Thomas Pynchon in Context guides students, scholars and other readers through the global scope and prolific imagination of Pynchon's challenging, canonical work, providing the most up-to-date and authoritative scholarly analyses of his writing. This book is divided into three parts. The first, 'Times and Places', sets out the history and geographical contexts both for the setting of Pynchon's novels and his own life. The second, 'Culture, Politics and Society', examines twenty important and recurring themes which most clearly define Pynchon's writing - ranging from ideas in philosophy and the sciences to humor and pop culture. The final part, 'Approaches and Readings', outlines and assesses ways to read and understand Pynchon. Consisting of Forty-four essays written by some of the world's leading scholars, this volume outlines the most important contexts for understanding Pynchon's writing and helps readers interpret and reference his literary work.

The American Renaissance has been a foundational concept in American literary history for nearly a century. The phrase connotes a period, as well as an event, an iconic turning point in the growth of a national literature and a canon of texts that would shape American fiction, poetry, and oratory for generations. F. O. Matthiessen coined the term in 1941 to describe the years 1850-1855, which saw the publications of major writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This Companion takes up the concept of the American Renaissance and explores its origins, meaning, and longevity. Essays by distinguished scholars move chronologically from the formative reading of American Renaissance authors to the careers of major figures ignored by Matthiessen, including Stowe, Douglass, Harper, and Longfellow. The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.

At various periods in their lives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald called Montgomery, Alabama their home. With Stepping Out with Scott and Zelda, you have a handy guide for touring the city and seeing the sights that the Fitzgeralds' would have enjoyed from day to day. Ranging from an old Confederate cemetery to a swanky country club, the Fitzgeralds' Montgomery is sure to enchant both visitors and natives alike. Stroll back in time with Stepping Out with Scott and Zelda, a tour and travel guide that reveals the places and people that made up the Fitzgeralds' lives during their time in Montgomery. Visit Zelda's childhood home in the quaint Cottage Hill neighborhood, with its ornate Victorian mansions and charming houses with gingerbread trim. See where Scott, as a lieutenant during World War I, first saw this Southern city and would change his live forever in meeting a young woman at a country-club dance. Explore historic Old Cloverdale's winding tree-lined streets and enjoy their 1931 rental home, now an important literary museum. Featuring photographs and period postcards from the era, Stepping Out with Scott and Zelda is the perfect way to ring in the new Roaring Twenties.

Young adult literature holds an exceptional place in modern American popular culture-accessible to readers of all levels, it captures a diverse audience and tends to adapt to the big screen in an exciting way. With its wide readership, YAL sparks interesting discussions inside and outside of the classroom. This collection of new essays examines how it has impacted college composition courses, primarily focusing on the first year. Contributors discuss popular YA stories, their educational potential, and possibilities for classroom discussion and exercise.

When theater and related forms of live performance explore the borderlands labeled animal and autism, they both reflect and affect their audiences' understanding of what it means to be human. Affect, Animals, and Autists maps connections across performances that question the borders of the human whose neurodiverse experiences have been shaped by the diagnostic label of autism, and animal-human performance relationships that dispute and blur anthropocentric edges. By analyzing specific structures of affect with the vocabulary of emotions, Marla Carlson builds upon the conception of affect articulated by psychologist Silvan Tomkins. The book treats a diverse selection of live performance and archival video and analyzes the ways in which they affect their audiences. The range of performances includes commercially successful productions such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, War Horse, and The Lion King as well as to the more avant-garde and experimental theater created by Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles, Back to Back Theatre, Elevator Repair Service, Pig Iron Theatre, and performance artist Deke Weaver.

Law and Literature presents an authoritative, fresh and accessible new overview of the many ways in which law and literature interact. Written by a team of international experts, it provides a multi-focused history of literary studies' critical interest in ideas of law and justice. It examines the effects of law on writers and their work, ranging from classical tragedy to comics, and from East Africa to Elizabethan England. Over twenty chapters, contributors reveal the intricate and multivalent historical interactions between law and literature, both past and present, and trace the intellectual genesis of the concept of law in literary studies, focusing on major developments in the history of the interdisciplinary project of law and literature, as well as the changing ideas of law, and the cultural contests in which it has figured. Law and Literature will appeal to graduates and scholars working on the intersection between law and literature and in key related areas such as literature and human rights.

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.

The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently reproduce the spectacle of twins who share an insular closeness and perform a supposed alikeness-standing side by side, speaking and acting in unison. Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines their historical narrative-embedded within discourses of aberrance, experimentation and eugenics-and how it has shaped their public and personal representations in the 20th and 21st centuries.

An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

This book analyzes and contextualizes Auerbach's life and mind in the wide ideological, philological, and historical context of his time, especially the rise of Aryan philology and its eventual triumph with the Nazi Revolution or the Hitler Revolution in Germany of 1933. It deals specifically with his struggle against the premises of Aryan philology, based on voelkisch mysticism and Nazi historiography, which eliminated the Old Testament from German Kultur and Volksgeist in particular, and Western culture and civilization in general. It examines in detail his apologia for, or defense and justification of, Western Judaeo-Christian humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment. It discusses Auerbach's ultimate goal, which was to counter the overt racist tendencies and voelkish ideology in Germany, or the belief in the Community of Blood and Fate of the German people, which sharply distinguished between Kultur and civilization and glorified voelkisch nationalism over European civilization. The volume includes an analysis of the entire twenty chapters of Auerbach's most celebrated book: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1946.

Even in a genre well known for generating controversy, some true-crime and scandal books have wielded a particular power to unsettle readers, provoke the authorities, and generate renewed focus on a case. For crimes and scandals that have attracted a library of more dubious investigations, the cumulative effect of the literature has been equally contentious, clouding the "truth" with a trail of myths and inaccuracies. From high-profile publishing sensations such as Ten Rillington Place, Fatal Vision, and Mommie Dearest to the wealth of writing on the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the Black Dahlia murder, this work delves into that hard copy era when crime and scandal books had a cultural impact beyond the genre's film and TV documentaries, fueling outcries that sometimes matched the notoriety of the cases they discussed, and leaving legacies that still resonate today.

This long-awaited dictionary provides an extensive list of ancient, beautiful Sanskrit names with their significance and spiritual meanings. Numerous references to classical scriptures of India are included to help in research and further study of a name. The special qualities implied by each name, such as particular aspects of God, character traits, and spiritual virtues are highlighted with cross-references to other names having the same quality.

Breaking Free from Death examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova's subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and-by extrapolation-their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success.

In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women's oppression without exploring Eastern women's sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women's liberation is truly global.

Award-winning popular culture scholar and expert, Gary Hoppenstand, assembles a collection of essays published over the past few decades that examine a vast array of popular adventure fiction. Some of the most famous novels in all of popular fiction are featured in these essays, such as Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. Hoppenstand examines the cultural and literary impact of these great works of entertainment, often presenting forgotten classics in a new light. Informative analysis offers the interested reader of popular fiction important insights into the adventure story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in American and British literature.

BBC's Orphan Black shattered conventions with one actress-Tatiana Maslany-playing a host of main characters. At the same time, it burst through the expectations of a crowd that anticipated male heroes and female victims. As the mighty heroines save one another and destroy the patriarchy, they're aided by supportive, gentle, even bumbling male love interests and friends. Even as the characters subvert gender expectations, they provide models that celebrate the many types of feminism through history and emerging today: Sarah, the punk feminist and protagonist, clashes with her foster-mother Siobhan, herself a veteran of radical feminism and literal combat. Housewife Alison begins as the quintessential post-feminist, while Krystal sports pink tops and high heels as a girl power icon. Cosima hails from Berkeley in her Birkenstocks and dreadlocks, the herald of second-wave lesbian feminism as she earns herself a science PhD. Beth has it all in the spirit of third-wave feminism, though her drug habits and relationship problems show the weakness of the era. M.K., hidden in her trailer yet ruling the internet as its hacker-queen, offers a new image as a fourth-wave feminist, conquering her disability through the new medium of the internet. At the same time, the science and ethics of cloning emphasizes the women's war against corporate power. Together with metafiction, allusions, symbolism, and deeper imagery, the show breaks all the barriers of gender as well as science fiction television.

The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.

Dante's Convivio, composed in exile between 1304 and 1307, is a series of self-commentaries on three of Dante's long poems. These allegorical love poems and philosophical verse become the basis for philosophical, literary, moral, and political exposition. The prose is written in Italian so that those who were not educated in Latin could take part in what Dante called his 'banquet of knowledge'. In this edition, eminent Dante translator-scholar Andrew Frisardi offers the first fully annotated translation of the work into English, with an extensive introduction, making Dante's often complex writings accessible to scholars and students. The parallel Italian text is also included for the first time in an English translation of the Convivio. Readers of this work can gain a strong understanding of the philosophical themes across Dante's work, including the Divine Comedy, as well as the logic, politics and science of his time.

A figure from ancient folklore, the doppelganger-in fiction a character's sinister look-alike-continues to reemerge in literature, television and film. The modern-day doppelganger ("double-goer" in German) is typically depicted in a traditional form adapted to reflect present-day social anxieties. Focusing on a broad range of narratives, the author explores 21st century representations in novels (Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, Jose Saramago's The Double), TV shows (Orphan Black, Battlestar Galactica, Ringer) and movies (The Island, The Prestige, Oblivion).

By mid-career, many successful writers find a groove and their readers come to expect a familiar consistency and fidelity. Not so with Henry Green (1905-1973). He prefers uncertainty over reason and fragmentation over cohesion, and rarely lets the reader settle into a nice cozy read. Evil, he suggests, can be as instructive as good. Through his use of paradoxical and ambiguous language, his novels bring texture to the flatness of life, making the world seem bigger and closer. We soon stop worrying about what Hitler's bombs have in store for the Londoners of Caught (1943) and Back (1946) and start thinking about what they have in store for each other. Praised in his lifetime as England's top fiction author, he is largely overlooked today. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of his work for a new generation of readers.

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.

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish novels of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence in works of fiction. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they are reflecting and responding to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.

From the Gay Repertoire is the first guide to consider the total sweep of gay plays published in English, not just those that were produced on Broadway and in London's West End. Here one will find, in addition to Off- and Off-Off-Broadway and regional theater offerings, plays from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Puerto Rican, Indian, and Filipino plays written in English as well as translations from other languages are given their due place. As a result fully 70% of the plays included here are appearing for the first time in such a survey. Lovers of the theater will be happy to discover the rich gay repertoire that they have inherited.

A History of Irish Autobiography is the first ever critical survey of autobiographical self-representation in Ireland from its recoverable beginnings to the twenty-first century. The book draws on a wealth of original scholarship by leading experts to provide an authoritative examination of autobiographical writing in the English and Irish languages. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of autobiography theory and criticism in Ireland, the History guides the reader through seventeen centuries of Irish achievement in autobiography, a category that incorporates diverse literary forms, from religious tracts and travelogues to letters, diaries, and online journals. This ambitious book is rich in insight. Chapters are structured around key subgenres, themes, texts, and practitioners, each featuring a guide to recommended further reading. The volume's extensive coverage is complemented by a detailed chronology of Irish autobiography from the fifth century to the contemporary era, the first of its kind to be published.