The late Toni Morrison was the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. A powerful writer, she wove stories depicting the largely overlooked Black experience in America and exploring the intersection of gender and race through the lives of Black women. Morrison's writing continues to move people and push readers to reassess their beliefs about what it means to be Black in America. Synthesizing some 250 scholarly works about Morrison's writing, this book examines eight novels as well as the short story "Recitatif." They are analyzed for techniques used to deepen meaning and emotional weight, and reveal Morrison's mastery over prose.

Charles Fort was an American researcher from the early twentieth century who cataloged reports of unexplained phenomena he found in newspapers and science journals. A minor bestseller with a cult appeal, Fort's work was posthumously republished in the pulp science fiction magazine Astounding Stories in 1934. His idiosyncratic books fascinated, scared, and entertained readers, many of them authors and editors of science fiction. Fort's work prophesied the paranormal mainstays of SF literature to come: UFOs, poltergeists, strange disappearances, cryptids, ancient mysteries, unexplained natural phenomena, and everything in between. Science fiction authors latched on to Fort's topics and hypotheses as perfect fodder for SF stories. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, and others are examined in this exploration of Fortean science fiction-a genre that borrows from the reports and ideas of Fort and others who saw the possible science-fictional nature of our reality.

In the six essays of this book, Ksana Blank examines affinities among works of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and their connections to the visual arts and music. Blank demonstrates that the borders of authorial creativity are not stable and absolute, that talented artists often transcend the classifications and paradigms established by critics. Featured in the volume are works by Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Kazimir Malevich, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the ""big wave"" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constitute a new generation of Jewish-Russian writers: diasporic Russians and new Israelis.

Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.

Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. Although to date Everett has published eighteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three poetry collections, and one children's book, his work has not garnered the critical attention that it deserves. Perhaps one of the most vexing problems scholars have had in trying to situate Everett's work is that they have found it difficult to place him and his work within a prescribed African American literary tradition. Because he happens to be African American, critics have expectations of so-called authentic African American fiction; however, his work often thwarts these expectations.

In "Perspectives on Percival Everett," scholars engage all of his creative production. On the one hand, Everett is an African American novelist. On the other hand, he pursues subject matters that seemingly have little to do with African American culture. The operative word here is "seemingly"; for as these essays demonstrate, Everett's works falls well within "as well as" outside of what most critics would deem the African American literary tradition. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions--issues essential to understanding his aesthetic and political concerns.

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

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.

The storm has become a universal trope in the literature of crisis, revelation and transformation. It can function as a trope of place, of apocalypse and epiphany, of cultural mythos and story, and of people and spirituality. This book explores the connections between people, place and environment through the image of cyclones within fiction and poetry from the Australian state of Queensland, the northern coast of which is characterized by these devastating storms. Analyzing a range of works including Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, and Vance Palmer's Cyclone it explains the cyclone in the Queensland literary imagination as an example of a cultural response to weather in a unique regional place. It also situates the cyclones that appear in Queensland literature within the broader global context of literary cyclones.

A comparative study of two classic literary works, from a specialist in Joyce and Homer Time and Identity in "Ulysses" and the "Odyssey" offers a unique in-depth comparative study of two classic literary works, examining essential themes such as change, the self, and humans' dependence on and isolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyce and Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time-that people are constantly changing yet remain the same across the years. In Nelson's analysis, both Ulysses and the Odyssey explore dichotomies such as the permanence of names and shifting of stories, independence and connection, and linear and cyclical narrative. Nelson discusses Homer's contrast of ordinary to mythic time alongside Joyce's contrast of "clocktime" to experienced time. She analyzes the characters Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, alienated from their previous selves; Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus, trapped by the past; and Penelope and Molly Bloom, able to recast time through weaving, storytelling, and memory. These concepts are also explored through Joyce's radically different narrative styles and Homer's timeless world of the gods. Nelson's thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, Joyce, narratology, oral tradition, and translation results in a volume that speaks across literary specializations. This book makes the case that Ulysses and the Odyssey should be read together and that each work highlights and clarifies aspects of the other. As Joyce's characters are portrayed as both flux and fixity, readers will see Homer's hero fight his way out of myth and back into the constant changes of human existence.

Caitlin R. Kiernan is at the forefront of contemporary gothic, weird and science fiction literature. She has written more than a dozen novels, over 250 short stories, many chapbooks, along with a large number of graphic works. For these Kiernan has won numerous awards. This first full-length look at Kiernan's body of work explores her fictional universe through critical literary lenses to show the depth of her contributions to modern genre literature. A prolific and creative writer, Kiernan's fictions bring to life our fears about the other, the unknown, and the future through stories that range widely across time and space. A sense of dark terror pervades her novels and stories. Yet Kiernan's fictional universe is not disengaged from reality. That is because she works within the long tradition of gothic fiction speaking to the gravest ethical, social and cultural issues. In her dark fiction, Kiernan illustrates the terror of the tyranny of the normal, the oppression of marginalized people, and the pervasive violence of our time. Her dystopian sf propels today's dangerous economic, social, political and environmental tendencies into the future. Kiernan's fiction portrays troubling truths about the current human condition.

The intertwined stories of two archipelagos and their diasporas This volume is the first systematic comparative study of Cuba and Puerto Rico from both a historical and contemporary perspective. In these essays, contributors highlight the interconnectedness of the two archipelagos in social categories such as nation, race, class, and gender to encourage a more nuanced and multifaceted study of the relationships between the islands and their diasporas. Topics range from historical and anthropological perspectives on Cuba and Puerto Rico before and during the Cold War to cultural and sociological studies of diasporic communities in the United States. The volume features analyses of political coalitions, the formation of interisland sororities, and environmental issues. Along with sharing a similar early history, Cuba and Puerto Rico have closely intertwined cultures, including their linguistic, literary, food, musical, and religious practices. Contributors also discuss literature by Cuban and Puerto Rican authors by examining the aesthetics of literary techniques and discourses, the representation of psychological space on the stage, and the impacts of migration. Showing how the trajectories of both archipelagos have been linked together for centuries and how they have diverged recently, Cuba and Puerto Rico offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of this intricate relationship and the formation of diasporic communities and continuities. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

With the 1965 publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote declared that he broke new literary ground. But, despite its kinship with the New Journalism, Capote's "nonfiction novel" belongs to the long tradition of literary naturalism, originating in the work of nineteenth-century French novelist Emile Zola. Now, Naturalism offers a particular response to the increasing problem of violence in American life and the sociological implications of that violence. This book traces the origins of the fact-based homicide novel tradition that emerged in the mainstream of twentieth-century American literature with works such as Frank Norris's McTeague and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. At the heart of these novels is a young man isolated from every possible community who acts out in desperate circumstances against someone who reflects his isolation. A tension develops in the narrative between how society views this killer and the way he is viewed by the novelist, who shows the protagonist as both victimizer and victim. The crimes central to these narratives epitomize the vast gap between those who can aspire to the so-called "American dream" and those with no realistic chance of achieving it.

This book provides tips and guidelines for teachers and learners of modern foreign languages in higher education institutions, drawing on the authors' experiences of teaching languages including Turkish, Japanese and Korean to suggest strategies and approaches that promote effective use of the online environment. As well as shedding light on modern languages that are typically under-studied and under-represented in the literature, this book demonstrates how the online sphere is increasingly fundamental to language use, change and contact. The authors provide practical guidance to help teachers and learners capitalise on the opportunities presented by a virtual educational context, and offer a more resilient blended approach that will increase teachers' and students' preparedness for changing circumstances and institutional priorities in the future. This book is primarily aimed at teachers and students of foreign languages within HE settings, but its focus on new perspectives will also be of interest to scholars researching the online shift in language education, applied linguistics, curriculum design and educational technology.

Contributions by Megan De Roover, Jennifer Harrison, Sarah Jackson, Zoe Jaques, Nada Kujund?Yi?c, Ivana Milkovi?c, Niall Nance-Carroll, Perry Nodelman, David Rudd, Jonathan Chun Ngai Tsang, Nicholas Tucker, Donna Varga, and Tim Wadham One hundred years ago, disparate events culminated in one of the most momentous happenings in the history of children's literature. Christopher Robin Milne was born to A. A. Milne and his wife; Edward Bear, a lovable stuffed toy, arrived on the market; and a living, young bear named Winnie settled in at the London Zoo. The collaboration originally begun by the Milnes, the Shepards, Winnie herself, and the many toys and personalities who fed into the Pooh legend continued to evolve throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to become a global phenomenon. Yet even a brief examination of this sensation reveals that Pooh and his adventures were from the onset marked by a rich complexity behind a seeming simplicity and innocence. This volume, after a decades-long lull in concentrated Pooh scholarship, seeks to highlight the plurality of perspectives, modes, and interpretations these tales afford, especially after the Disney Corporation scooped its paws into the honeypot in the 1950s. Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after One Hundred Years argues the doings of Pooh remain relevant for readers in a posthuman, information-centric, media-saturated, globalized age. Pooh's forays destabilize social certainties on all levels-linguistic, ontological, legal, narrative, political, and so on. Through essays that focus on geography, language, narrative, characterization, history, politics, economics, and a host of other social and cultural phenomena, contributors to this volume explore how the stories open up discourses about identity, ethics, social relations, and notions of belonging. This first volume to offer multiple perspectives from multiple authors on the Winnie-the-Pooh books in a single collection focuses on and develops approaches that bring this classic of children's literature into the current era. Essays included not only are of relevance to scholars with an interest in Pooh, Milne, and the ""golden age"" of children's literature, but also showcase the development of children's literature scholarship in step with exciting modern developments in literary theory.

"The Translator's Doubts" singles out translation as a way of talking about literary history and theory, philosophy, and interpretation, with the work of Vladimir Nabokov as its "case study." It is hard to separate Nabokov from the act of translation, in all senses of the word--ranging from "moving across" geographical borders and cultural and linguistic boundaries to the transferring of the split between "here" and "there" and "then" and "now." Investigating translation as a transformational rather than mimetic experience allows us to understand the strikingly original end-result: in what emerges, both the "target language" and the "native" language undergo something new that dispenses with the quest for and the "anxiety" of influences. In this sense Nabokov constitutes a perfect object for comparativist study since his oeuvre offers us the unique opportunity to look at his major texts twice: as originals and as translations.

First published in 1906, this edition of Magnyfycence aimed to highlight the true significance of the play within both the canon of John Skelton's work and English drama. Robert Lee Ramsay situates Magnyfycence as a morality play which functioned as a bridge between medieval miracle plays and the modern comedy. He demonstrates the text's significance as the first example of a play by an English man of letters and our first example of a secular and literary rather than theological morality play. This edition features an extensive scholarly introduction exploring areas such as the staging, versification, sources and characterisation, followed by the Middle-English text itself along with glosses.

First published in 1905, these two volumes together reproduced the text of Rawlinson MS. B 408 from the Bodleian Library in two parts. They consist of a preface followed the full Middle English text with glosses. The initial section of the manuscript is slightly older and consists of prefixed liturgical pieces such as the Articles of Excommunication. This follows the common historical practice of combining manuscripts to encourage their preservation. The remainder of the text presents the reader with the Register of the Estates of Godstow Abbey. The manuscript was initially created as a translation of the Latin register in order to allow the nuns, who were literate in English but not Latin, to manage their own estates. This manuscript was, at the time of publication, the only known complete English-language cartulary made for a monastic house. It holds significant implications not only for the status, linguistic development and usage of the English language, but also for women's history in the church and their socioeconomic agency, along with the ability of language to both restrict and open doors. The text includes its own introduction in which the founding of the Abbey by Dame Edyve of Winchester, first Abbess of Godstow, is recounted, followed by deeds relating to the local area.

Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his stagecraft. 15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing, smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature, and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and page. The volume explores and develops current methods for studying Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges created by this emergent and influential area of scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.

With the decline of formalism and its predilection for Old English poetry, Old English prose is leaving the periphery and moving into the center of literary and cultural discussion. The extensive corpus of Old English prose lends many texts of various kinds to the current debates over literary theory and its multiple manifestations. The purpose of this collection is to assist the growing interest in Old English prose by providing essays that help establish the foundations for considered study and offer models and examples of special studies. Both retrospective and current in its examples, this collection can serve as a "first book" for an introduction to study, particularly suitable for courses that seek to entertain such issues as authorship, texts and textuality, source criticism, genre, and forms of historical criticism as a significant part of a broad, cultural teaching (and research) plan.

Winner 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Choice

Winner 2010 EBSCOhost / Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize

Honorable Mention 2010 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award, Western Literature Association

In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's "Christian Recorder," John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: "It takes our Western boys to lead off. I am
proud of your paper."

Weaver's story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. "Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature" recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, "Unexpected Places" calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, "Unexpected Places" offers the first critical considerations of important figures including William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart. The book's discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century.

A Curious Peril examines the prose penned by modernist writer H.D. in the aftermath of World War II, a little-known body of work that has been neglected by scholars, and argues that the trauma H.D. experienced in London during the war profoundly changed her writing. Lara Vetter reveals a shift in these writings from classical "escapist" settings to politically aware explorations of gender, spirituality, nation, and imperialism. Impelled by the shocking political crises of the early 1940s, and increasingly sensitive to imperialist logics, H.D. began to write about the history of modern Europe using innovative forms and genres. She directed her well-known interest in mysticism and otherworldly themes toward the material world of empire-building and perpetual war. Vetter contends that H.D.'s postwar work is essential to understanding the writer's entire career, marking her entrance into late modernism and even foretelling crucial aspects of postmodernism.

The Short Story of the Novel is a new and innovative introduction to the best works of fiction from the last 500 years. Simply constructed, the book explores 60 key novels from The Tale of Genji to My Brilliant Friend. In addition to enjoyable descriptions of the novels and concise explanations of why they are important, the book illuminates the most significant writing genres, themes and techniques. Accessible and fun to read, with a foreword by Professor Peter Boxall, this pocket guide will give readers a new way to enjoy their favourite books - and to discover new ones.

Eudora Welty and Surrealism surveys Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City, where the surrealists exhibited, and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism's perspective in her writing. In fact, Welty's first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York's premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty's striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study's interpretations also foreground how her writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomenon. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dali, Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South, a literary strategy that revealed not only cultural farsightedness but great artistic daring.

Between 1880 and 1914, England saw the emergence of an unprecedented range of new literary forms from Modernism to the popular thriller. Not coincidentally, this period also marked the first overt references to an art/market divide through which books took on new significance as markers of taste and class. Though this division has received considerable attention relative to the narrative structures of the period's texts, little attention has been paid to the institutions and ideologies that largely determined a text's accessibility and circulated format and thus its mode of address to specific readerships. Hammond addresses this gap in scholarship, asking the following key questions: How did publishing and distribution practices influence reader choice? Who decided whether or not a book was a 'classic'? In a patriarchal, class-bound literary field, how were the symbolic positions of 'author' and 'reader' affected by the increasing numbers of women who not only bought and borrowed, but also wrote novels? Using hitherto unexamined archive material and focussing in detail on the working practices of publishers and distributors such as Oxford University Press and W.H. Smith and Sons, Hammond combines the methodologies of sociology, literary studies and book history to make an original and important contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics and rhetorics of the fin-de-siecle literary field in England.