When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz, and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

Exploring the role of boundaries and limits in the writing of James Joyce Beating the Bounds examines the role of boundaries and limits in James Joyce's later works, primarily Finnegans Wake but also Ulyssesand other texts. Building on the ideas of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Giordano Bruno, and scholar Fritz Senn, Roy Benjamin explains and reconciles Joyce's contrary tendencies to establish and transgress limits. Benjamin begins by contrasting Joyce's exploration of the artificial impositions of ritual and political power with the writer's attention to natural boundaries of rivers and mountains. The next section considers sexual, spiritual, and interpersonal boundaries in the Wake. Benjamin then discusses how Joyce simultaneously affirms and undermines the limits of philosophy, geometry, and aesthetics. The final section covers Joyce's representation of the boundaries imposed in cosmogonic myths, the collision between the bounded medieval world and the boundless world of modern science, and the drive to escape from the boundaries of place. In this detailed and original analysis, Benjamin demonstrates that in Joyce's writing, the tendency to disintegrate into chaos is countered by an urge to impose order. Benjamin's close readings put an abundance of subjects in conversation through the concept of limits, showing the Wake's relevance to many different fields of thought. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics. Reinterpreting characteristic autistic verbal practices such as repetition in the context of a more widely respected literary canon, Julia Miele Rodas argues that autistic language is actually an essential part of mainstream literary aesthetics, visible in poetry by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, in novels by Charlotte Bronte and Daniel Defoe, in life writing by Andy Warhol, and even in writing by figures from popular culture. Autistic Disturbances pursues these resonances and explores the tensions of language and culture that lead to the classification of some verbal expression as disordered while other, similar expression enjoys prized status as literature. It identifies the most characteristic patterns of autistic expression-repetition, monologue, ejaculation, verbal ordering or list-making, and neologism-and adopts new language to describe and reimagine these categories in aesthetically productive terms. In so doing, the book seeks to redress the place of verbal autistic language, to argue for the value and complexity of autistic ways of speaking, and to invite recognition of an obscured tradition of literary autism at the very center of Anglo-American text culture.

This is a detailed, narrative-based history of Classical Malay Literature. It covers a wide range of Malay texts, including folk literature; the influence of the Indian epics and shadow theatre literature; Panji tales; the transition from Hindu to Muslim literary models; Muslim literature; framed tales; theological literature; historical literature; legal codes; and the dominant forms of poetry, the pantun and syair. The author describes the background to each of these particular literary periods. He engages in depth with specific texts, their various manuscripts, and their contents. In so doing, he draws attention to the historical complexity of traditional Malay society, its worldviews, and its place within the wider framework of human experience. Dr Liaw's A History of Classical Malay Literature will be of benefit to beginning students of Malay Literature and to established scholars alike. It can also be read with benefit by those with a wider interest in Comparative Literature and in Southeast Asian culture in general.

The very successful Oxford Reader's Companion series, described recently in the TLS as 'scholarly, ambitious and scrupulous', is now available in paperback. 'Lively and thorough' says the Library Journal of the Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad. Bringing together all of the best scholarship around on this compelling and complex figure in English literature, this handy paperback edition of thisCompanion will prove invaluable to students of 19th-century Victorian fiction.

Cormac McCarthy is a writer informed by an intense curiosity. His interests range from the natural world, to philosophy and religion, to history and culture. Cormac McCarthy in Context offers readers the opportunity to understand how various influences inform his rich body of work. The collection explores the relationship McCarthy has with his favourite authors, writers such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Other contexts are tremendously informative, including the American Romance tradition of the nineteenth century as well as modernity and the modernist literary movement. Influence and context are of absolute importance in understanding McCarthy, who is now being understood as one of the most significant authors of the contemporary period.

First Contact is just that, a place for teen or adult readers, to make a first foray into the world of science fiction and fantasy. There are classics in each category, as well as current titles popular with both younger and older teens. The designations M J S stand for either middle school, grades 6-8, junior high school, grades 7-8, or senior high school, grades 10-12. Rather than a comprehensive selection tool, this volume is a beginning reader's advisory book, a key to unlock the delicious array of imaginative writings that one finds in these challenging genres.

Showcases Ezra Pound's close involvement with the arts throughout his career The present volume of new, interdisciplinary scholarship investigates the arts with which Pound had a lifelong interaction including architecture, ballet, cinema, music, painting, photography and sculpture. Divided into 5 historically and thematically arranged sections, the 28 chapters foreground the shifting significance of art forms throughout Pound's life which he spent in London, Paris, Rapallo and Washington. The Companion maps Pound's practices of engagement with the arts, deepening areas of study that have recently emerged, such as his musical compositions. At the same time, it opens up new fields, particularly Pound's interaction with the performing arts: opera, dance, and cinema. The volume demonstrates overall that Ezra Pound was no mere spectator of the modernist revolution in the arts; rather he was an agent of change, a doer and promoter who also had a deep emotional response to the arts. Key Features: The first book to gather together all the different aspects of the subject of Pound and the arts Chapters are devoted to topics never covered before: (cinema; political anarchism; early music; Agnes Bedford; the artists Munch, Lekakis, Martinelli, Frampton) Presents the ways Pound's interests and activities in the arts change over time in a continuous story, from his beginnings to his old age Includes portraits of friendships and short biographies of artists connected to Pound, showing his personal impact in the arts world

A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman.

Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature.

Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific War as fought by "Frogs" and "Toads," humanoid creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts. The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic strips from America's small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father's adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers, radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of progressive American educational reform, these violent comic stories, often in settings modeled on the artist's small Nebraska town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral conventions consistent with comic art's reputation for "outsider" or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kugler's thorough analysis of his father's adolescent art explains how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious, even shocking terms.

Pieces of Me is an anthology of Essays, Poems, Prose and Short Stories that expands throughout the course of the author's life. Topics range from God, life, death, to unrequited love.

This comprehensive collection of Italian tales in English encourages a revisitation of the fairy-tale canon in light of some of the most fascinating material that has often been excluded from it. In the United States, we tend to associate fairy tales with children and are most familiar with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Disney. But the first literary fairy tales appeared in Renaissance Italy, and long before the Grimms there was already a rich and sophisticated tradition that included hundreds of tales, including many of those today considered "classic." The authors featured in this volume have, over the centuries, explored and interrogated the intersections between elite and popular cultures and oral and literary narratives, just as they have investigated the ways in which fairy tales have been and continue to be rewritten as expressions of both collective identities and individual sensibilities. The fairy tale in its Italian incarnations provides a striking example of how this genre is a potent vehicle for expressing cultural aspirations and anxieties as well as for imagining different ways of narrating shared futures.

In the 1960s, as the underpinnings of society weakened, the traditional novel form seemed less suited to describe American reality. Theorists groped towards non-mimetic fiction as the tools that had sustained the novel since its birth--coherent characterization, linear plot, symbolism--became tools of New Journalism. "The New American Novel of Manners" explores the virtual reinvention of the novel of manners in America out of the same subjectivity that charged the works of New Journalism.

In place of the rigid social structures that never seemed to depict America, novelists such as Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane located America's modern-day manners in its semiotics, in the system of signs that envelops us--the blue jeans people wear, the fast food they eat, the decor of the bars they drink in and the rock-and-roll lyrics that play through memories. The new generation of mannerists describe lifestyles that are determined by words and images, by actions that are dictated by what has been read and seen, and patterns of behavior in which life is edited and fictionalized. Klinkowitz reveals a fiction that is once again capable of reflecting the way people live.

Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How are nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continuing to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like? Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts - including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry - Rachel Bryant explores how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same given geographical coordinates even while existing in distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. At the same time, she performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout.This commitment to listening is analogous to homing - the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that continuously seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were intentionally built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries.

Wordsworth's Reading 1800-1815, first published in 1996, lists all of the authors and (where possible) books known to have been read by William Wordsworth during the years which saw the composition of some of his greatest poetry, including Poems, in Two Volumes, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, The White Doe of Rylstone and The Excursion. The information is presented in an easy-to-use form, and includes dates of reading and full discussions of evidence. It draws on analyses of Wordsworth's manuscripts contained in current and forthcoming scholarly editions of his works, and incorporates hitherto unpublished research into the poet's intellectual development, including a thorough survey of manuscript materials. Together with Duncan Wu's companion-volume, Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1799, this is a most complete study of Wordsworth's reading, and it will be an essential reference tool for all scholars and students of his work.

The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory - profoundly impacted Irish and World Literature. Recent research has uncovered new archives of previously neglected texts and authors. Organized according to multiple categories, ranging from single author to genre and theme, this volume allows readers to imagine multiple ways of re-mapping this crucial period. The book incorporates different, even competing, approaches and interpretations to reflect emerging trends and current debates in contemporary scholarship. As ongoing research in the field of Irish studies discovers new materials and critical strategies for interpreting them, our sense of Irish literary history during this period is constantly shifting. This volume seeks to capture the richness and complexity of the years 1880-1940 for our current moment.

Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed from nineteenth-century literature and Socialist Realism. Sorokin became famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books in 2002 and he picked up neo-nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses in his dystopian novels of the 2000s and 2010s, making him one of the fiercest critics of Russia's "new middle ages," while remaining steadfast in his dismantling of foreign discourses.

Bringing together seventy-one newly commissioned original chapters by literary specialists and musicologists, this book presents the most recent interdisciplinary research into literature and music. In five parts, the chapters cover the Middle Ages to the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of these two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture.This trailblazing companion charts and extends the work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.

Critics have long recognized the links between community festivals and literary art. The comedies and tragedies of the ancient Greeks grew out of their festivals; Anglo-Saxon poetry was often read at festival occasions; and the structural patterns of renaissance drama are inseparable from their festive origins. In "The Life of the Party," Christopher Ames argues that the private party has become the festival of modern culture and has served as a shaping force in the fiction of many important twentieth century writers.
Drawing upon and extending theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, Ames contends that parties have inherited much of the spirit and social function of festivals and carnivals. In these "controlled transgressions," ordinary rules of behavior are set aside for a short time, permitting excess and including (usually in veiled form) a ritual encounter with death, as well as a cathartic return to the normal social order when the party ends.
In the experimental fiction of James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, the mingling of many voices at the party challenges both social and narrative decorum. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green, the party becomes a microcosm of a decadent society and informs a festive vision characteristic of the literature that emerged between the wars. And in postmodern works by Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, the novelists celebrate the disruptive and liberating force of parties even as they illustrate the dangers of chaos through scenes of the party-gone-wild.
With its creative application of literary theory and ethnographic studies of festival, "The Life of the Party" demonstrates the persistence of the festive vision and its significance in the evolution of modern fiction.

Provides a comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fiction.

Starting in 1949, John W. Bonner Jr. compiled an annual annotated bibliography of books by Georgia writers for the "Georgia Review." Published in 1966, this volume contains sixteen years of publications by native-born Georgian authors and authors who had lived in the state for at least five years. Books are listed by author, title, publisher, date, and price of the work. The annotations are descriptive rather than critical, intended to outline what type of material is contained in the books. A complete index by author is included.

This was the first bibliography and guide to the American mass market paperback book, and it remains one of the most definitive. The major index is by author, and lists: author, title, publisher, book number, year of publication, and cover price. The title index lists titles and authors only. The publisher index provides a history of that imprint, with addresses, number ranges, and general physical description of the books issued. This is the place that all study of the American paperback must begin.

James Baldwin in Context provides a wide-ranging collection of approaches to the work of an essential black American author who is just as relevant now as he was during his turbulent heyday in the mid-twentieth century. The perspectives range from those who knew Baldwin personally, to scholars who have dedicated decades to studying him, to a new generation of scholars for whom Baldwin is nearly a historical figure. This collection complements the ever-growing body of scholarship on Baldwin by combining traditional inroads into his work, such as music and expatriation, with new approaches, such as intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, are well known English poets and novelists of the nineteenth century. This volume closely examines Charlotte's masterpiece Jane Eyre, Emily's influential Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to give readers a deeper sense of the themes throughout these important works and the influences behind their creation. Common themes throughout the sisters' works are love, gender, class, and the intersections of all three, and this volume explores these topics and more, setting the work of the Bronte sisters into various contexts, such as biographical, historical, social, cultural, and aesthetic.

The years between 1850 and 1930 witnessed the first large-scale migration of peoples from East Asia and South Asia to North America and the emergence of the US as an imperial power in the Pacific. This period also produced the first instances of Asian North American writing, theater, and film. This exciting collection examines how the many literary and cultural works from this period approached questions of migration, exclusion, and identity. Covering an extensive ranges of topics including anticolonialist writing, the erotics of queer modernist poetry, interracial desire, and the racial gaze in silent film, the book shows the diverse and multi-ethnic nature of literary and cultural production at a crucial period in modern formations of race as well as literary and cultural aesthetics.