The rich and complex genre of fantasy fiction appeals to readers of all ages. Designed for readers' advisors and collection development specialists in public, school, and college libraries, this in-depth guide expands upon the material on fantasy fiction offered in Genreflecting. Herald offers a historical and structural overview of the genre, describes 15 subgenres and a score of variations within them, and lists the best and most current reads available in the fantasy arena. Descriptive entries contain information about pertinent review resources, bibliographies, criticism, awards, and organizations. An author/title and subject index help provide easy access to specific titles and authors and an appendix lists recommended fantasy titles for young adults. A must for readers' advisors and collection development specialists, this book will also be valuable to writers, researchers, bookstore owners, and dedicated fans of fantasy fiction.

Religion is not merely a different way of thinking but is rather an alternative manner of being-it is both a way of attending to the world and a form of embodiment. Literature provides another key to legislating new ways of being in the world. Some of the best Romantic literature can be understood as experimental attempts to access and harness infrasensible energy-affects and dispositions operating beneath the threshold of consciousness-in the hope that by so doing it may become possible to project elusive affects into the practical world of conscious thinking and judgment. Words Made Flesh demonstrates how the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and the novelist Jane Austen affect, mediate, and ultimately alter our very sense of embodiment in ways that have lasting effects on readers' affective, political, and spiritual lives. Such works, which unsettle habitual ways of seeing, are perennially valuable because they not only call attention to the dispositions we normally inhabit, but they also suggest ways of forging new patterns and forms of life through the medium of embodiment.Drawing on the work of these writers, Dempsey argues that Romanticism's contribution to our understanding of the postsecular becomes clearer when considered in relation to three timely scholarly conversations not previously synthesized: secular and postsecular studies, affect theory, and media studies. By weaving together these three strands, Words Made Flesh clarifies how Romanticism provides a useful field guide to the new geography of the self ushered in by secular modernity, while also pointing toward potential postsecular futures. Ultimately, Dempsey argues for a view of literature that recognizes it as an essential component to ethical practice.

Drawn from the manuscript collections at the Bodleian Library, this delightful softback notebook set features the distinctive handwriting of three remarkable women writers and thinkers: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace. The Library holds part of the manuscript of Jane Austen's unfinished novel, 'The Watsons', together with the original notebooks in which Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' and the personal correspondence of mathematical pioneer Ada Lovelace. Inspirational and unusual, these useful literary notebooks make the ideal gift for writers and book-lovers alike.

Known as ""Captain Fiction,"" Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential--and controversial--figures in modern American letters. As an editor at Esquire (1969-1977), Alfred A. Knopf (1977-1995), and The Quarterly (1987-1995) and as a teacher both in and outside the university system, he has worked closely with many of the most pioneering writers of recent times, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus. A prolific author of stories and novels, Lish has also won a cult following for his own fiction, earning comparisons with Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments: the impact of the Californian counterculture, the rise and decline of so-called literary ""minimalism,"" dramatic transformations in book and magazine publishing, and the ongoing growth of creative writing instruction. Over time, Lish--a self-described ""dynamic conversationalist""-- forges an evolving conversation not only with his interviewers, but with the central trends of twentieth-century literary history. This book will be essential reading not only for students and fans of contemporary fiction, but for writers too: included are several interviews in which Lish discusses his legendary writing classes. Indeed, these pieces themselves amount to a masterclass in Lishian literary language--each is a work of art in its own right.

This volume introduces readers to classical Chinese literature from its beginnings (ca. 10th century BCE) to the tenth century CE. It asks basic questions such as: How did reading and writing practices change over these two millennia? How did concepts of literature evolve? What were the factors that shaped literary production and textual transmission? How do traditional bibliographic categories, modern conceptions of genre, and literary theories shape our understanding of classical Chinese literature? What are the recurrent and evolving concerns of writings within the period under purview? What are the dimensions of human experience they address? Why is classical Chinese literature important for our understanding of pre-modern East Asia? How does the transmission of this literature in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam define cultural boundaries? And what, in turn, can we learn from the Chinese-style literatures of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, about Chinese literature? In addressing these questions, The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature departs from standard literary histories and sourcebooks. It does not simply categorize literary works according to periods, authors, or texts. Its goal is to offer a new conceptual framework for thinking about classical Chinese literature by defining a four-part structure. The first section discusses the basics of literacy and includes topics such as writing systems, manuscript culture, education, and loss and preservation in textual transmission. It is followed by a second section devoted to conceptions of genre, textual organization, and literary signification throughout Chinese history. A third section surveys literary tropes and themes. The final section takes us beyond China to the surrounding cultures that adopted Chinese culture and produced Chinese style writing adapted to their own historical circumstances. The volume is sustained by a dual foci: the recuperation of historical perspectives for the period it surveys and the attempt to draw connections between past and present, demonstrating how the viewpoints and information in this volume yield insights into modern China and east Asia.

Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary - such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy - that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare - and early modern drama more broadly - changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

During the short history of the United States, war has marked the stages of the nation's journey, and imaginative literature has reflected and shaped an understanding of that journey. To study the war literature of the United States, then, is to study not only the representation of individuals at war but also creative renderings of the American experience. Until now, the treatment of American war literature has been handicapped by the absence of a single-source reference that can be the foundation for significant inquiry. This book addresses that need by presenting succinct, authoritative entries on the major writers and texts that have imaginatively represented the American experience of war.

This reference establishes the range and character of a significant body of work never before treated so comprehensively. It includes critical commentary on the novels, poems, nonfiction prose, and plays that reflect major conflicts from before the Revolutionary War through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It also includes topical entries that survey the literature of America's major wars as well as such subjects as Indian captivity narratives, women's diaries of the Civil War, the literature of the Spanish-American War, and African American war literature. Entries are written by expert contributors and conclude with brief bibliographies, while the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

This catalogue of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) is the result of two decades of research during which 232 surviving copies of this immeasurably important book were located - a remarkable 72 more than were recorded in the previous census over a century ago - and examined in situ, creating an essential reference work.

This book builds on a critical and scholarly revival of interest in Collins. Baker draws upon biographical revelations and the recent publication of Collins's letters to provide a unique insight into both the man and the writer. The volume will appeal to all students of Collins and those with an interest in the life of Nineteenth-century England.

This volume explores the interface between linguistics and literary studies. Theoretical and textual analyses help illustrate the common features between everyday discourse and literature, and show the potentials for a collaborative approach between literary scholars and linguists in understanding speech acts and reference; inference, cognitive and cultural background; rhetoric, styles of speaking and writing; as well as perspectives and genres.

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism's entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by the cultural riches of the West, vacationing in the North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Crimea afforded the compensatory opportunity to play colonizer kings and queens in "Asia." Drawing on Anna Karenina and other literary classics, travel writing, journalism, and guidebooks, the investigation engages with current debates in cosmopolitan studies, including the fuzzy paradigm of "colonial cosmopolitanism.

Roland McHugh's classic Annotations to Finnegans Wake provides both novice readers and seasoned Joyceans with a wealth of information in an easy-to-use format uniquely suited to this densely layered text. Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly to a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer, enabling readers to look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings. McHugh's richly detailed annotations distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. This thoroughly updated fourth edition draws heavily on Internet resources and keyword searches. For the first time, McHugh provides readers with a synopsis of the action of Finnegans Wake. He also expands his examination of possible textual corruption and adds hundreds of new glosses to help scholars, students, and general readers untangle the dense thicket of allusions that crowds every sentence of Joyce's nearly inscrutable masterpiece.

Outlining the controversies that have surrounded the academic discipline of English Literature since its institutionalization in the late nineteenth century, this important book draws on a range of archival sources. It addresses issues that are central to the identity of academic English - how the subject came into existence, and what makes it a specialist discipline of knowledge - in a manner that illuminates many of the crises that have affected the development of modern English studies. Atherton also addresses contemporary arguments about the teaching of literary criticism, including an examination of the reforms to A-Level literature.

'Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.' - Talleyrand 'He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.' - Jonathan Swift 'There is no love sincerer than the love of food' wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903. Poets, novelists, chefs and gourmands before and after him would seem to agree. Collected in this anthology is a mouth-watering selection of excerpts on the subject of eating, drinking, cooking and serving food, guaranteed to whet every reader's appetite. Themed sections group together poetry and prose on grapes and bottles, the ideal cuisine, hangover cures and vivid vignettes of dinner-party behaviour, including Mrs Gaskell eating peas with a knife. There are stories about food fit for kings, a duchess's 'rumblings abdominal', fine dining, eating abroad, cooking at home and gastronomic excesses. A section on food and travel features Edmund Hillary's meal at the summit of Everest, Ernest Shackleton's dish of penguin in the Antarctic and Joshua Slocum on the unfortunate effects of cheese and plums while sailing solo around the world. Also on the menu are limericks, short-tempered cooks, recipes, fantasy food, special feasts, iron rations, tips on opening oysters and the uses and abuses of coffee. Featuring writers as diverse as Brillat-Savarin, Edward Lear, John Keats, Collette, Charles Dickens, Maria Edgeworth and Marcel Proust and interspersed with a generous helping of cartoons, this is a perfect gift for foodies, chefs, picnickers and epicurean explorers.

This study provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, autobiographers) and topics. It provides contextualizing material, with concise introductions to related topics, including organizations, movements, genres and publications.

The Irish Renaissance encompassed one of the western world's most powerful dramatic movements. But most lists of productions have only included certain premieres, while ignoring all revivals and the productions of lesser-known theatres. This reference is a comprehensive list of all theatrical productions of the early modern Irish dramatic movement, including all premieres and revivals. The volume includes productions from the 1899 founding of the Irish Literary Theatre through the April 1916 Easter Rising, when British martial law significantly altered the course of Irish drama.

Entries are provided for more than 1,000 productions, with each entry offering the play's title, author, producing organization, building, city, and dates of performance. The entries are grouped in chapters devoted to particular years and are arranged chronologically within each chapter. The chronological arrangement of the entries reveals the development of Irish theatre, while an extensive index allows alphabetical access to the contents. By including entries for all productions, the volume indicates that many plays that are now neglected were produced numerous times and were central to the drama of the period. This work will force scholars to reconsider the major plays of the period, due to the record of their revivals, and the importance of many neglected plays will now have to be reassessed.

The "Author Chronologies Series" aims to provide a means whereby the precise chronological facts of an author's life and career can be seen at a glance. This chronology provides a synopsis of Joyce's first years in Dublin and, from 1900, a more detailed account of his life there and attempts to become established as a writer when living mainly in Trieste and Zurich; and finally (when he became world-famous) Paris, concluding with his death in 1941.

Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-three operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and according to Edith Lewis, her companion throughout adulthood, the two women frequently visited the theater, even in the early days, when purchasing tickets to attend performances proved a financial sacrifice. Melding cultural history with thoughtful readings of her works and discussions of opera's complex place in turn-of-the-century America, David McKay Powell's Cather and Opera offers the first book-length study of what drew the writer so powerfully and repeatedly to the art form. With close attention to Cather's fiction and criticism, Powell posits that at the heart of both her work and the operatic corpus dwells an innate tension between high artistic ideals and popular acceptance, often figured as a clash between compositional integrity and raw, personal emotion. Considering her connection to opera in both historical and intertextual terms, Cather and Opera investigates what operatic references mean in Cather's writing, along with what the opera represented to her throughout her life.

Some authors strongly criticized attempts to rebuild a German literary culture in the aftermath of World War II, while others actively committed themselves to "dealing with the German past." There are writers in Austria and Switzerland that find other contradictions of contemporary life troubling, while some find them funny or even worth celebrating. German postwar literature has, in the minds of some observers, developed a kind of split personality. In view of the traumatic monstrosities of the previous century that development may seem logical to some. The Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature is devoted to modern literature produced in the German language, whether from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or writers using German in other countries. This volume covers an extensive period of time, beginning in 1945 at what was called "zero hour" for German literature and proceeds into the 21st century, concluding in 2008. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on writers, such as Nobel Prize-winners Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, Elias Canetti, Elfriede Jelinek, and W. G. Sebald. There are also entries on individual works, genres, movements, literary styles, and forms."

One of the most popular and prolific writers of our day, Mary Higgins Clark continues to write bestselling, award-winning novels of mystery and suspense, attracting new fans worldwide and thrilling dedicated readers who have followed her career for nearly three decades. This revised Critical Companion offers an expanded discussion of the forms and conventions of suspense writing, along with updated biographical information about the "Queen of Suspense." Covering Clark's most recent works, nine new chapters examine the novels and short stories published since 1996, including Daddy's Little Girl (2002). For each major work, a plot synopsis and analysis of character development is given. Themes and issues woven into her fiction--such as the role of the past in people's lives, repercussions of violence, and the concept of identity--are considered. Close critical readings delve deeper into these otherwise entertaining works to uncover psychological, feminist, and socio-political interpretations. The updated and expanded bibliography offers librarians and readers a comprehensive list of Clark's published works, with reviews and criticism of the works covered in this volume. An extensive list of additional biographical sources includes the latest interviews. A bonus feature of this edition is a guide to the film adaptations of Clark's work.