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.

An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholars This book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar. Christopher Prendergast, one of today's most distinguished authorities on French literature, has gathered a transatlantic group of more than thirty leading scholars who provide original essays on carefully selected writers, works, and topics that open a window onto key chapters of French literary history. The book begins in the sixteenth century with the formation of a modern national literary consciousness, and ends in the late twentieth century with the idea of the "national" coming increasingly into question as inherited meanings of "French" and "Frenchness" expand beyond the geographical limits of mainland France. * Provides an exciting new account of French literary history from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century* Features more than thirty original essays on key writers, works, and topics, written by a distinguished transatlantic group of scholars* Includes an introduction and index The contributors include Etienne Beaulieu, Christopher Braider, Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Caws, David Coward, Nicholas Cronk, Edwin M. Duval, Mary Gallagher, Raymond Geuss, Timothy Hampton, Nicholas Harrison, Katherine Ibbett, Michael Lucey, Susan Maslan, Eric Mechoulan, Hassan Melehy, Larry F. Norman, Nicholas Paige, Roger Pearson, Christopher Prendergast, Jean-Michel Rabate, Timothy J. Reiss, Sarah Rocheville, Pierre Saint-Amand, Clive Scott, Catriona Seth, Judith Sribnai, Joanna Stalnaker, Aleksandar Stevi?, Kate E. Tunstall, Steven Ungar, and Wes Williams.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in three volumes in 1886, The Princess Casamassima follows Hyacinth Robinson, a young London craftsman who carries the stigma of his illegitimate birth, and his French mother's murder of his patrician English father. Deeply impressed by the poverty around him, he is driven to association with political dissidents and anarchists including the charismatic Princess Casamassima - who embodies the problems of personal and political loyalty by which Hyacinth is progressively torn apart. This edition is the first to provide a full account of the context in which the book was composed and received. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand its nuanced historical, cultural and literary references, and its complex textual history.

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary tradition. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

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.

Here, for the first time in English, is celebrated French classicist Jacques Jouanna's magisterial account of the life and work of Sophocles. Exhaustive and authoritative, this acclaimed book combines biography and detailed studies of Sophocles' plays, all set in the rich context of classical Greek tragedy and the political, social, religious, and cultural world of Athens's greatest age, the fifth century. Sophocles was the commanding figure of his day. The author of Oedipus Rex and Antigone, he was not only the leading dramatist but also a distinguished politician, military commander, and religious figure. And yet the evidence about his life has, until now, been fragmentary. Reconstructing a lost literary world, Jouanna has finally assembled all the available information, culled from inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and later sources. He also offers a huge range of new interpretations, from his emphasis on the significance of Sophocles' political and military offices (previously often seen as honorary) to his analysis of Sophocles' plays in the mythic and literary context of fifth-century drama. Written for scholars, students, and general readers, this book will interest anyone who wants to know more about Greek drama in general and Sophocles in particular. With an extensive bibliography and useful summaries not only of Sophocles' extant plays but also, uniquely, of the fragments of plays that have been partially lost, it will be a standard reference in classical studies for years to come.

In addition to being a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist, Langston Hughes was also a globe-trotting cosmopolitan, travel writer, translator, avid international networker, and-perhaps above all-pan-Africanist. In Cultural Entanglements, Shane Graham examines Hughes's associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognizing these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence. Graham isolates and maps Hughes's cluster of black Atlantic relations and interprets their significance. Moving chronologically through Hughes's career from the 1920s to the 1960s, he spotlights Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay, Haitian novelist and poet Jacques Roumain, French Negritude author Aime Cesaire of Martinique, South African writers Es'kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams, and Caribbean American novelist Paule Marshall. Taken collectively, these writers' intellectual relationships with Hughes and with one another reveal a complex conversation-and sometimes a heated debate-happening globally throughout the twentieth century over what Africa signified and what it meant to be black in the modern world. Graham makes a truly original contribution not only to the study of Langston Hughes and African and Caribbean literatures but also to contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism, the black Atlantic, and transnational cultures.

The fourteen essays in Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain showcase the eye-opening potential of a food lens within colonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and studies of power dynamics, nationalisms and nation building, theories of embodiment, and identity. In short, Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain grapples with an emerging field in need of a foundational text, and does so from multiple angles. The studies span from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and the contributing scholars occupy diverse fields within Latin American and Hispanic Studies. As such, their essays showcase eclectic critical and theoretical approaches to the subject of Latin American and Iberian food. Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain also introduces the first English-language publication of works from such award-winning scholars as Adolfo Castanon of the Mexican Academy of Language; Sergio Ramirez, winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Literature; and Carmen Simon Palmer, winner of the 2015 Julian Marias Prize for Research.

An essential quick-reference book for students of Gothic literature, theatre and literary theory'Key Concepts in the Gothic' provides a one-stop resource which details and defines, in accessible language, those contexts essential for the study of the Gothic in all periods and media. The volume is divided into three sections: Concepts and Terms; Theories of the Gothic; and Key Fictional Texts. Bibliographies are provided with the last two sections. The book clearly explains the critical terms from 'Ab-human' to 'Zombie' as well as the main theories, including ecocriticism, queer theory and Postcolonial theory, which any student of the Gothic is likely to encounter. This book will be a reliable companion for students of the genre from school and through university.Key FeaturesCovers the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the presentProvides a comprehensive survey not just of movements and theories but also of the essential terminology used in Gothic StudiesA reference work for those working with genres inflected by the Gothic, such as Romanticism, theatre studies and crime writingProvides a readily accessible resource for developing further research

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

A fresh, twenty-first-century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive, and multicultural sense. Australian literature is one of the world's richest, dealing not only with "local" Australian themes and issues but with those at the forefront of global literary discussion. This book offers a fresh look at Australian literature,taking a broad view of what literature is and viewing it with Australian cultural and societal concerns in mind. Especially relevant is the heightened role of indigenous people and issues following the landmark 1992 Mabo decision on Aboriginal land rights. But attention to other multicultural connections and the competing pull of Australia's continued connection to Great Britain are also enlightening. Chapters are devoted to internationally prominent writers such as Patrick White, Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Christina Stead; fast-rising authors such as Gerald Murnane and Tim Winton; less-publicized writers such as Xavier Herbert and Dorothy Hewett; and on prose fiction,poetry, and drama, women's and gay and lesbian writing, children's literature, and science fiction. The Companion goes beyond Eurocentric ideas of national literary history to reveal the full, resplendent variety of Australian writing. Contributors: Nicholas Birns, Rebecca McNeer, Ali Gumillya Baker, Gus Worby, Anita Heiss, Ruth Feingold, Wenche Ommundsen, Susan Jacobowitz, Deborah Madsen, Marguerite Nolan, Tanya Dalziell, Richard Carr, David McCooey, Maryrose Casey, Brigid Rooney, John Beston, John Scheckter, Werner Senn, Carolyn Bliss, Paul Genono, Lyn Jacobs, Nicole Moore, Ouyang Yu, Jaroslav Kusnir, Brigid Magner, Russel Blackford, Toni Johnson-Woods, Theodore F. Sheckels, Alice Mills, Gary Clark, Damien Barlow, Leigh Dale Nicholas Birns teaches literature at the New School in New York City and is the editor of Antipodes. Rebecca McNeer is Associate Dean Emerita at Ohio University Southern.

The Blackademic Life critically examines academic fictions produced by black writers. In it, Lavelle Porter evaluates the depiction of academic and campus life in literature as a space for black writers to produce counternarratives that celebrate the potentials of black intelligence and argue for the importance of black higher education, particularly in the humanistic tradition. Beginning with an examination of W. E. B. Du Bois's creative writing as the source of the first black academic novels, Porter looks at the fictional representations of black intellectual life and the expectations that are placed on faculty and students to be racial representatives and spokespersons, whether or not they ever intended to be. The final chapter examines blackademics on stage and screen, including in the 2014 academic film Dear White People and the groundbreaking television series A Different World.

Adventure is just a book away as best-selling author Nancy Pearl returns with recommended reading for more than 120 destinations around the globe. "Book Lust To Go" connects the best fiction and nonfiction to particular destinations, whether your bags are packed or your armchair is calling. With stops from Texas to Timbuktu, Nancy Pearl's reading recommendations will send you on your way.

What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Who are we, and can we strike a balance between an emphasis on our divergent ethnic origins and what we have in common? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines our evolving understanding of ourselves as an Anglo-American nation to a multicultural one and the key role writing has played in that process. Challenges of Diversity contains stories of American myths of arrival (pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, slave ships at Jamestown, steerage passengers at Ellis Island), the powerful rhetoric of egalitarian promise in the Declaration of Independence and the heterogeneous ends to which it has been put, and the recurring tropes of multiculturalism over time (e pluribus unum, melting pot, cultural pluralism). Sollors suggests that although the transformation of this settler country into a polyethnic and self-consciously multicultural nation may appear as a story of great progress toward the fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, deepening economic inequality actually exacerbates the divisions among Americans today.

John Donne was a writer of dazzling extremes. He was a notorious rake and eloquent preacher; he wrote poems of tender intimacy, and lyrics of gross misogyny. This book offers a comprehensive account of early modern life and culture as it relates to Donne's richly varied body of work. Short, lively, and accessible chapters written by leading experts in early modern studies shed light on Donne's literary career, language and works as well as exploring the social and intellectual contexts of his writing and its reception from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. These chapters provide the depth of interpretation that Donne demands, and the range of knowledge that his prodigiously learned works elicit. Supported by a chronology of Donne's life and works and a comprehensive bibliography, this volume is a major new contribution to the study and criticism on the age of Donne and his writing.

**Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year** The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in the world. Spanning 4,000 years from the legends of Ancient Mesopotamia to the poetry of the First World War, with Greek tragedies, Icelandic sagas, Japanese epics and much more in between, it encompasses 500 authors and 1,200 books, bringing these to life with lively descriptions, literary connections and beautiful cover designs.

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias that emerged following the Iraq War. Individual chapters on SFT from Korean, Czech, Finnish, and eleven other source languages feature an introduction by an expert in the language's speculative fiction tradition and its present-day output. Cordasco then breaks down each chapter by subgenre--including science fiction, fantasy, and horror--to guide readers toward the kinds of works that most interest them. Her discussion of available SFT stands alongside an analysis of how various subgenres emerged and developed in a given language. She also examines the reasons a given subgenre has been translated into English. An informative and one-of-a-kind guide, Out of This World offers readers and scholars alike a tour of speculative fiction's new globalized era.

This book builds upon critical reevaluations of modernism and British literature of the 1930s with a simultaneous focus on discourses of race, gender, and empire. The essays direct attention to the complications and ambivalence accumulating around the meanings of Englishness. They reject analyses of texts as chronicles of personal psychological development in favor of analyses that assume texts are shaped by their authors' public intellectual involvement. In addition, they offer detailed, specific explorations of ways in which British women in the 1930s narrativize empire and war. Thus they will resonate with significance for readers in the early twenty-first century for women empire and war, as well as terror and security, are part of the discourse of everyday life.

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading - and its power to consume and enchant - more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures. Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Fielding's Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Burney's The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

Best known for his masterpiece Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-invented fiction and non-fiction for a generation with his groundbreaking and original work. Wallace's desire to blend formal innovation and self-reflexivity with the communicative and restorative function of literature resulted in works that appeal as much to a reader's intellect as they do emotion. As such, few writers in recent memory have quite matched his work's intense critical and popular impact. The essays in this Companion, written by top Wallace scholars, offer a historical and cultural context for grasping Wallace's significance, provide rigorous individual readings of each of his major works, whether story collections, non-fiction, or novels, and address the key themes and concerns of these works, including aesthetics, politics, religion and spirituality, race, and post-humanism. This wide-ranging volume is a necessary resource for understanding an author now widely regarded as one of the most influential and important of his time.

This is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of the acclaimed Australian-born, New York-based author. In the course of the last half century, Hazzard's writing has crossed and re-crossed the terrain of love, war, beauty, politics and ethics. Hazzard's oeuvre effortlessly reflects and represents the author's life and times, encapsulating the prominent feelings, anxieties and questions of the second half of the 20th century. It is these qualities, along with Hazzard's lyrical style that place her among the most noteworthy Australian writers of the 20th century. Hazzard's work has been duly praised and admired by many including the critic Bryan Appleyard who describes her as 'the greatest living writer on goodness and love'. In 2011, novelist Richard Ford observed: 'If there has to be one best writer working in English today it's Shirley Hazzard'.

Celebrated as a novelist and made famous by her novel Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942) is far less known for also writing and publishing hundreds of poems over a period of half a century.Although this output included a chapbook and a full-length collection in which she presented herself primarily as a nature poet, most of her poems appeared in periodicals, including women's magazines, farm papers, faith-based periodicals, daily and weekly newspapers, and magazines for children. As a shrewd businesswoman, she learned to find the balance between literary quality and commercial saleability and continued to publish poetry even though it paid less than short fiction. A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894-1921, the second volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, gathers a selection of fifty poems originally published across a twenty-five-year period. Benjamin Lefebvre organizes this work within the context of Montgomery's life and career, claiming her not only as a nature poet but also as the author of a wider range of "songs": of place, of memory, of lamentation, of war, of land and sea, of death, and of love. Many of these poems echo motifs that readers of Montgomery's novels will recognize, and many more explore surprising perspectives through the use of male speakers. These poems offer today's readers a new facet of the career of Canada's most enduringly popular author.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge, scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. Booksellers, authors, and academics have been talking about world literature since Goethe made the term fashionable in the early nineteenth century. Yet amidst all the talk of books that 'circulate' and literature as a kind of universal property that can function as a 'window on the world', how do we account for the people who live in real places, and who write, translate, market, and read the texts that travel on these global journeys? World Authorship breaks new ground by showing how to bring together the real-world contexts of authorship with the literary worlds of fiction. Written by world-leading academics and creative professionals including authors, translators, publishers, editors, prize jurors, and literary festival organizers, World Authorship updates Michael Foucault's 'author function' by significantly expanding the network of people and practices involved in literature. It covers keyword aspects of world authorship, grounding them in the study of actual literary texts to illuminate how literature is shared and made in different parts of the world and at different times in history. At the heart of all contributions, however, is one key question: where is the human element in world literature? By covering everything from 'Beginnings' to 'Voice', World Authorship provides the answer.