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.

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.

In THE ART OF DISCWORLD, Terry Pratchett takes us on a guided tour of the Discworld, courtesy of his favourite Discworld artist, Paul Kidby. Following on from THE LAST HERO, THE ART OF DISCWORLD is a lavish 112-page large format, sumptuously illustrated look at all things Discworldian. Terry Pratchett provides the written descriptions while Paul Kidby illustrates the world that has made Pratchett one of the best-selling authors of all time. Here you will find favourites old and new: the City Watch, including Vimes, Carrot and Angua, the three witches - Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick - and the denizens of the Unseen University Library, not forgetting the Librarian, of course: they're all here in sumptuous colour, together with the places: Ankh-Morpork, Lancre, Uberwald and more ...No Discworld fan will want to be without this beautiful gift book.

"Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing." "The fool wonders, the wise man asks." "Comedy is tragedy plus time." "Friends are the sunshine of life." It is hard to imagine a more convenient reference--and a more engaging book to browse in--than The Little Oxford Dictionary ofQuotations. Here at your fingertips are over 4,000 of the best things ever said on more than 300 topics. From Actors to Writing by way of America, Children, Cinema, Last Words, Marriage, Politicians, Sex, and Taxes, it only takes a moment to find the perfect witticism, bon mot, or sage adage to suit any occasion.
Full of snappy one-liners and the world's greatest ideas, this stimulating volume ranges from the wisdom of the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great philosophers to the more modern meditations of Bona, J. K. Rowling, and George W. Bush. There is Yogi Berra's immortal "The future ain't what it used to be," Robert Louis Stevenson's "Wine is bottled poetry," and Lao Tzu's "A good traveler has no fixed plans." From literature to the law, music to the movies, readers will find an abundance of classic quotes and little known gems to enliven their speeches, conversation, reports and correspondence. And to make this volume even easier to use, a full index allows readers to search the text by author as well as theme.
The fifth edition has many new themes--including Africa, Facts, Honesty, India, Insight, Kissing, Persistence, Wisdom, Wit--and over 400 new quotations. Concise, convenient, authoritative, and affordable, The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations allows readers to keep a traveling data base of entertainment and information right in their pocket. It's as handy as it is indispensable--the perfect reference for home, school, and office.

*A TIME, New Yorker, Financial Times and History Today Book of the Year* 'Hilarious' Sam Leith 'I loved this book' Susie Dent' 'Witty and affectionate' Lynne Truss Perfect for book lovers, a delightful history of the wonders to be found in the humble book index Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.

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 New View from Cane River features ten in-depth essays that provide fresh, diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin's first novel, At Fault. While much critical work on the author prioritizes her famous, groundbreaking second book, The Awakening, its 1890 predecessor remains a fascinating text that presents a complicated moral universe, including a plot that involves divorce, alcoholism, and murder set in the aftermath of the Civil War. Edited by Chopin scholar Heather Ostman, the essays in The New View from Cane River provide multiple approaches for understanding this complex work, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Reconstruction era and its effects on race, gender, and economics in Louisiana. Original perspectives introduced by the contributors include discussions of Chopin's treatment of privilege, sexology, and Unitarianism, as well as what At Fault reveals about the early stages of literary modernism and the reading audiences of late nineteenth-century America. This overdue reconsideration of an overlooked novel gives enthusiastic readers, students, and instructors an opportunity for new encounters with a cherished American author.

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.

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.

What happens to literature in an age of digital technology? Regards Croises: Perspectives on Digital Literature provides an answer, with a collection of cutting-edge critical essays on literature gone digital. Regards Croises is an important addition to existing research on digital literature, and will appeal to scholars of electronic writing, digital art, humanities computing, media and communication, and others interested in the field. It offers a significant advance in the field through its wide-angle perspective that globalizes digital literature and diversifies the current critical paradigms. Regards Croises shows how digital literature connects with traditions and future directions of reading and writing communities all over the world. With contributions by authors from eight countries and three continents, the collection presents points of view on a transcontinental practice of digital literature. Regards Croises also opens dialogues with expanded critical paradigms of digital literature, beyond earlier critical concern with the aesthetics of the screen as a space of hypertext links. Many of the essays recognize a rich history and ongoing literary practice engaged with the basic fact of the computer as a programmable device. Other essays explore the latest developments in social media and Web 2.0 as venues for digital literature. Regards Croises shows the vibrant engagement of writers and readers with literary practice in a digital world.

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.

Set in the South of France during the waning days of the French Revolution and the early years of Napoleonic rule, The Rover (1923) is the last novel that Conrad completed in his lifetime. A popular success on its publication, it explores, against the backdrop of dramatic political change and the Anglo-French hostilities leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar, the themes of personal and national identity, loyalty and love. The 'Introduction' situates the novel in Conrad's career and traces its sources and contemporary reception. Explanatory notes illuminate literary and historical references and indicate Conrad's sources. The essay on the text and the apparatus lay out the history of the work's composition and publication, detail the interventions in the text by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors and explain editorial policy. This edition of The Rover, established through modern textual scholarship, presents the novel in a form more authoritative than any so far printed.

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.

In conferring upon Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) the 2013 Rea Award for the Short Story, the jury said that at the then age of ninety-two, she "has thrived at the height of her powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters." Over a celebrated six-decade career, Spencer published every type of literary fiction: novels and short stories, a memoir, and a play. Like her best-known work, The Light in the Piazza, most of her narratives explore the inner lives of restless, searching southern women. Yet one mercurial male character, Edward Glenn, deserves attention for the way he insists on returning to her pages. Speaking of Edward in unusually personal terms, Spencer admitted a strong attraction to his type: the elusive, intelligent southern man, "maybe an unresolved part of my psyche." In The Edward Tales, Sally Greene brings together the four narratives in which Edward figures: the play For Lease or Sale (1989) and three short stories, "The Runaways" (1994), "Master of Shongalo" (1996), and "Return Trip" (2009). The collection allows readers to observe Spencer's evolving style while offering glimpses of the moral reasoning that lies at the heart of all her work. Greene's critical introduction helpfully places these narratives within the context of Spencer's entire body of writing. The Edward Tales confirms Spencer's place as one of our most beloved and accomplished writers.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot includes several new chapters, providing an essential introduction to all aspects of Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and original insights into the work of one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century, author most famously of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. From an introduction that traces her originality as a realist novelist, the book moves on to extensive considerations of each of Eliot's novels, her life and her publishing history. Chapters address the problems of money, philosophy, religion, politics, gender and science, as they are developed in her novels. With its supplementary materials, including a chronology and an extensive section of suggested readings, this Companion is an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

Consider this handbook your education. Hunter 101. And don't go thinking you got off easy just because there's not a pop quiz at the end. This is the good stuff. The real deal. In here you'll find out all there is to know about being a Dark-Hunter.
Now for the disclaimer: This book is mutable. It goes with the wind. It changes more often than the mind of a sixteen-year-old Gemini with a closet full of clothes and a date in an hour. Don't be surprised if you open it up for the thirty-five thousandth time and find something old, something new, something borrowed or. . .well you get the point.
Curl up in a comfy chair with some millennium-old scotch and feast upon the informative banquet I have prepared for your enjoyment.
Welcome to your new life.
---From the "Dark-Hunter Companion"

'A vital and timely introduction to some of the best books I've ever read. Perfectly curated and filled with brilliant literature' Nikesh Shukla 'The ultimate introduction to post-colonial literature for those who want to understand the classics and the pioneers in this exciting area of books' Symeon Brown These are the books you should read. This is the canon. Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay have curated a decolonized reading list that celebrates the wide and diverse experiences of people from around the world, of all backgrounds and all races. It disrupts the all-too-often white-dominated 'required reading' collections that have become the accepted norm and highlights powerful voices and cultural perspectives that demand a place on our shelves. From literary giants such as Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe to less well known (but equally vital) writers such as Caribbean novelist Earl Lovelace or Indigenous Australian author Tony Birch, the novels recommended here are in turn haunting and lyrical; innovative and inspiring; edgy and poignant. The power of great fiction is that readers have the opportunity to discover new worlds and encounter other beliefs and opinions. This is the Canon offers a rich and multifaceted perspective on our past, present and future which deserves to be read by all bibliophiles - whether they are book club members or solitary readers, self-educators or teachers.

Robert Morgan (b. 1944) is one of the most distinguished writers in southern and Appalachian literature, celebrated for his novels, poetry, short fiction, and historical and biographical writing, totaling more than thirty volumes. Morgan's work gives voice to the traditionally underrepresented people of southern Appalachia, and his appearances in such popular venues as The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and the New York Times Bestseller List have contributed to his wide readership and successful dismantling of Hollywood stereotypes that still dog the region in the nation's larger consciousness. His writing makes a case for the dignity of work, the beauty and terror of the landscape, and the essential value of creating a community and learning to live in the world. The interviews in Conversations with Robert Morgan provide readers and scholars the first stand-alone book on Morgan's long and fascinating career as a master of multiple genres, and make a significant contribution to the understanding of American, southern, and Appalachian literature and culture. Collected here are five decades of interviews that cover such topics as literary influence, the impact of war on family and community, poetic and narrative craft, the role of environmentalism in American literature, and the journey from impoverished North Carolina mountain boy to award-winning Ivy League professor. Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1971. Readers will learn about writing across multiple genres, craft that can be learned and practiced by a writer, and studying the past for those present truths that create what Morgan values most in literature, "a community across time.

In this work, Rosenberg insists again and again that only the individual reader or actor can determine Shakespeare's design of Hamlet's characterand of the play. To interpret Hamlet's words and actions at the many crises, the reader needs to double in the role of actor, imagining the character from the inside and observing from the outside. Winner of the Theatre Library Association Award for 1993.

In this deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century work, William Dowling analyzes Boswell's Life of Johnson as a paradigm of antithetical structure in narrative, and develops a grammar of discontinuity" for interpreting other texts as well. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature.

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was Ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos' translation (or what he calls a 'transcreation') of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos' GalAxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized. The volume is divided into three parts. 'Essays' unites seven texts by renowned scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance by exploring explore the historical background and the different stylistic and cultural influences on the authors, ranging from Latin America and Europe to India and the U.S. The second section, 'Remembrances,' collects four experiences of interaction with Haroldo de Campos in the process of transcreating Paz's poem and working on Transblanco and GalAxias. In the last section, 'Poems,' five poets of international standing--Jerome Rothenberg, Antonio Cicero, Keijiro Suga, AndrE Vallias, and Charles Bernstein--share their creations that demonstrate influence by and dialogue with the work of Paz and de Campos. Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted. This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

The publication of Sanyika Shakur's "Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Membe"r in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles--"New York Times" book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a "shocking and galvanic book"--and set off a new publishing trend of gang memoirs in the 1990s. The memoirs showcased tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging but also offered many of the first journalistic and autobiographical accounts of the much-mythologized gang subculture.In "The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs," Josephine Metcalf focuses on three of these memoirs--Shakur's "Monster"; Luis J. Rodriguez's "Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A."; and Stanley "Tookie" Williams's "Blue Rage, Black Redemption"--as key representatives of the gang autobiography. Metcalf examines the conflict among violence, thrilling sensationalism, and the authorial desire to instruct and warn competing within these works. The narrative arcs of the memoirs themselves rest on the process of conversion from brutal, young gang bangers to nonviolent, enlightened citizens.

Metcalf analyzes the emergence, production, marketing, and reception of gang memoirs. Through interviews with Rodriguez, Shakur, and Barbara Cottman Becnel (Williams's editor), Metcalf reveals both the writing and publishing processes. This book analyzes key narrative conventions, specifically how diction, dialogue, and narrative arcs shape the works. The book also explores how the memoirs are consumed. This interdisciplinary study--fusing literary criticism, sociology, ethnography, reader-response study, and editorial theory--brings scholarly attention to a popular, much-discussed, but understudied modern expression.

In Bowing to Elephants, a woman seeking love and authenticity comes to understand herself as a citizen of the world through decades of wandering the globe. During her travels she sees herself more clearly as she gazes into the feathery eyes of a 14,000-pound African elephant and looks for answers to old questions in Vietnam and the tragically ravaged landscape of Cambodia. Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist the story of an unloved rich girl from San Francisco who becomes a travel junkie, searching for herself in the world to avoid the tragic fate of her narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Haunted by images of childhood loneliness and the need to learn about her world, Dimond journeys to far-flung places into the perfumed chaos of India, the nostalgic, damp streets of Paris, the gray, watery world of Venice in the winter, the reverent and silent mountains of Bhutan, and the gold temples of Burma. In the end, she accepts the death of the mother she never really had and finds peace and her authentic self in the refuge of Buddhist practice.