This book, first published in 1988, reveals the great care Dickens took with the planning and preparation of A Tale of Two Cities and its roots. It also explores the aspects of Dickens's life, especially his interest in private theatricals, which contributed to the genesis of the novel. For the first time the historical sources for the very individual account of the French Revolution presented in A Tale of Two Cities are examined, and the book investigates the novelist's debt to French and English eye-witnesses. This Companion identifies the multitude of allusions to what Dickens often regarded as the whims of eighteenth-century justice, religion, philosophy, fashion and society. It provides the modern reader with both fundamental sources of information and a fascinating account of the creation of a complex historical novel.

This book, first published in 1988, is the most comprehensive annotation of Bleak House ever undertaken. It provides authoritative background information about the topical issues of the novel that interested Dickens as a social critic and activist. It also describes the novel's literary antecedents and identifies the sources of its hundreds of literary and historical allusions. The annotation is based on a wide range of nineteenth-century sources - from newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary papers to travel guides and cookery books - and gives the modern reader unprecedented access to both Bleak House - Dickens's tract for the times - and the period when it was written.

Anthony Trollope's novels and stories entertain while vividly bringing the Victorian era to life. His deep empathy for the underdog led him to subvert conventions, exploring the lives of women, as well as men, and choosing as heroes and heroines outsiders who would be viewed with suspicion by his readers. Trollope's profound insight to human nature made him the first novelist in English to develop three dimensional characters and to create the novel sequence. This literary companion introduces readers to his life and work. A-to-Z entries explore Trollope's short story collections, and nonfiction contributions, as well as important themes in the works. This companion also includes fresh voices of contributors that bring in their contemporary insights to bear on Trollope's achievements, facilitating the understanding of Trollope's perspectives in relation to feminism, queer studies, and transnationalism.

Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a subterranean literary figure, receiving effusive praise from his fans, befuddled or cautious assessments from reviewers, and scant scholarly attention. Erickson's obscurity comes in part from the difficulty of categorizing his work within current trends in fiction, and in part from the wide variety of concerns that populate his writing: literature, music, film, politics, history, time, and his fascination with his home city of Los Angeles. His dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp, and paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction but difficult to classify neatly within that same realm. He is at once thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that America's triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception-and that he presciently described decades ago certain features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the remarkable consistency of Erickson's vision over time while simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve Erickson will deepen readers' understanding of how Erickson's books work-and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater attention.

During the early colonial encounter, children's books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US's role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the public. Subsequently, youth literature and media were important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought as a means of negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance. In Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, author Marilisa Jimenez Garcia focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for US communities of color. Through analysis of such texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought. Considering recent debates over diversity in children's and young adult literature and media and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, Jimenez Garcia's timely work encourages us to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, as well as other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.

Essays by Ian Andrews, Roland Boer, Heidi Brush, Angela Hubler, Cynthia Anne McLeod, Carl F. Miller, Jana Mikota, Mervyn Nicholson, Jane Rosen, Sharon Smulders, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Naomi Wood A significant body of scholarship examines the production of children's literature by women and minorities, as well as the representation of gender, race, and sexuality. But few scholars have previously analyzed class in children's literature. This definitive collection remedies that by defining and exemplifying historical materialist approaches to children's literature. The introduction of Little Red Readings lucidly discusses characteristics of historical materialism, the methodological approach to the study of literature and culture first outlined by Karl Marx, defining key concepts and analyzing factors that have marginalized this tradition, particularly in the United States. The thirteen essays here analyze a wide range of texts--from children's bibles to Mary Poppins to The Hunger Games--using concepts in historical materialism from class struggle to the commodity. Essayists apply the work of Marxist theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson to children's literature and film. Others examine the work of leftist writers in India, Germany, England, and the United States. The authors argue that historical materialist methodology is critical to the study of children's literature, as children often suffer most from inequality. Some of the critics in this collection reveal the ways that literature for children often functions to naturalize capitalist economic and social relations. Other critics champion literature that reveals to readers the construction of social reality and point to texts that enable an understanding of the role ordinary people might play in creating a more just future. The collection adds substantially to our understanding of the political and class character of children's literature worldwide, and contributes to the development of a radical history of children's literature.

The poetry of John Berryman (1914-1972) is primarily concerned with the self in response to the rapid social, political, sexual, racial, and technological transformations of the twentieth century, and their impact on the psyche and spirit, both individual and collective. He was just as likely to find inspiration in his local newspaper as he did from the poetry of Hopkins or Milton. In fact, in contrast to the popular perception of Berryman drunkenly composing strange, dreamlike, abstract, esoteric poems, Berryman was intensely aware of craft. His best work routinely utilizes a variety of rhetorical styles, shifting effortlessly from the lyric to the prosaic. For Berryman, poetry was nothing less than a vocation, a mission, and a way of life. Though he desired fame, he acknowledged its relative unimportance when he stated that the "important thing is that your work is something no one else can do". As a result, Berryman very rarely granted interviews - "I teach and I write", he explained, "I'm not copy" - yet when he did the results were always captivating. Collected in Conversations with John Berryman are all of Berryman's major interviews, personality pieces, profiles, and local interest items, where interviewers attempt to unravel him, as both Berryman and his interlocutors struggle to find value in poetry in a fallen world.

In English and American cultures, detective fiction has a long and illustrious history. Its origins can be traced back to major developments in Anglo-American law, like the concept of circumstantial evidence and the rise of lawyers as heroic figures. Edgar Allen Poe's writings further fueled this cultural phenomenon, with the use of enigmas and conundrums in his detective stories, as well as the hunt-and-chase action of early police detective novels. Poe was only one staple of the genre, with detective fiction contributing to a thriving literary market that later influenced Arthur Conan Doyle's work.-This text examines the emergence of short detective fiction in the nineteenth century, as well as the appearance of detectives in Victorian novels. It explores how the genre has captivated readers for centuries, with the chapters providing a framework for a more complete understanding of nineteenth-century detective fiction.

This is a critical study of the great British man of letters, G.K. Chesterton, with chapters devoted to the novels, stories, and essays that explore the darker fringes of his wild imagination. "Everything is different in the dark," wrote Chesterton; "perhaps you don't know how terrible a truth that is." Chesterton's frequent use of the image and theme of "gargoyles" provides the thematic structure of the book. It covers the detective stories of Father Brown and others, the locked rooms and miracle crimes that appear in his writing, his status as a science fiction writer, and the riddles and paradoxes of three works-Job, The Man Who Was Thursday, and the play, The Surprise. This volume also includes an interlude about Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges and a robust appendix including interviews about the formation of Ignatius Press's Collected Chesterton.

"The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness" is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts that says African American writers retreated from issues of "race" when they wrote about whiteness, Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement."

In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates that these texts have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies.

The poetry of Gavrila Derzhavin is a monument to that which could be read, heard, and, most important, seen in the two centuries in which he lived. The Palladian villa he occupied, the British service placed on the table before him, the English spinning machine put to use on his estate, and even the optical devices, such as the telescope, magic lantern, and camera obscura, which populated his home: Tatiana Smoliarova restores Derzhavin's visual environment through minute textual clues, inviting the reader to consider how such impressions informed and shaped his thinking and writing, countering the conservative, Russophile ideology he shared in his later years. In examining the poetics, aesthetics, and politics of Derzhavin's poems written in the early nineteenth century, Three Metaphors for Life makes us see this period as a chapter in the contradictory development of Russian modernity-at once regressive and progressive, resistant to social reform, insistent on a distinctly Russian historical destiny, yet enthusiastically embracing technological and industrial innovations and exploring new ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling.

In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyonce's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls ""the dream of Black Studies""-abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.

Riddled with intertextual references and notorious for their explicit portrayal of sex, drugs, and the occasional rock 'n' roll, the novels of Bret Easton Ellis offer themselves for deconstruction to reveal their many interpretational layers. This book argues that Ellis's novels, often accused of not making sense, make, instead, many senses. Their semantic complexity becomes especially obvious when put under a theoretical lens as provided by Jacques Derrida. His semiotic analysis, which focuses on the instability of meaning and is shaped by key terms such as differance, the trace, and the supplement, offers the ideal framework to look behind Ellis's infamous obsession with surfaces. Aimed at aficionados of Ellis's works, as well as students of contemporary American fiction and literary theory, these chapters discuss the central issues in Ellis's novels through 2019 and simultaneously offer a new perspective for the practical use of Derrida's ideas. In order to ensure accessibility, a theoretical chapter introduces all the concepts necessary to understand a Derridean analysis of Ellis's fiction. As Rip says in Imperial Bedrooms: "It means so many things, Clay.

The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education - where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities - but it also offers challenges. What is 'contemporary'? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: * Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; * The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; * The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

Many of the best-known British authors of the 1800s were fascinated by the science and technology of their era. Dickens included spontaneous human combustion and "mesmerism" (hyptnotism) in his plots. Mary Shelley created the immortal Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his creature. H.G. Wells imagined the Time Machine, the Invisible Man, and invaders from Mars. Percy Shelley was as infamous at Oxford for his smelly experiments and for his atheism. This book of essays explores representations of technology in the work of various nineteenth-century British authors. Essays cluster around two important areas of innovation-transportation and medicine. Each essay contributor accessibly maps out the places where art and science meet, detailing how these authors both affected and reflected the technological revolutions of their time.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature is a useful reference to the broad and burgeoning field of science fiction literature. Science fiction literature has gained immensely in critical respect and attention, while maintaining a broad readership. However, despite the fact that it is a rapidly changing field, contemporary science fiction literature also maintains a strong sense of its connections to science fiction of the past, which makes a historical reference of this sort particularly valuable as a tool for understanding science fiction literature as it now exists and as it has evolved over the years. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature covers the history of science fiction in literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries including *significant people; *themes; *critical issues; and *the most significant genres that have formed science fiction literature. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this subject.

Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period. Justice in its many forms - legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary - is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.

Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good "coming out" story? Will increased queer representation in young people's media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture - queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that "It Gets Better" and the threat that it might not - challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people's media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see "queer YA" as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect - specifically, anxiety - instead of content.

The Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater provides users with an accessible single-volume reference tool covering Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the 16 Spanish-speaking countries of continental Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela). Entries for authors, ranging from the early colonial period to the present, give succinct biographical data and an account of the author's literary production, with particular attention to their most prominent works and where they belong in literary history. The introduction provides a review of Latin American literature and theater as a whole while separate dictionary entries for each country offer insight into the history of national literatures. Entries for literary terms, movements, and genres serve to complement these commentaries, and an extensive bibliography points the way for further reading. The comprehensive view and detailed information obtained from all these elements will make this book of use to the general-interest reader, Latin American studies students, and the academic specialist.

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.

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or disempowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged.

Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants--rather than passive observers--in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, "Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation" demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions?

Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew--such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar--and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

Published in 1979: This is a play based on the reign of King John with notes.

Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall's evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928-2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of ""Ox Cart Man"" to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon's death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.