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.

Play Up and Play the Game (1973) examines the type of fictional hero most embodied in the work and character, poetry and philosophy of Sir Henry Newbolt. 'Newbolt Man', imbued with the spirit of fairplay, loyalty, fearlessness, conformity (while remaining slightly philistine and sexless), can be traced in the work of Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Anthony Hope and P.C. Wren. The book traces his development from the Victorian schoolboy (Tom Brown's School Days and Kipling) to the twentieth-century secret agent (Buchan's Richard Hannay), and on to his demise in Sheriff's Journey's End and Aldington's Death of a Hero.

New Aphorisms & Reflections, the fourth volume of a major work in progress, features nearly 500 entries, some of which are autobiographical. Like its predecessors, New Aphorisms & Reflections includes a sampling of "meetings of the minds"-dialogues between the author and aphorists and thinkers of the past.

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.

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

This volume is intended as an introduction of contemporary poetry by notable Uruguayan poets to the English-reading world, but also to readers of Spanish unfamiliar with them. The introduction provides a brief background on Uruguay for readers unfamiliar with the country. Each poet is represented by an ample and varied selection of poems originally published in Spanish, here with English translations on facing pages. The final chapter is devoted to a biographical sketch of each poet and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A numbers of these poets have had poems translated into other languages and included in national and international anthologies, and have received international recognition for their work, but they are still virtually unknown in English-speaking countries. Although some of Spanish America's most celebrated narrative writers of the past quarter century have garnered public, academic, and critical attention abroad, their poets have not. Part of this is due to a lack of orientation, a need to identify which poets of the hundreds currently writing are noteworthy.The editor of this anthology addresses this literary omission by identifying seventeen Uruguayans deserving of recognition: Jorge Arbeleche, Nancy Bacelo, Washington Benavides, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, Luis Bravo, Selva Casal, Rafael Courtoisie, Marosa Di Giorgio, Enrique Fierro, Alfredo Fressia, Saol Ibargoyen, Circe Maia, Jorge Meretta, Eduardo MilOn, Alvaro Miranda, and Salvador Puig.

When creating her post-apocalyptic world of The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins drew from various real-world history and geography, particularly from Appalachia, which is reflected in the culture and location of District 12. With the release of her 2019 prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins brought readers deeper into Appalachia's extraordinary cultural diversity and its storied musical traditions. This book provides a tour of human geography, history and culture that establishes the foundation for the saga's novels and films. Told from the expertise of a geographer, it explores how place can shape culture, how social and geographical concepts intersect and how these ideas apply to The Hunger Games. Specifically, the work explores the idea of "home," and how attachment to a place is strengthened through landscape, geography and song.

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.

First published in 1968, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric is designed primarily to assist the student of renaissance literature in the science of rhetoric. It gathers together the information provided by the various different authorities who contributed to the education of the renaissance author, particularly the writer in English. These authorities include key classical rhetoricians he would probably have read, well-known and important renaissance rhetoricians, and the writers of vernacular treatises and of major school textbooks. The information is arranged in a schematic and tabular form, so that enquiry can start from the object, the particular rhetorical form as it appears in a given literary text. The core of the book is the central section on elocutio, the art of using the devices of rhetorical ornament.

The Bobbio Missal was copied in south-eastern Gaul around the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. It contains a unique combination of a lectionary and a sacramentary, to which a plethora of canonical and non-canonical material was added. The Missal is therefore highly regarded by liturgists; but, additionally, medieval historians welcome the information to be derived from material attached to the codex, which provides valuable data about the role and education of priests in Francia at that time, and indeed on their cultural and ideological background. The breadth of specialist knowledge provided by the team of scholars writing for this book enables the manuscript to be viewed as a whole, not as a narrow liturgical study. Collectively, the essays view the manuscript as physical object: they discuss the contents, they examine the language, and they look at the cultural context in which the codex was written.

This bibliography will give comprehensive coverage to published commentary in English on Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition during the period from 1961-1985. Doctoral dissertations will also be included. Each entry will provide a clear and detailed summary of an item's contents. For pomes and plays based directly on classical sources like Antony and Cleopatra and The Rape of Lucrece, virtually all significant scholarly work during the period covered will be annotated. For other works such as Hamlet, any scholarship that deals with classical connotations will be annotated. Any other bibliographies used in the compiling of this volume will be described with emphasis on their value to a student of Shakespeare and the Classics.

The only dictionary of its kind, this greatly expanded second edition lists objects, concepts, traits and situations ancient and modern and gives their appropriate symbols. A companion to Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary (2012), this volume presents symbols and their referents in reverse association (but is not simply a reconfiguring of information). Examples: a symbol for "hell" is descending stairs; an attribute of Saint Benedict is a raven; joy after sorrow is signified by the gemstone amber. Ethnic, literary, artistic, religious, heraldic, numerological, folkloric, occult and psychological usages are included.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The Sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

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.

The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate Cobain's texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions of his art. Cobain's distinctive version of grunge, understood as a subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an understanding of the self as part of a larger social order. Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain's writings independently of the artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.

Why do Israelis dislike fantasy? Put so bluntly, the question appears frivolous. But in fact, it goes to the deepest sources of Israeli historical identity and literary tradition. Uniquely among developed nations, Israel's origin is in a utopian novel, Theodor Herzl's 'Altneuland' (1902), which predicted the future Jewish state. Jewish writing in the Diaspora has always tended toward the fantastic, the mystical, and the magical. And yet, from its very inception, Israeli literature has been stubbornly realistic. The present volume challenges this stance. Originally published in Hebrew in 2009, it is the first serious, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated exploration of fantasy in Israeli literature and culture. Its contributors jointly attempt to contest the question posed at the beginning: why do Israelis, living in a country whose very existence is predicated on the fulfillment of a utopian dream, distrust fantasy?

When Harry Potter first boards the Hogwarts Express, he journeys to a world which Rowling says has alchemy as its "internal logic." The Philosopher's Stone, known for its power to transform base metals into gold and to give immortality to its maker, is the subject of the conflict between Harry and Voldemort in the first book of the series. But alchemy is not about money or eternal life, it is much more about the transformations of desire, of power and of people-through love. Harry's equally remarkable and ordinary power to love leads to his desire to find but not use the Philosopher's Stone at the start of the series and his wish to end the destructive power of the Elder Wand at the end. This collection of essays on alchemical symbolism and transformations in Rowling's series demonstrates how Harry's work with magical objects, people, and creatures transfigure desire, power, and identity. As Harry's leaden existence on Privet Drive is transformed in the company of his friends and teachers, the Harry Potter novels have transformed millions of readers, inspiring us to find the gold in our ordinary lives.

Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, A Concise Dictionary of Comics guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics expertise. It provides them with a dictionary that doubles as a compendium of comics scholarship. A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions for each term. It includes twenty-five witty illustrations, and pairs most defined terms with references to books, articles, book chapters, and other relevant critical sources. All references are dated and listed in an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of comics scholarship. Each term is also categorized according to type in an index of thematic groupings. This organization serves as a pedagogical aid for teachers and students learning about a specific facet of comics studies and as a research tool for scholars who are unfamiliar with a particular term but know what category it falls into. These features make A Concise Dictionary of Comics especially useful for critics, students, teachers, and researchers, and a vital reference to anyone else who wants to learn more about comics.

Here is a fascinating and humorous encyclopedia of more than three hundred

words and phrases and how they have taken on new meanings over time. It is an

informative reference book for the whole family. "What's in a Word?" is a

sequel to Garrison's popular "Why You Say It." Indexed.

While previous collections of Emerson essays have tended to be a sort of 'stock-taking' or 'retrospective' look at Emerson scholarship, the present collection follows a more 'prospective' trajectory for Emerson studies based on the recent increase in global perspectives in nearly all fields of humanistic studies. The present collection is divided into four main sections: "Emerson, Europe, and Beyond;" "Emerson and Science;" "Emerson Thinking;" "and "Emerson and Activism." The first category emphasizes the global perspective in Emerson's literary and cultural relations, followed closely by two other "transnational" categories - Emerson's relations in the international arenas of science and philosophy - and concluding with the final category, which addresses the end purpose of Emerson's project: fully realized human beings whose actions, directly and indirectly, help to create a society in which individuals are free to develop their capacities fully. Transnational and global perspectives are becoming more recognized and more commonplace in the academy and the world at large. Evidence for such developing perspectives is not hard to find: national and international conferences, new books, and the increasing university courses and programs in World Literature, all reflect a move toward viewing Emerson and literature in general from broader, more inclusive perspectives. The first four categories that follow - "Emerson, Europe, and Beyond" - gives us seven perspectives on Emerson's international influence, ranging from Stephen L. Tanner's gem-like essay on English Traits, to Steve Adisasmito-Smith's trail-blazing Hindu scholarship, to Jan Stievermann's explication of Emerson's vision of "an American World Literature." In the "Emerson and Science" section, four essays range from Michael P. Branch's examination of Emerson's early lectures on natural science, to Branka Arsic's explorations of science from a broad Emersonian view, to David M. Robinson's and Laura Walls' very specific essays on Emerson's encounters with the cutting-edge science of his mature period. In "Emerson Thinking," five scholars examine Emerson's broad thought, which gives evidence of philosophical influence from all times and places through suck topics as human subjectivity and its expression, while George J. Stack and Mary DiMaria examine Emerson's philosophical similarities to and disparities from the French foundational thinkers of the Postmodern theory revolution in literary studies. Finally, in the "Emerson and Activism" section, David S. Reynolds, Len Gougeon, and T. Gregory Garvey examine Emersonian and Transcendental influences on the abolition movement, and Eduardo Cadava expands activism to include more recent "economic oppression and colonialist and racist exclusions," which ultimately can be seen as part of a worldwide post-colonial literary movement and an awareness of the dark side of globalism. All of these essays to a greater or lesser degree are concerned with influences of literature and thought that are cycled through the individual, the culture, and the global community.

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.

A 29th-century dystopian society seen through the eyes of a mutant-cum-romantic poet; a post-impressionist landscape of orbs and cubes experienced by a wandering underdog; an imaginary sick room generated entirely from sounds reaching the ears of an invalid: These and other haunting re-presentations of time and space constitute the Japanese modernist landscape depicted in this volume of stories from the 1910s to the 1930s. The fourteen stories selected for this anthology-by both relatively unknown and "must-read" authors-experiment with a protean modernist style in the vivacious period between the nation-building Meiji and the early years of Showa. The writers capture imaginary temporal and spatial dimensions that embody forms of futuristic urban space, colonial space, utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia. Their work invites readers to abandon the conventional naturalistic approach to spatial and temporal representations and explore how the physical and empirical experience of time and space is distorted and reconfigured through the prism of modernist Japanese prose. An introduction and prefatory materials provide historical and critical context for Japanese modernism, making Three-Dimensional Reading a valuable teaching text not only for the study of modern Japanese literature, but for world literature, global modernism, and utopian studies as well. The volume also includes drawings by contemporary artist Sakaguchi Ky?hei, whose ability to create a stunning visual reality beyond the borders of time and place is a testament to the power and reverberations of the modernist imagination.

In 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry ("The Marble Faun"), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.

In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the "Times-Picayune" and in the "Double Dealer."

The pieces in "New Orleans Sketches" broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication.

In praise of "New Orleans Sketches," Alfred Kazin wrote in the "New York Times Book Review" that "the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work."

In his trail-blazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called "Faulkner's best-informed critic," illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist.

"For the reader of Faulkner," Paul Engle wrote in the "Chicago Tribune," "the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights." "We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment," states the "Book Exchange" (London). "The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times."

Set in 1867, The Innocents Abroad is a travel book that follows a group of Americans from New York City to the renowned Holy Land. Throughout the journey, author Mark Twain uses humor and wit to make astute observations about the diverse people and legendary locales. Described as the "Great Pleasure Excursion," Twain and his traveling companions visit some of the most illustrious cities in the world. They make stops in Italy, France, and Greece as well as modern-day Israel and Ukraine. With each trip, the author notes the contrast between expectation and reality. He critiques the misrepresentation of cultural sites and events with notable irony and disillusion. The retelling of a worldly expedition through an American lens made >The Innocents Abroad a massive commercial success. It's one Twain's best-selling books and became a staple within the travel genre. Readers will thoroughly enjoy the author's enlightening take on the Old World and public perception. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Innocents Abroad is both modern and readable.

The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century. Sarah Jordan argues that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed for itself was industriousness. But this claim was undermined and complicated by, among other factors, the importance of leisure to the upholding of class status, thus making idleness a subject of intense anxiety. One result of this anxiety was an increased surveillance of the supposed idleness of marginalized and less powerful members of society: the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women. In a widely researched and elegantly argued book, Jordan analyzes how idleness is figured in eighteenth-century literature and culture, including both traditional forms of literature and a wide variety of other cultural discourses. At the center of this account, Jordan investigates the lives and works of Johnson, Cowper, Thomson, and many other, lesser known writers. She incorporates their obsession with idleness into a new and lucid theorization of the professionalization of writing and the place of idleness and industry in the larger cultural formation that was eighteenth-century British identity.