Conversations with Graham Swift is the first collection of interviews conducted with the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders. Beginning in 1985 with Swift's arrival in New York to promote Waterland and concluding with an interview from 2016 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the collection spans Swift's more than thirty-five-year career as a writer. The volume also includes interviews first printed in English as well as translated from the French or Spanish and covers a wide range of formats, from lengthier interviews published in standard academic journals, to those for radio, newspapers, and, more recently, podcasts. In these interviews, Graham Swift (b. 1949) offers insights into his life and career, including his friendships with other contemporary writers like Ted Hughes and the group of celebrated novelists who emerged in Britain during the eighties. With remarkable clarity, Swift discusses the themes of his novels and short stories: death, love, history, parent-child relationships, the power of the imagination, the role of storytelling, and the consequences of knowing. He also notes the influences, literary and personal, that have helped shape his writing career. While quite ordinary in his life and daily habits, Swift reveals his penetrating intellect and rich imagination-an imagination that can craft some of the most engaging and formally complex stories in the language.

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.

This collective volume aims to highlight the philosophical and literary idea of apocalypse, within some key examples in the Slavic world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Russian realism to avant-garde painting, from the classic fiction of the nineteenth century to twentieth-century philosophy, and not omitting theatre, cinema or music, there is a specific examination of the concepts of "end of history" and "end of present time" as conditions for a redemptive image of the world. To understand this idea means to understand an essential part of Slavic culture, which, however divergent and variegated it may be in general, converges on this specific myth in a surprising manner.

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.

Across the twentieth century, the Russian literary hero remained central to Russian fiction and frequently "battled" one enemy or another, whether on the battlefield or on a civilian front. War was the experience of the Russian people, and it became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature as well as other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Astafiev, Viktor Pelevin, and Vasily Aksyonov. These authors represented official Soviet literature and underground or dissident literature; they fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, died at home and abroad. Most importantly, they were all touched by war, and they reacted to the state of war in their literary works.

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 fourteen essays in Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain showcase the eye-opening potential of a food lens within colonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and studies of power dynamics, nationalisms and nation building, theories of embodiment, and identity. In short, Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain grapples with an emerging field in need of a foundational text, and does so from multiple angles. The studies span from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and the contributing scholars occupy diverse fields within Latin American and Hispanic Studies. As such, their essays showcase eclectic critical and theoretical approaches to the subject of Latin American and Iberian food. Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain also introduces the first English-language publication of works from such award-winning scholars as Adolfo Castanon of the Mexican Academy of Language; Sergio Ramirez, winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Literature; and Carmen Simon Palmer, winner of the 2015 Julian Marias Prize for Research.

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.

Young adult literature holds an exceptional place in modern American popular culture-accessible to readers of all levels, it captures a diverse audience and tends to adapt to the big screen in an exciting way. With its wide readership, YAL sparks interesting discussions inside and outside of the classroom. This collection of new essays examines how it has impacted college composition courses, primarily focusing on the first year. Contributors discuss popular YA stories, their educational potential, and possibilities for classroom discussion and exercise.

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.

Dashiell Hammett's writing career began with the publication of The Parthian Shot, a tiny short story in "The Smart Set" in 1922, and virtually ended when he published 3 outstanding stories in "Collier's" in 1934. During this period, he published 60 short stories, 5 novels--including "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man"--a few minor poems, some nonfictional prose, and a series of astute book reviews. Though he lived until 1961, he wrote little after 1934 and suffered from alcoholism, tuberculosis, and other illnesses. His influence on other writers, however, and on movies and television, has survived to this day. This reference work is a comprehensive guide to Hammett's life and works.

The volume begins with a chronology that highlights the major events in Hammett's life. The bulk of the book comprises alphabetically arranged entries for Hammett's works, characters, family members, and acquaintances. Some of the entries cite sources of additional information, and the volume concludes with a brief bibliography. While the reference is first and foremost a guide to Hammett, it is also a helpful aid to the study of the development of the American hard-boiled detective novel.

The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently reproduce the spectacle of twins who share an insular closeness and perform a supposed alikeness-standing side by side, speaking and acting in unison. Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines their historical narrative-embedded within discourses of aberrance, experimentation and eugenics-and how it has shaped their public and personal representations in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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.

This book is about Susan Howe's poetry from the perspective of space. Howe reshapes cultural configurations of space through her drive to infiltrate interstitial areas of 'third' spaces: the silences of history, the margins of the page, the placeless migrants, and the uncharted lands. Nuances, frontiers, thresholds, edges, fuzzinesses, ambiguities, pauses, singularities, margins: these are the spaces where her poetry occurs, places that lie between two states. Rather than absences, therefore, the space of this poetry is a place of being, of what Gilles Deleuze and FZlix Guattari refer to as becoming. Third space is contested because it must also call itself into question in reimagining itself; in questioning its condition and rethinking itself, it contradicts itself repeatedly, setting up the form of an ever-present yet ever-shifting paradox of self-presencing. This site is also, however, the place of no frames or boundaries, a place that is all margins and singularities, that site of displacement, where migration is eternal and violence is perennial. Nomadism becomes an emblem in Howe's poetry for the twentieth-century condition as it represents the continual movement through space of the body, that never-ending, always-perpetuated sense of loss of place, but that equally charged coming into being regardless of the space within which that loss/becoming occurs.

Balzac claimed that toilettes were the expression of society. Coiffures describes the historical and cultural practices associated with women's hairstyles, hair care, and hair art in nineteenth-century France. Hair also has profound symbolic significance. Lying on the border between life and death, it grows, but does not feel. It marks sexual identity; it can be wild and erotic or tamed and made docile by hairdressing. Literary works are inevitably informed by social and cultural practices, and those of the period make extensive use of the meanings of hair. The Realist novelists in particular devote great attention to the physical traits and dress of their characters, and hair is often a key element in their descriptions and plots. Coiffures shows how a wide range of literary works incorporate the manifold aspects of hair, and it examines particular texts in detail, including works by Balzac, Sand, Flaubert, Zola, Gautier, Maupassant, and Rodenbach.

Even in a genre well known for generating controversy, some true-crime and scandal books have wielded a particular power to unsettle readers, provoke the authorities, and generate renewed focus on a case. For crimes and scandals that have attracted a library of more dubious investigations, the cumulative effect of the literature has been equally contentious, clouding the "truth" with a trail of myths and inaccuracies. From high-profile publishing sensations such as Ten Rillington Place, Fatal Vision, and Mommie Dearest to the wealth of writing on the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the Black Dahlia murder, this work delves into that hard copy era when crime and scandal books had a cultural impact beyond the genre's film and TV documentaries, fueling outcries that sometimes matched the notoriety of the cases they discussed, and leaving legacies that still resonate today.

Award-winning popular culture scholar and expert, Gary Hoppenstand, assembles a collection of essays published over the past few decades that examine a vast array of popular adventure fiction. Some of the most famous novels in all of popular fiction are featured in these essays, such as Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. Hoppenstand examines the cultural and literary impact of these great works of entertainment, often presenting forgotten classics in a new light. Informative analysis offers the interested reader of popular fiction important insights into the adventure story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in American and British literature.

BBC's Orphan Black shattered conventions with one actress-Tatiana Maslany-playing a host of main characters. At the same time, it burst through the expectations of a crowd that anticipated male heroes and female victims. As the mighty heroines save one another and destroy the patriarchy, they're aided by supportive, gentle, even bumbling male love interests and friends. Even as the characters subvert gender expectations, they provide models that celebrate the many types of feminism through history and emerging today: Sarah, the punk feminist and protagonist, clashes with her foster-mother Siobhan, herself a veteran of radical feminism and literal combat. Housewife Alison begins as the quintessential post-feminist, while Krystal sports pink tops and high heels as a girl power icon. Cosima hails from Berkeley in her Birkenstocks and dreadlocks, the herald of second-wave lesbian feminism as she earns herself a science PhD. Beth has it all in the spirit of third-wave feminism, though her drug habits and relationship problems show the weakness of the era. M.K., hidden in her trailer yet ruling the internet as its hacker-queen, offers a new image as a fourth-wave feminist, conquering her disability through the new medium of the internet. At the same time, the science and ethics of cloning emphasizes the women's war against corporate power. Together with metafiction, allusions, symbolism, and deeper imagery, the show breaks all the barriers of gender as well as science fiction television.

First published in 1907, the publication of these Middle-English texts aimed to make the dramatic Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus easily accessible to students of English literature. Edited together using all known manuscripts, the volume includes the texts of the Harrowing of Hell and the Gospel of Nicodemus along with an extensive scholarly introduction on both texts. The Digby, Harley and Auchinleck manuscripts of the Harrowing are printed in three parallel columns to allow for fuller, comparative understanding, at once succinct and comprehensive. The Gospel is reproduced similarly with its Galba, Harley and Sion manuscripts along with an additional manuscript. Explanatory notes and glosses have been omitted owing to inclusion in a separate publication.

A figure from ancient folklore, the doppelganger-in fiction a character's sinister look-alike-continues to reemerge in literature, television and film. The modern-day doppelganger ("double-goer" in German) is typically depicted in a traditional form adapted to reflect present-day social anxieties. Focusing on a broad range of narratives, the author explores 21st century representations in novels (Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, Jose Saramago's The Double), TV shows (Orphan Black, Battlestar Galactica, Ringer) and movies (The Island, The Prestige, Oblivion).

By mid-career, many successful writers find a groove and their readers come to expect a familiar consistency and fidelity. Not so with Henry Green (1905-1973). He prefers uncertainty over reason and fragmentation over cohesion, and rarely lets the reader settle into a nice cozy read. Evil, he suggests, can be as instructive as good. Through his use of paradoxical and ambiguous language, his novels bring texture to the flatness of life, making the world seem bigger and closer. We soon stop worrying about what Hitler's bombs have in store for the Londoners of Caught (1943) and Back (1946) and start thinking about what they have in store for each other. Praised in his lifetime as England's top fiction author, he is largely overlooked today. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of his work for a new generation of readers.

Yeats and his shadow are one of the most closely scrutinised pairs in contemporary literary history. The meaning and significance Yeats gave to the entity by which he was constantly pursued and with which he held frequent colloquy have been held under the critical microscope, and the shadow has emerged alternately as the course of human history, the poet's alter-ego, his inner self, the natural man, or as anything that Yeats wanted but believed himself not to be. This title, first published in 1988, examines the influence that Shelley had on Yeats and this 'shadow'. The study concentrates primarily on the complex influence of Shelley's Alastor on Yeats, tracing the problems it suggests and the questions it raises from Yeats's early, highly imitative poems through the austere, unromantic middle poems to the late poems where Yeats sees himself as the "last of the romantics". This title will be of interest to students of literature.

In this study, first published in 1951, the author examines the poetry of Yeats's last years, that poetry which reached and held to the 'intensity' which he had striven for all his life. Vivienne Koch explores the ways in which the great but troubled poems derive their energy from suffering, and examines thirteen of his last poems in detail, each with a slightly different focus. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

The letters in this book, first published in 1953, throw light on the literary scene at a time in which William Butler Yeats and Thomas Sturge Moore regularly corresponded. In the early days of their friendship Yeats and Sturge Moore often saw each other in London where they both played an active part in the literary and artistic scene. When Yeats later lived chiefly in Ireland and Sturge Moore spent much of his time in the country and abroad they met less often but kept in touch by letter. Many of these letters, and therefore a record of their friendship, has been preserved and presented in this book. This title will be of interest to students of literature and literary history.

This chief aim of this title, first published in 1965, is to present a comprehensive picture of Yeats's achievement and some of the means for an evaluation of that achievement. To this end both the poems and plays have been examined and some of Yeats's critical ideas have been briefly discussed. Professor Rajan's study provides a compact introduction to Yeats's work, and will be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of literature.