This comprehensive reference begins with an introductory chapter that overviews Flaubert's life and career. A detailed summary of the novel's plot is followed by a close examination of the novel's genesis, its publication history, and the merits of various editions and translations. Later chapters discuss the social and cultural contexts informing the work, Flaubert's literary craftsmanship, and the novel's critical reception. The volume concludes with extensive bibliographic information.

Flaubert's determination to achieve stylistic and structural perfection led to the creation of his masterpiece, "Madame Bovary." The achievement was long considered the exemplary novel in Western literature, and writers remain deeply indebted to its legacy.

The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the U.S. South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an ad vanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the U.S. South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage. Navigating Souths broadens these exchanges by facilitating transdisciplinary conversations about southern studies scholarship. The fourteen original essays in Navigating Souths articulate questions about the significances of the South as a theoretical and literal "home" base for social science and humanities researchers. They also examine challenges faced by researchers who identify as southern studies scholars, as well as by those who live and work in the regional South, and show how researchers have responded to these challenges. In doing so, this book project seeks to reframe the field of southern studies as it is currently being practiced by social science and humanities scholars and thus reshape historical and cultural conceptualizations of the region. Contributors: Alix Chapman, Rico D. Chapman, Michele Grigsby Coffey, Kirsten A. Dellinger, Leigh Anne Duck, Gwendolyn Ferreti, Kathryn Green, Robert Greene II, John Hayes, Jeffrey T. Jackson, Anne Lewis, Katie McKee, Kathryn Radishofski, Emily Satterwhite, Jodi Skipper, Jon Smith, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, Daniel Cross Turner, Charles Reagan Wilson.

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.

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women's writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs-cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment-in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

Often referred to as the model minority, Asian American children and adolescents feel pressured to perform academically and be disinterested in sports, with the exception of martial arts. Boys are often stereotyped as physically unattractive nerds and girls as petite and beautiful. Many Americans remain unaware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term Asian American comprises, with Asian American adolescents proving to be more invisible than adults. As a result, Asian American adolescents are continually searching for their identity and own place in American society. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. ,br> The contributors to Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters, crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children's and teenagers' identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; interracial friendships; transnational adoptions and birth searches; food as a means of assimilation and resistance; commodity racism and the tourist gaze; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror; and many other topics.

A revised and expanded reissue containing over 1,200 brain-teasing questions on the legendary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, published to coincide with the release of the third and final The Lord of The Rings movie. How many Hobbits joined the Fellowship of the Ring? What colour is the Orcs' skin? Why did Gandalf have difficulty in opening the West-door of Khazad-dum? Who betrayed Berien and Luthien to Thingol? What was Farmer Giles' full name? The worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, from the saga of Middle-earth to a brief visit to Wootton Major, are so rich and varied that they inspire legions of followers of different ages. This peerless revised and expanded quiz book offers over 1,200 questions and answers, including easy starter questions and more difficult tie-breakers, to test the range and depth of your knowledge. And whereas every right answer will confirm your mastery over your subject, every wrong answer will be a learning experience all of its own!

In Staging the Trials of Modernism, Dale Barleben explores the interactions among literature, cultural studies, and the law through detailed analyses of select British modern writers including Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. By tracing the relationships between the literature, authors, media, and judicial procedure of the time, Barleben illuminates the somewhat macabre element of modern British trial process, which still enacts and re-enacts itself throughout contemporary judicial systems of the British Commonwealth. Using little seen legal documents, like Ford's contempt trial decision, Staging the Trials of Modernism uncovers the conversations between the interior style of British Modern authors and the ways in which law began rethinking concepts like intent and the subconscious. Barleben's fresh insights offer a nuanced look into the ways in which law influences literary production.

'If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you'll love What She Ate' Elle Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt dished up Eggs Mexican (a concoction of rice, fried eggs, and bananas) in the White House? Or that Helen Gurley Brown's commitment to 'having it all' meant dining on supersized portions of diet gelatine? In the irresistible What She Ate, Laura Shapiro examines the plates, recipe books and shopping trolleys of six extraordinary women, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Eva Braun. Delving into diaries, newspaper articles, cook books and more, Shapiro casts a different light on the usual narratives of women's lives. Finding meaning in every morsel, and looking through the lens of their attitudes towards food, she masterfully reveals the love and rage, desire and denial, need and pleasure, behind six remarkable appetites.

Conversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) has made many contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, including but not limited to crafting a personal poetic style suited to the age; leading the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative through New Formalism; walloping the "intellectual ghetto" of American poetry through his epochal article "Can Poetry Matter?"; helping American poetry move forward by organizing influential conferences; providing public service and initiating nationwide arts projects such as Poetry Out Loud through his leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts; and editing twenty best-selling literary anthologies widely used in American classrooms. Taken together, the twenty-two collected interviews increase our understanding of Gioia's poetry and poetics, offer aesthetic pleasure in themselves, and provide a personal encounter with a writer who has made poetry matter. The book presents the actual voice of Dana Gioia, who speaks of his personal and creative life and articulates his unique vision of American culture and poetry.

The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Proust's Recherche, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precendents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. As defined in the period between the fin de siecle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors such as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde's decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism's negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, Dandyism reveals the Victorian dandy's legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature.

Young adult (or YA) literature and publishing are not simply flourishing. They represent perhaps the fastest-growing field of all. With graphic novels and so-called crossover works like the Harry Potter series selling in the tens of millions, the field of YA literature is one of the most dynamic and exciting in the U.S. and Canada. YA is increasingly an international phenomenon as well. "The Continuum Encyclopedia of Young Adult Literature" is the only reference guide to this phenomenon in any language. It is a collaborative effort by 200 authorities who contribute some 650 original, signed entries. These key contributors include: Michael Cart, Ken Donelson, Danny Fingeroth Ted Hipple, Teri Lesesne, Alleen Nilsen, Hazel Rochman, Stephanie Svirin, and many others. (Some are subjects of entries themselves.) Among the authors and educators written about are: Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, Chris Crutcher, Will Eisner, James Cross Giblin, Karen Hesse, S. E. Hinton, Robert Lipsyte, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Gary Paulsen, Richard Peck, Philip Pullman, Louise Rosenblatt, J. K. Rowling, Art Spiegelman, Dorothy Strickland, J. R. R. Tolkien, and many others. A considerable effort is made to include authors and graphic-novel artists who are not found in any other reference work on adult or children's literature. Another special feature is the topical article. These often include up-and-coming figures that are not covered in their own entry. There are 75 topical articles, including African American Literature; Asian American Literature; Australian Literature; Canadian Literature; "Crossovers"; "Death and Dying"; "Fantasy"; "Feminist Fairy Tales"; "The Graphic Novel"; Harry Potter - "Not Just for Kids Anymore"; Horror; Latina/Latino Literature; "The Lord of the Rings" and "Beyond"; New Zealand Literature; Science Fiction and Crossovers; Superheroes of the 1960s and Stan Lee; Witches and Dragons; Tween and Teen; Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; and others. For easy reference, "The Continuum Encyclopedia of Young Adult Literature" features an appendix listing major-award winners as well as an index of names cross-referenced to entries where applicable.

J. R. R. Tolkienbs "Lord of the Rings" has long been acknowledged as the gold standard for fantasy fiction, and the recent Oscar-winning movie trilogy has brought forth a whole new generation of fans. Many Tolkien enthusiasts, however, are not aware of the profoundly religious dimension of the great Ring saga.

In "The Battle for Middle-earth" Fleming Rutledge employs a distinctive technique to uncover the theological currents that lie just under the surface of Tolkienbs epic tale. Rutledge believes that the best way to understand this powerful bdeep narrativeb is to examine the story as it unfolds, preserving some of its original dramatic tension. This deep narrative has not previously been sufficiently analyzed or celebrated. Writing as an enthusiastic but careful reader, Rutledge draws on Tolkienbs extensive correspondence to show how biblical and liturgical motifs shape the action. At the heart of the plot lies a rare glimpse of what human freedom really means within the Divine Plan of God. "The Battle for Middle-earth" surely will, as Rutledge hopes, bgive pleasure to those who may already have detected the presence of the sub-narrative, and insight to those who may have missed it on first reading.b

Jane Austen wrote six books that were published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, all known for their happy endings. Yet below the courtship novels' sparkling wit and dance scenes flows an undercurrent of suffering. Austen had a deep understanding of the sources and cure for suffering that shares much in common with Buddhism. Though not intentionally writing through the lens of Buddhism, Austen intuitively understood the Buddha's most fundamental teaching of the Four Noble Truths: that life contains suffering, that we can discover the causes of suffering, and that we can stop suffering by following the Eightfold Path described by the Buddha. In this book, Austen fans or those who wish for a deeper understanding of how stories can alleviate suffering will discover a combination of psychology and Buddhism alongside accessible close readings of Austen. This unique approach offers insight into Austen's enduring popularity and lessons we might apply to our own lives to find happiness-just like Austen's heroines.

Contributions by Aneesh Barai, Clementine Beauvais, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N. Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Bjoern Sundmark, Michelle Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb. Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge, experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing need. Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film argues that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and emotional connections between generations by representing intergenerational solidarity. For example, one essayist focuses on Disney films, which have shown a long-time commitment to variously highlighting, and then conservatively healing, fissures between generations. However, Disney-Pixar's Up and Coco instead portray intergenerational alliances - young collaborating with old, the living working alongside the dead - as necessary to achieving goals. The collection also testifies to the cultural, social, and political significance of children's culture in the development of generational intelligence and empathy towards age-others and positions the field of children's literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity, opening possibilities for a new socially consequential inquiry into the culture of childhood.

Teaching guides and lesson plans designed to make classic literature engaging and relevant to today's students! This comprehensive book of lesson plans, projects, discussion questions, reproducible worksheets, and more provides teachers with everything they need to engage middle- and high-school students in the study of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Each SparkTeach Guide includes: - Dozens of lessons and contextual "Real Life Lens" discussion prompts - "Big Idea Question" prompts, activities, and projects that explore the work's key themes - Poetics lesson plans - Film comparative lesson plans - Exercises in studying the play's use of metaphor, simile, personification, and motifs - Lesson plans for differentiated instruction - Reproducible worksheets and lesson assessments that build reading, vocabulary, and comprehension skills - Answer keys - Student rubrics There are also tips for class planning and management, ideas for personalizing content, Common Core references, and more, making this the perfect resource to engage students in literature study that's meaningful, exciting, and above all, FUN.

This volume presents a selection from the American and British fiction of the nineteenth century which was evolving into what we now know as science fiction. Taking Frankenstein as its formative work, it assembles stories and excerpts from narratives exploring the complex impact of new technologies like the telegraph and later the cinema, or new scientific practices like mesmerism (hypnotism) and microscopy. The selected authors range from those famous within the realist tradition like George Eliot and Mark Twain to scientists like the physician Silas Weir Mitchell and the inventor Thomas Edison. They repeatedly destabilize their narratives so that some come to resemble scientific records and frequently leave their endings unresolved, encouraging the reader to speculate about their subjects, which include extensions to the senses, new inventions, and challenges to individual autonomy. Many focus on experiments but might combine scientific enquiry with the supernatural, producing hybrid narratives as a result which are difficult to classify.

This volume presents a selection from the American and British fiction of the nineteenth century which was evolving into what we now know as science fiction. Taking Frankenstein as its formative work, it assembles stories and excerpts from narratives exploring the complex impact of new technologies like the telegraph and later the cinema, or new scientific practices like mesmerism (hypnotism) and microscopy. The selected authors range from those famous within the realist tradition like George Eliot and Mark Twain to scientists like the physician Silas Weir Mitchell and the inventor Thomas Edison. They repeatedly destabilize their narratives so that some come to resemble scientific records and frequently leave their endings unresolved, encouraging the reader to speculate about their subjects, which include extensions to the senses, new inventions, and challenges to individual autonomy. Many focus on experiments but might combine scientific enquiry with the supernatural, producing hybrid narratives as a result which are difficult to classify.

J. R. R. Tolkien is arguably the most influential fantasy writer of all time-his world building and epic mythology have changed Western audiences' imaginations and the entire fantasy genre. This book is the first wide-ranging Christian Platonic reading on Tolkien's fiction. This analysis, written for scholars and general Tolkien enthusiasts alike, discusses how his fiction is constructed on levels of language, myth and textuality that have a background in the Greek philosopher Plato's texts and early Christian philosophy influenced by Plato. It discusses the concepts of ideal and real, creation and existence, and fall and struggle as central elements of Tolkien's fiction, focusing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth. Reading Tolkien's fiction as a depiction of ideal and real, from the vision of creation to the process of realization, illuminates a part of Tolkien's aesthetics and mythology that previous studies have overlooked.

Louisiana writer Tim Gautreaux (b. 1947) writes fiction that mixes equal parts dry humor, tall tales, and deep tragedy. His stories and novels of working-class Acadiana portray lives of inimitably poignant love, loss, and longing. The depth and complexity of Gautreaux's writing invite scholarly appraisals as well, as critics mine the richness of his moral vision. These interviews reveal the intensity of his sense of place, his deep connection to the mechanical and working world, his commitment to the craft of writing, and his Catholic view that has been shaped by Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy.

"Conversations with Tim Gautreaux" collects interviews from 1993 to 2009 with the author of "The Missing, The Clearing, Welding with Children," and many other vital works of fiction. Readers who have been engaged with the themes in his stories and novels will find themselves equally taken with the kind and thoughtful voice they discover in interviews.

Understanding an epic story's key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories' central heroes and heroines. In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than 38 hours to complete over 18 nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works - the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh - establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.

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