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.

Comparative Literature explores an 'area of interest' rather than a special discipline. The book begins with an account of the approaches that twentieth century writers took to literature by writers other than themselves. It discusses the common tone shared by those who subscribe to a national tradition, and considers what is meant by 'the mind of Europe'. It ponders the problems of translation, and discusses the nature of comparative study at university. Lastly, the special case of American literature is treated as pointing to the need for adjustment to a new stage in the world's culture. The criticial discussion of comparative studies provided in this book demonstrates the greater depth and vivacity that these studies can give to our ideas about literature.

Contributions by Alice Knox Eaton, Mar Gallego, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Shirley A. Stave, Justine Tally, Susana Vega-Gonzalez, and Anissa WardiIn her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returned to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. God Help the Child, published in 2015, is set in the contemporary period, unlike all of her previous novels. The contemporary setting is ultimately incidental to the project of the novel, however; as with Morrison's other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues. New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's "God Help the Child": Race, Culture, and History, a collection of eight essays by both seasoned Morrison scholars as well as new and rising scholars, takes on the novel in a nuanced and insightful analysis, interpreting the novel in relation to Morrison's earlier work as well as locating it within ongoing debates in literary and other academic disciplines engaged with African American literature. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on trauma - both the pain and suffering caused by neglect and abuse, as well as healing and understanding. The second section considers narrative choices, concentrating on experimentation and reader engagement. The third section turns a comparative eye to Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The Bluest Eye, until the present. These essays build on previous studies of Morrison's novels and deepen readers'understanding of both her last novel and her larger literary output.

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.

Billy Collins "puts the 'fun' back in profundity," says poet Alice Fulton. Known for what he has called "hospitable" poems, which deftly blend wit and erudition, Collins (b. 1941) is a poet of nearly unprecedented popularity. His work is also critically esteemed and well represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. An English professor for five decades, Collins was fifty-seven when his poetry began gathering considerable international attention. Conversations with Billy Collins chronicles the poet's career beginning with his 1998 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which exponentially expanded his readership, three years prior to his being named United States Poet Laureate. Other interviewers range from George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Henry Taylor to a Presbyterian pastor, a physics professor, and a class of AP English Literature students. Over the course of the twenty-one interviews included in the volume, Collins discusses such topics as discovering his persona, that consistently affable voice that narrates his often wildly imaginative poems; why poetry is so loved by children but often met with anxiety by high school students; and his experience composing a poem to be recited during a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that occurred during his tenure as poet laureate. He also explores his love of jazz, his distaste for gratuitously difficult poetry and autobiographical poems, and his beguiling invention of a mock poetic form: the paradelle. Irreverent, incisive, and deeply life-affirming-like his twelve volumes of poetry-these interviews, gathered for the first time in one volume, will edify and entertain readers in the way his sold-out readings have done for the past quarter century.

50 party recipes to suit every occasion, from award-winning food writer Kate Young. It's time to spend time with those we love most. It's time to party. In The Little Library Parties, Kate Young draws on all of her experience catering for weddings and events, and her love of cooking for friends, to provide 50 sensational new recipes for entertaining. From dinner party feasts and canapes for a crowd, to barbeques, tea parties, house parties and that all important morning-after tonic, Kate provides delicious and joyful recipes - as always, inspired by her favourite literature - to ensure your get-together tastes delicious. With beautiful photographs throughout and in a gorgeous, giftable format, this is the perfect book to help you kick off the party season. 'Transportative... [The] recipes are enhancing and useful' Caroline Eden, TLS on The Little Library Christmas

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

It is the not-too-distant future, and the rapture has occurred. Every born-again Christian on the planet has, without prior warning, been snatched from the earth to meet Christ in the heavens, while all those without the requisite faith have been left behind to suffer the wrath of the Antichrist as the earth enters into its final days.

This is the premise that animates the enormously popular cultural phenomenon that is the Left Behind series of prophecy novels, co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and published between 1995 and 2007. But these books are more than fiction: it is the sincere belief of many evangelicals that these events actually will occur--soon. "Plotting Apocalypse" delves into the world of rapture, prophecy, and tribulation in order to account for the extraordinary cultural salience of these books and the impact of the world they project. Through penetrating readings of the novels, Chapman shows how the series offers a new model of evangelical agency for its readership. The novels teach that although believers are incapable of changing the course of a future that has been preordained by God, they "can" become empowered by learning to read the prophetic books of the Bible--and the signs of the times--correctly. Reading and interpretation become key indices of agency in the world that Left Behind limns.

"Plotting Apocalypse" reveals the significant cultural work that Left Behind performs in developing a counter-narrative to the passivity and fatalism that can characterize evangelical prophecy belief. Chapman's arguments may bear profound implications for the future of American evangelicalism and its interactions with culture, society, and politics.

In the twenty-first century, the romance genre has gained a growing academic response, including the creation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Popular romance has long been so ignored and maligned that seemingly every scholarly work on it opens with a lengthy defense of the genre and its value for academic study. Even the early scholarly works on the genre approach it in ways that, while primarily respectful, make sweeping generalizations about popular romance, its texts, and its readers. This essay collection examines the position of the romance genre in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which romance responds to and influences the culture and community in which it exists. Essays are divided into six sections, which cover the genre's relationship with masculinity, the importance of consent, historical romance, representation, social status and web-based romance fiction.

Billy Collins "puts the 'fun' back in profundity," says poet Alice Fulton. Known for what he has called "hospitable" poems, which deftly blend wit and erudition, Collins (b. 1941) is a poet of nearly unprecedented popularity. His work is also critically esteemed and well represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. An English professor for five decades, Collins was fifty-seven when his poetry began gathering considerable international attention. Conversations with Billy Collins chronicles the poet's career beginning with his 1998 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which exponentially expanded his readership, three years prior to his being named United States Poet Laureate. Other interviewers range from George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Henry Taylor to a Presbyterian pastor, a physics professor, and a class of AP English Literature students. Over the course of the twenty-one interviews included in the volume, Collins discusses such topics as discovering his persona, that consistently affable voice that narrates his often wildly imaginative poems; why poetry is so loved by children but often met with anxiety by high school students; and his experience composing a poem to be recited during a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that occurred during his tenure as poet laureate. He also explores his love of jazz, his distaste for gratuitously difficult poetry and autobiographical poems, and his beguiling invention of a mock poetic form: the paradelle. Irreverent, incisive, and deeply life-affirming-like his twelve volumes of poetry-these interviews, gathered for the first time in one volume, will edify and entertain readers in the way his sold-out readings have done for the past quarter century.

The iconic masks of the Italian commedia dell'arte-Harlequin, Pierrot, Colombina, Pulcinella, and others-have been vagabonding the roads of Russian cultural history for more than three centuries. This book explores how these masks, and the artistic principles of the commedia dell'arte that they embody, have profoundly affected the Russian artistic imagination, providing a source of inspiration for leading Russian artists as diverse as nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol, modernist theater director Evgenii Vakhtangov, Vladimir Nabokov, and the empress of Russian popular culture Alla Pugacheva. The author presents a new perspective on this topic, showing how the commedia dell'arte has nourished a rich cultural tradition in Russia.

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.

This new edition of the British epistolary novel The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton examines the theme of female agency, and is an excellent example of women's writing in the eighteenth-century. The relationships of the author, Phebe Gibbes, with the East India Company, The London Magazine, 'The Benevolent Society', and the Royal Literary Society provide rich avenues for research. Accompanied by a new introduction and editorial commentary, this text will be of great interest to students of literary history and women's writing.

The literature of Wales is one of the oldest continuous literary traditions in Europe. The earliest surviving poetry was forged in the battlefields of post-Roman Wales and the 'Old North' of Britain, and the Welsh-language poets of today still write within the same poetic tradition. In the early twentieth century, Welsh writers in English outnumbered writers in Welsh for the first time, generating new modes of writing and a crisis of national identity which began to resolve itself at the end of the twentieth century with the political devolution of Wales within the United Kingdom. By considering the two literatures side by side, this book argues that bilingualism is now a normative condition in Wales. Written by leading scholars, this book provides a comprehensive chronological guide to fifteen centuries of Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English against a backdrop of key historical and political events in Britain.

John Van Buren's 'Travel journal for a trip to Europe, 1838-1839' is a record of the a year he spent in England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium and Holland, primarily for his father, Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the United States. A fly-on-the-wall view of the political and social situation in Europe was invaluable to the President at a highly sensitive moment in Anglo-American relations, and provides a rich and insightful view for historians of the period. Published in its entirety for the first time, Van Buren's objective and good-humoured observations present fresh insights into complex and compelling personalities and relationships on both sides of the Atlantic, providing an invaluable and highly readable resource for scholars and students of the period, as well as for the general reader.

Daniele Pitavy-Souques was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Welty's view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Welty's fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Welty's work. The volume explores beloved stories in Welty's masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as "A Curtain of Green," "Flowers for Marjorie," "Old Mr. Marblehall," "A Still Moment," "Livvie," "Circe," "Kin," and The Optimist's Daughter, One Writer's Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include "Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" (1979), "A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty" (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Welty's brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal. Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souques's European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Welty's narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.

In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children's picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children's picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children's picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children's picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children's picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.

The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" places the allegorical dream-vision of the poem within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the work, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement with its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Covering passus C.15-19 and B.13-17, Volume 4 of the Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" creates a complete vade mecum for readers, identifying and translating all Latin quotations, uncovering allusions, providing full cross-reference to other parts of the poem, drawing in relevant scholarship, and unraveling difficult passages. Like the other commentaries in the series, this volume contains an extensive overview and analysis of each passus, and the subdivisions within, large and small, and discusses all differences between the two versions. It pays careful attention to the poem at the literal level as well as to Latin texts that are analogues or even possible sources of Langland's thought and it emphasizes the comedy of the poem, of which these passus offer a number of examples.

"In All Stories Are True," Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes-history, myth, and trauma-throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. Guzzio argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism.

Wideman's work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman's personal life is characteristic of his style, which-due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions-has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman remains under-studied.

Of particular value is Guzzio's analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman's challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, and his allowing past, present, and future time to remain fluid in the narratives, Guzzio finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.

Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the "Queens of Crime." Alongside writers like Agatha Christie, she perfected the whodunnit, but also used the genre to explore social, ethical, and emotional matters. Her characters, particularly Lord Peter Wimsey and his investigative partner Harriet Vane, struggle with the complexities of life and love in a rapidly changing world while solving some of the most intricate and complex mysteries ever offered to the reading public. Sayers was also an important theoretician of detective fiction, a religious dramatist, a public intellectual, and one of the 20th century's most important translators of Dante. While focusing on her mystery fiction, this companion offers a full view of all aspects of Sayers's career. It is an ideal introduction for readers new to Sayers's diverse and rewarding body of work, and an invaluable companion for her many fans.

In the global imagination, Paris is the city's glamorous center, ignoring the Muslim residents in its outskirts except in moments of spectacular crisis such as terrorist attacks or riots. But colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light, including fiction by Charef, Chraibi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son. Spanning the decades from the post-World War II era to the present day, Amine demonstrates that the postcolonial other is both peripheral to and intimately entangled with all the ideals so famously evoked by the French capital-romance, modernity, equality, and liberty. In their work, postcolonial writers and artists have juxtaposed these ideals with colonial tropes of intimacy (the interracial couple, the harem, the Arab queer) to expose their hidden violence. Amine highlights the intrusion of race in everyday life in a nation where, officially, it does not exist.

Latin America's Indigenous writers have long labored under the limits of colonialism, but in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they have constructed a literary corpus that moves them beyond those parameters. Gloria E. Chacon considers the growing number of contemporary Indigenous writers who turn to Maya and Zapotec languages alongside Spanish translations of their work to challenge the tyranny of monolingualism and cultural homogeneity. Chacon argues that these Maya and Zapotec authors reconstruct an Indigenous literary tradition rooted in an Indigenous cosmolectics, a philosophy originally grounded in pre-Columbian sacred conceptions of the cosmos, time, and place, and now expressed in creative writings. More specifically, she attends to Maya and Zapotec literary and cultural forms by theorizing kab'awil as an Indigenous philosophy. Tackling the political and literary implications of this work, Chacon argues that Indigenous writers' use of familiar genres alongside Indigenous language, use of oral traditions, and new representations of selfhood and nation all create space for expressions of cultural and political autonomy. Chacon recognizes that Indigenous writers draw from universal literary strategies but nevertheless argues that this literature is a vital center for reflecting on Indigenous ways of knowing and as a key artistic expression of decolonization.

As a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oft outrageous ""Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction"" persona, James Ellroy has used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels. Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroy from 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution and his public and private image.Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. Ellroy's complex narratives, which merge history and fiction, have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, a revisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine's Novel of the Year 1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adapted into films. Much of Ellroy's remarkable life story has served as the template for the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal, unsolved murder of his mother, to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroy has lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writers could claim.In Conversations with James Ellroy, Ellroy talks extensively about his life, his literary influences, his persona, and his attitudes towards politics and religion. In interviews with fellow crime writers Craig McDonald, David Peace, and others, including several previously unpublished interviews, Ellroy is at turns charismatic and eloquent, combative and enigmatic.

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.

Contributions by Beverly Lyon Clark, Christine Doyle, Gregory Eiselein, John Matteson, Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Anne K. Phillips, Daniel Shealy, and Roberta Seelinger Trites As the golden age of children's literature dawned in America in the mid-1860s, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a work that many scholars view as one of the first realistic novels for young people, soon became a classic. Never out of print, Alcott's tale of four sisters growing up in nineteenth-century New England has been published in more than fifty countries around the world. Over the century and a half since its publication, the novel has grown into a cherished book for girls and boys alike. Readers as diverse as Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J. K. Rowling have declared it a favorite. Little Women at 150, a collection of eight original essays by scholars whose research and writings over the past twenty years have helped elevate Alcott's reputation in the academic community, examines anew the enduring popularity of the novel and explores the myriad complexities of Alcott's most famous work. Examining key issues about philanthropy, class, feminism, Marxism, Transcendentalism, canon formation, domestic labor, marriage, and Australian literature, Little Women at 150 presents new perspectives on one of the United States' most enduring novels. A historical and critical introduction discusses the creation and publication of the novel, briefly traces the scholarly critical response, and demonstrates how these new essays show us that Little Women and its illustrations still have riches to reveal to its readers in the twenty-first century.