired professor Thomas C. Foster guides you through the basics of writing. With How to Write Like a Writer you'll learn how to organize your thoughts, construct first drafts, and (not incidentally) keep you in your chair so that inspiration can come to visit. With warmth and wit, Foster shows you how to get into (and over) your best self, how to find your voice, and how to know when, if ever, a piece of work is done. Packed with enlightening anecdotes, highlighted with lists and bullet points, this invaluable guide reveals how writers work their magic, and reminds us that we all-for better or worse, whether we mean to or not-are known by what we put on paper or screen, both our thoughts and our words.

Searching for perfect book lovers gifts? Rejoice! Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany, is a love letter to all things bookish. Author Jane Mount brings literary people, places, and things to life through her signature and vibrant illustrations. It's a must-have for every book collection, and makes a wonderful literary gift for book lovers, writers, and more. Readers of Jane Mount's Bibliophile will delight in: Touring the world's most beautiful bookstores Testing their knowledge of the written word with quizzes Finding their next great read in lovingly curated stacks of books Sampling the most famous fictional meals Peeking inside the workspaces of their favorite authors A source of endless inspiration, literary facts and recommendations: Bibliophile is pure bookish joy and sure to enchant book clubbers, English majors, poetry devotees, aspiring writers, and any and all who identify as book lovers. If you have read or own: I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life; The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization; or How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines; then you will want to read and own Jane Mount's Bibliophile.

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are demonstrated in two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic inventions based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and wording to style more broadly conceived. The book is concerned not only with prose fiction but with creative non-fiction, a growing area of interest for readers and aspiring writers. Written by internationally-renowned critics, novelists and biographers, the essays provide readers and writers with ways of understanding the workings of prose. They are exemplary of good critical practice, pleasurable reading for their own sake, and both informative and inspirational for practising writers. The Cambridge Companion to Prose will serve as a key resource for students of English literature and of creative writing.

George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic period, as well as a peer, politician and global celebrity, famed not only for his verse, but for his controversial lifestyle and involvement in the Greek War of Independence. In thirty-seven concise, accessible essays, by leading international scholars, this volume explores the social and intertextual relationships that informed Byron's writing; the geopolitical contexts in which he travelled, lived and worked; the cultural and philosophical movements that influenced changing outlooks on religion, science, modern society and sexuality; the dramatic landscape of war, conflict and upheaval that shaped Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe and Regency Britain; and the diverse cultures of reception that mark the ongoing Byron phenomenon as a living ecology in the twenty-first century. This volume illuminates how we might think of Byron in context, but also as a context in his own right.

Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. In this New and Selected, master of the form Don Paterson brings the best examples from his two previous volumes together with ingenious new material relevant to today's world. Moving and mischievous, canny and profound - these wide-ranging observations of no more than one or two lines demonstrate that the aphorism is the perfect form for our times. Consciousness is the turn the universe makes to hasten its own end. * Agnosticism is indulged only by those who have never suffered belief. * Poet: someone in the aphorism business for the money.

African American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form.

The figures of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne appear throughout the writing of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, featuring in his poems, short fictions, dialogues and as authorities in notes to his work. Bringing together into one volume published and unpublished writings featuring these two enigmatic figures, W.B. Yeats's Robartes-Aherne Writings traces their history and the development of Yeats's mystical thought that culminated (twice) in the publication of his visionary work A Vision (1925, 1937). Including reproductions of manuscript and notebook pages as well as transcriptions and extracts from a wide range of Yeats's mystical writings and substantial commentary and annotation throughout, this book is an essential resource for scholars of Yeats's thought, his stylistic evolution and the esoteric influences on modernist writing in the early 20th century.

It's been barely twenty years since Dave Eggers (b. 1970) burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In that time, he has gone on to publish several books of fiction, a few more books of nonfiction, a dozen books for children, and many harder-to-classify works. In addition to his authorship, Eggers has established himself as an influential publisher, editor, and designer. He has also founded a publishing company, McSweeney's; two magazines, Might and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern; and several nonprofit organizations. This whirlwind of productivity, within publishing and beyond, gives Eggers a unique standing among American writers: jack of all trades, master of same. The interviews contained in Conversations with Dave Eggers suggest the range of Eggers's pursuits-a range that is reflected in the variety of the interviews themselves. In addition to the expected interviews with major publications, Eggers engages here with obscure magazines and blogs, trade publications, international publications, student publications, and children from a mentoring program run by one of his nonprofits. To read the interviews in sequence is to witness Eggers's rapid evolution. The cultural hysteria around Staggering Genius and Eggers's complicated relationship with celebrity are clear in many of the earlier interviews. From there, as the buzz around him mellows, Eggers responds in kind, allowing writing and his other endeavors to come to the fore of his conversations. Together, these interviews provide valuable insight into a driving force in contemporary American literature.

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences continue to matter now and in the future.

Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Context gathers thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them. It explores the places that shaped his life and enabled his literary destiny, the social and cultural contexts he both observed and immersed himself in, and the literary and intellectual contexts that made him one the most famous Black writers in the world at mid-century.

A dictionary records a language and a cultural world. This global history of lexicography is the first survey of all the dictionaries which humans have made, from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and the Greco-Roman world, to the contemporary speech communities of every inhabited continent. Their makers included poets and soldiers, saints and courtiers, a scribe in an ancient Egyptian 'house of life' and a Vietnamese queen. Their physical forms include Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts and the dictionary apps which are supporting endangered Australian languages. Through engaging and accessible studies, a diverse team of leading scholars provide fascinating insight into the dictionaries of hundreds of languages, into the imaginative worlds of those who used or observed them, and into a dazzling variety of the literate cultures of humankind.

Tom Stoppard's work as a playwright and screenwriter has always been notable for mixing ideas with entertainment. From the early success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to masterpieces like Arcadia, from radio plays about modern art to the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard has challenged and delighted audiences with the intellectual and cultural richness of his writing. Tom Stoppard in Context provides multiple perspectives on both the life and works of one of the most important modern playwrights. This collection covers biographical and historical topics, as well as the broad array of intellectual, aesthetic, and political concerns with which Stoppard has engaged. More than thirty essays on subjects ranging from science to screenwriting help illuminate Stoppard's rich body of work.

Drawing on evidence from his published works, manuscripts, and correspondence, Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism explores Beckett's engagement with the theme of cultural nationalism throughout his writing life, revealing the various ways in which he sought to challenge culturally nationalist conceptions of art and literature, while never embracing a cosmopolitan approach. The Element shows how, in his pre-Second World War writings, Beckett sought openly to mock Irish nationalist ideas of culture and language, but that, in so doing, he failed to avoid what he himself described as a 'clot of prejudices'. In his post-war works in French and English, however, following time spent in Nazi Germany in 1936-7 as well as in the French Resistance during the Second World War, Beckett began to take a new approach to ideas of national-cultural affiliation, at the heart of which was a conception of the human as a citizen of nowhere.

Frederick Douglass in Context provides an in-depth introduction to the multifaceted life and times of Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century's leading black activist and one of the most celebrated American writers. An international team of scholars sheds new light on the environments and communities that shaped Douglass's career. The book challenges the myth of Douglass as a heroic individualist who towered over family, friends, and colleagues, and reveals instead a man who relied on others and drew strength from a variety of personal and professional relations and networks. This volume offers both a comprehensive representation of Douglass and a series of concentrated studies of specific aspects of his work. It will be a key resource for students, scholars, teachers, and general readers interested in Douglass and his tireless fight for freedom, justice, and equality for all.

This is a wide-ranging anthology that examines, in chronological order, several genres that have been prominent in the history of Western philosophy. The programmatic introduction outlines the diverse range of genres used by philosophers (dialogue, commentary, biography, etc.) and explains how genre-based exegesis can enrich our analysis and interpretation of philosophical texts. The remaining essays examine individual texts from this perspective. This examination begins with two studies of Plato's dialogues. It then turns to three studies of ancient and medieval texts in which genre is used to explore the boundaries of 'philosophy.' The next eight essays examine representative philosophical works from the Middle Ages to the present. The epilogue considers how disparate genres and styles may be used to establish different ethical relationships between the author, the audience, and the subject matter.

As poet and as country parson, George Herbert engaged the pastoral in all of its varied senses. In October of 2007, many of the world's leading Herbert scholars met at Sarum College in Salisbury, England to locate Herbert's pastoral life and writings more particularly in early Stuart Wiltshire. They explored the relations between the pastoral locale of Herbert's last years (1630-1633) in nearby Bemerton and the themes, images, and tenor of his writing. How did the specific country place, time, and people shape the life and work of this especially lyrical country priest? The fourteen essays in this collection address Herbert's pastoral poetry and practice, cast new light on his actual relations with specific local personalities and places, make fresh connections to the inward biblical and liturgical spaces of his work, consider his outward links to garden and pasture, and discover fictional and theological reverberations beyond Herbert's local, pastoral world.