The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.

Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers both essential background to the understanding of this material and sixteen chapters by leading scholars which are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide range of fascinating but now little-known texts to the handful of more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More's Utopia, Milton's Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus. All Latin is translated throughout the volume.

The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature emphasizes the importance of understanding Latina/o literature not simply as a US ethnic phenomenon but more broadly as an important element of a trans-American literary imagination. Engaging with the dynamics of migration, linguistic and cultural translation, and the uneven distribution of resources across the Americas that characterize Latina/o literature, the essays in this History provide a critical overview of key texts, authors, themes, and contexts as discussed by leading scholars in the field. This book demonstrates the relevance of Latina/o literature for a world defined by the migration of people, commodities, and cultural expressions.

Focusing on the core assessment objectives for GCSE English Literature 9-1, The Quotation Bank takes 25 of the most important quotations from the text and provides detailed material for each quotation, covering interpretations, literary techniques and detailed analysis. Also included is a sample answer, detailed essay plans, revision activities and a comprehensive glossary of relevant literary terminology, all in a clear and practical format to enable effective revision and ultimate exam confidence.

Reveals the secrets and stories that lie beneath the surface of Watson's narratives The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told, or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson's narratives and Holmes's often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle's life and works, and Doyle's literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war, and secrecy. Key Features New insights into the ever-popular Holmes stories New contexts for late-Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction, from forgotten scandals to the social controversies of the age A literary-critical approach to these popular works that is both scholarly and accessible

The third edition of The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature is the complete and authoritative reference guide to the classical world and its literary heritage. It not only presents the reader with all the essential facts about the authors, tales, and characters from ancient myth and literature, but it also places these details in the wider contexts of the history and society of the Greek and Roman worlds. With an extensive web of cross-references and a useful chronological table and location maps (all of which have been brought fully up to date), this volume traces the development of literary forms and the classical allusions which have become embedded in our Western culture.
Extensively revised and updated since the second edition was published in 1989, the Companion acknowledges changes in the focus of scholarship over the last twenty years, through the incorporation of a far larger number of thematic entries such as medicine, friendship, science, freedom (concept of), and sexuality. These topical entries provide an excellent starting point to the exploration of their subjects in classical literature; after all, for many aspects of classical society the literature we have inherited is the primary (and sometimes the only) source material. Additions and changes have been made taking into account the advice of teachers and lecturers in Classics, ensuring that current educational needs are catered for.
In addition to newly covered topics, the Companion still plays to its traditional strengths, with extensive biographies of classical literary figures from Aeschylus to Zeno; entries on a multitude of literary styles from biography and rhetoric to lyric poetry and epic, encompassing everything in between; and character entries and plot summaries for the major figures and myths in the classical canon. It is the ideal guide for students in Classics, and for all who are passionate about the vast and varied literary tradition bequeathed to us from the classical world.

How have African American writers drawn on bad men and black boys as creative touchstones for their evocative and vibrant art? This is the question posed by Howard Rambsy's new book, which explores bad men as a central, recurring, and understudied figure in African American literature, and music. By focusing on how various iterations of the black bad man figure serve as creative muse and inspiration for literary production, Rambsy puts a wide variety of contemporary African American literary and cultural works in conversation with creativity research for the first time. Employing concepts such as playfulness, productivity, divergent thinking, and problem finding, Rambsy examines the works of a wide range of writers-including Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Paul Beatty, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tyehimba Jess, Trymaine Lee, Adrian Matejka, Aaron McGruder, Evie Shockley, and Kevin Young-who have drawn on notions of bad black men and boys to create innovative and challenging works in a variety of genres. Through groundbreaking readings, Rambsy demonstrates the fruitfulness of viewing black literary art through the lens of the field of creativity research.

Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is amongst the most acclaimed and widely studied of contemporary authors. The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee provides a compelling introduction for new readers, as well as fresh perspectives and provocations for those long familiar with Coetzee's works. All of Coetzee's published novels and autobiographical fictions are discussed at length, and there is extensive treatment of his translations, scholarly books and essays, and volumes of correspondence. Confronting Coetzee's works on the grounds of his practice, the chapters address his craft, his literary relations and horizons, and the relationship between his writings and other arts, disciplines and institutions. Written by an international team of contributors, this Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to this important writer, establishes new avenues of discovery, and explains Coetzee's undiminished ability to challenge and surprise his readers with inventive works of striking power and intensity.

Print culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites is organized around these sometimes chaotic and often generative forms and their most famous practitioners: Edgar Allan Poe and the magazine review; Ralph Waldo Emerson and the quarterly essay; Rufus Wilmot Griswold and the literary anthology; Margaret Fuller and the newspaper book review; and Frederick Douglass's editorial repurposing of criticism from other sources. Revealing the many and frequently competing uses of criticism beyond evaluation and aesthetics, this insightful study offers a new vision of antebellum criticism, a new model of critical history, and a powerful argument for the centrality of literary criticism to modern life.

As animals recede from our world, what tale is being told by literature's creatures? Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings examines incongruous animals in the works of four major contemporary French writers: an airborne horse in a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, extinct orangutans in Eric Chevillard, stray dogs in Marie NDiaye, vanishing (bits of) hedgehogs in Marie Darrieussecq. Resisting naturalist assumptions that an animal in a story is simply-literally or metaphorically-an animal, Thangam Ravindranathan understands it rather as the location of something missing. The animal is a lure: an unfinished figure fleeing the frame, crossing bounds of period, genre, even medium and language. Its flight traces an exorbitant (self-)portrait in which thinking admits to its commerce with life and flesh. It is in its animals, at the same time unbearably real and exquisitely unreal, that literature may today be closest to philosophy. This book's primary focus is the contemporary French novel and continental philosophy. In addition to Toussaint, Chevillard, NDiaye, and Darrieussecq, it engages the work of Jean de La Fontaine, Eadweard Muybridge, Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett, and Francis Ponge.

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking rights seriously has never been more urgent. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written as a contribution to this vital debate. Each moreover is written in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, reaching across the myriad constitutive disciplines of law, literature and the humanities in order to present an array of alternative perspectives on the nature and meaning of human rights in the modern world. The taking of human rights seriously, it will be suggested, depends just as much on taking seriously the idea of the human as it does the idea of rights.

Professor Quinones describes significant stages in the development of literary Modernism, redefining the period as extending from about 1900 to 1940, and beyond, and not as an entity centered on the 1920s. Originally published in 1985. 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.

Professor Moynahan's object in this illuminating, critical survey has been to consider Lawrence entirely in his most important role...as the author of the novels and the shorter tales. To this end he traces the development of Lawrence's mastery of the novel. Originally published in 1963. 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.

Most contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and linguists think of language as basically a means by which speakers reveal their thoughts to others. Christopher Gauker calls this "the Lockean theory of language," since Locke was one of its early exponents, and he contends that it is fundamentally mistaken. The Lockean theory, he argues, cannot adequately explain the nature of the general concepts that words are supposed to express. In developing this theme, Gauker investigates a wide range of topics, including Locke's own views, contemporary theories of conceptual development, the nature of reference and logical validity, the nature of psychological explanation, and the division of epistemic labor in society. The Lockean theory contrasts with the conception of language as the medium of a distinctive kind of thinking. Gauker explains how language, so conceived, is possible as a means of cooperative interaction. He articulates the possibility and objectivity of a kind of non-conceptual thinking about similarities and causal relations, which allows him to explain how a simple language might be learned. He then takes on the problem of logical structure and gives a formally precise account of logical validity formulated in terms of "assertibility in a context" rather than in terms of truth. Finally, he describes the role that attributions of belief and meaning play in facilitating cooperative interaction. With lucid and persuasive arguments, his book challenges philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and logicians to rethink their fundamental assumptions about the nature of language. Originally published in 1994. 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.

Tragedy in the eighteenth century is often said to have expired or been deflected into nondramatic forms like history and satire, and to have survived mainly as a "tragic sense" in writers like Samuel Johnson. Leopold Damrosch shows that many readers were still capable of an imaginative response to tragedy. In Johnson, however, moral and aesthetic assumptions limited his ability to appreciate or create tragedy, despite a deep understanding of human suffering. This limitation, Mr. Damrosch argues, derived partly from his Christian belief, and more largely from a view of reality that did not allow exclusive focus on its tragic aspects. The author discusses Irene, The vanity of Human Wishes, and Johnson's criticism of tragedy, particularly that of Shakespeare. A Final chapter places Johnson's view in the context of modern theories. Originally published in 1972. 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.

Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing. Originally published in 1985. 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.

The Mother of All Booklists: The 500 Most Recommended Nonfiction Reads for Ages 3 to 103 is written for parents, grandparents, and teachers unfamiliar with the bewildering array of award and recommended reading lists. This book is a long overdue composite of all the major booklists. It brings together over 100 of the most influential book awards and reading lists from leading magazines, newspapers, reference books, schools, libraries, parenting organizations, and professional groups from across the country. The Mother of All Booklists is to reading books what the website Rotten Tomatoes is to watching movies-the ultimate, one-stop, synthesizing resource for finding out what is best. Mother is not the opinion of one book critic, but the aggregate opinion of an army of critics. Organized into five age group lists each with one hundred books-preschoolers (ages 3-5), early readers (ages 5-9), middle readers (ages 9-13), young adults (ages 13-17), and adults (ages 18+)-The Mother of All Booklists amalgamates the knowledge of the best English-language booklists in the United States, including a few from Canada and Great Britain. Each of the 500 books is annotated, describing the contents of the book and suggesting why the book is unique and important. Each includes a picture of the book cover.

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by looking at two or three poems from a small group (including works by Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott), to build up sustained analytical readings. Thorough and compact, with notes and quotations supplemented by detailed reference to the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a companion website with texts, links, and further discussion, The Poetry Handbook is indispensable for all school and undergraduate students of English. A final chapter addresses examinations of all kinds, and sample essays by undergraduates are posted on the website. Critical and scholarly terms are italicised and clearly explained, both in the text and in a complete glossary; the volume also includes suggestions for further reading. The first edition, widely praised by teachers and students, showed how the pleasures of poetry are heightened by rigorous understanding and made that understanding readily available. This second edition - revised, expanded, updated, and supported by a new companion website - confirm The Poetry Handbook as the best guide to poetry available in English.

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.