Now in its 31st edition, this title is a comprehensive and practical source of biographical information on the key personalities and organizations of the literary world, whether world-famous or lesser known. This descriptive directory is revised annually by our editorial team and all entrants are given the opportunity to update their career details, publications and contact information. International in scope and covering all literary genres, this title will prove an invaluable acquisition for public and academic libraries, journalists, television and radio companies, PR companies, literary organizations and anyone needing up-to-date information in this field. Entries: Biographical details are listed for writers of all kinds, including novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, essayists, editors, columnists, journalists, as well as literary agents and publishers. Each entry provides personal information, career details, works published, literary awards and prizes, memberships and contact information, where available. Key Features: - nearly 8,000 entries, including hundreds of new entries for this edition - an additional directory section that includes current and detailed lists of major literary awards and prizes, literary organizations, literary festivals and national libraries from around the world.

This is the first comprehensive reference work on Italian literature to be published in English. With 2,400 entries from an international team of scholars, it provides a wealth of clear, up-to-date assessments of Italy's writers, famous and not so famous, from 1200 to 2000, whether they wrote in Italian, dialect, or Latin, together with vital background information on historical events, regional culture, and the other arts.

This set reissues 5 books on George Eliot originally published between 1963 and 1989. The volumes examine many of Eliot's most respected works, including Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. As well as proving in-depth analyses of Eliot's work, this collection also includes an extensive collection of her critical articles written between 1846 and 1868. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

This Companion offers an overview and assessment of Mario Vargas Llosa's large body of work, tracing his development as a writer and intellectual in his essays, critical studies, journalism, and theatrical works, but above all inhis novels. This companion to the work of Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa traces his fictional and non-fictional writing throughout the different phases of a career spanning more than fifty years. His lifelong dedication to literature goes hand in hand with his commitment as a public intellectual, a role that frequently involves him in controversy. Against the backdrop of Vargas Llosa's political and intellectual development this study brings out the continuities and interrelations that give unity and coherence to a diverse body of work. It highlights the thematic concerns that re-emerge at different points in his writing and link Vargas Llosa's journalism and essays with his fiction: the effects of social ills on the individual, the nature of fiction, and the importance of literature for society. The novels at the centre of his work combine passionate storytelling with technical complexity and an often playful experimentation with genres. This book not only provides a comprehensive overview of Vargas Llosa's writing in the context of his intellectual biography, but looks in detail at each individual work, summarizing contents and analyzing the interplay of form, language, and meaning. A bibliography and suggestions for further reading complement this Companion which will serve the general reader as much as the undergraduate and scholar.

The present English translation reproduces the original German of Carl Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur (GAL) as accurately as possible. In the interest of user-friendliness the following emendations have been made in the translation: Personal names are written out in full, except b. for ibn; Brockelmann's transliteration of Arabic has been adapted to comply with modern standards for English-language publications; modern English equivalents are given for place names, e.g. Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, etc.; several erroneous dates have been corrected, and the page references to the two German editions have been retained in the margin, except in the Supplement volumes, where new references to the first two English volumes have been inserted.

The Imprisoned Traveler is a fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its elusive author. Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year 'detention' came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth's contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth's encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth's allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother.

Born and brought up in Poland bilingually in French and Polish but living for most of his professional life in England and writing in English, Joseph Conrad was, from the start, as much a European writer as he was a British one and his work - from his earliest fictions through Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent to his later novels- has repeatedly been the focal point of discussions about key issues of the modern age. With chapters written by leading international scholars, this book provides a wide-ranging survey of the reception, translation and publication history of Conrad's works across Europe. Covering reviews and critical discussion, and with some attention to adaptations in other media, these chapters situate Conrad's works in their social and political context. The book also includes bibliographies of key translations in each of the European countries covered and a timeline of Conrad's reception throughout the continent.

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.

Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. The term picaresque describes a specific set of early modern Spanish narratives relating the life story of a lowborn adventurer in a realist, ironic, and often humorous manner. The protagonist, the picaro or picara (rascal), seeks upward mobility in a resolutely hierarchical society determined to prevent his - or her - ascent, and both are rich targets of satire. Spanish picaros inspired Anglo-French rogues including Gil Blas and Tom Jones and paved the way for the modern novel. Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque novel from its origins to the present day, along with a treatment of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. After introductory chapters on the picaresque genre and the origin of the phenomenon, the book analyses canonical texts and their role in the picaresque spectrum. Further chapters then turn to critical approaches to the genre and manifestations of the picaresque in Hispanic America, France, England, and modern Spain. Overall, the book affords readers a broad sense of the range of this rich tradition and an in-depth view of the field and its major texts.

Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers recovers the history of the writers, artists, and intellectuals of the African diaspora who, witnessing a transition to an American-dominated capitalist world-system during the Cold War, offered searing critiques of burgeoning U.S. hegemony. Cedric Tolliver traces this history through an analysis of signal events and texts where African diaspora literary culture intersects with the wider cultural Cold War, from the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists organized by Francophone intellectuals in September 1956 to the reverberations among African American writers and activists to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Among Tolliver's subjects are Caribbean writers Jacques Stephen Alexis, George Lamming, and Aime Cesaire, the black press writing of Alice Childress and Langston Hughes, and the ordeal of Paul Robeson, among other topics. The final chapter brings together the international and domestic consequences of the cultural Cold War and closes with a discussion of their lingering effects on our contemporary critical predicament.

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.

Although nearly every other television form or genre has undergone a massive critical and popular reassessment or resurgence in the past twenty years, the game show's reputation has remained both remarkably stagnant and remarkably low. Scholarship on game shows concerns itself primarily with the history and aesthetics of the form, and few works assess the influence the format has had on American society or how the aesthetics and rhythms of contemporary life model themselves on the aesthetics and rhythms of game shows. In Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film, author Mike Miley seeks to broaden the conversation about game shows by studying how they are represented in fiction and film. Writers and filmmakers find the game show to be the ideal metaphor for life in a media-saturated era, from selfhood to love to family to state power. The book is divided into "rounds," each chapter looking at different themes that books and movies explore via the game show. By studying over two dozen works of fiction and film-bestsellers, blockbusters, disasters, modern legends, forgotten gems, award winners, self-published curios, and everything in between-Truth and Consequences argues that game shows offer a deeper understanding of modern-day America, a land of high-stakes spectacle where a game-show host can become president of the United States.

A detailed and lively discussion and analysis of the novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and other works of one of the most important and popular writers in Spain today. This book provides the most comprehensive study to date of the full range of Marias' writing, including discussion and analysis of his literary and intellectual formation, his development as a novelist and short story writer, andhis unique perspective offered in nearly twenty-five years of newspaper columns on topics ranging from religion to football. Above all, Marias is examined as a writer of fictions. As a translator of several canonical works from English to Spanish, Marias came to appreciate the preciseness of words as well as their ambiguity, their capacity to represent as well as their propensity to distort. The author examines Marias's constant awareness of how languagecan be used to construct stories as the foundation for engaging the world as well as for imagining it. The nature of Marias's storytelling, and the way in which he imagines, form the principal focus of this Companion. David K. Herzberger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison's work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate's novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison's ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

"The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku" reveals Richard Wright's poetic vision toward the human world. Through the minimal form of haiku, Wright (1908-1960) found his poetic connection to nature. This sensibility displays not only the change in him as a writer but also the tenderness in him as a human being.

These essays open up a new territory in Wright studies by tracing the development of Wright's aesthetic and its relationship to African and Japanese cultures. The book tells how haiku offered a therapeutic outlet for Wright in his final two years of life in Paris, explores the influence of Zen Buddhism on Wright's haiku, and delivers a thematic analysis of Wright's haiku. The collection also gives us a focused examination of how Wright's haiku reveal a conflict between nature and culture, how women are exploited for labor and sex by the culture at-large, and how the South in Wright's haiku symbolizes a place full of dreams, memories, hardships, and loneliness with his images of cotton, freight trains, croaking frogs, magnolia trees, and hog-killing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Utopian thinking embraces fictional descriptions of how to create a better (but not a perfect) alternative way of life as well as intentional communities (that is, groups of people leading lives in small communities for their own betterment and the betterment of others). The first edition almost exclusively dealt with the intentional-community side of utopianism; this second edition offers a much more inclusive definition of the key term utopia by offering a great many entries devoted to describing fictional or literary utopian works. It is also heavily illustrated with plates from utopian works, especially those from the heyday of utopianism in the late nineteenth century. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Utopianism contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on broad conceptual entries; narrower entries about specific works; and narrower entries about specific intentional communities or movements. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Utopianism.

Contributions by Torsten Caeners, Phoebe Chen, Mathieu Donner, Shannon Hervey, Angela S. Insenga, Patricia Kennon, Maryna Matlock, Ferne Merrylees, Lars Schmeink, Anita Tarr, Tony M. Vinci, and Donna R. White For centuries, humanism has provided a paradigm for what it means to be human: a rational, unique, unified, universal, autonomous being. Recently, however, a new philosophical approach, posthumanism, has questioned these assumptions, asserting that being human is not a fixed state but one always dynamic and evolving. Restrictive boundaries are no longer in play, and we do not define who we are by delineating what we are not (animal, machine, monster). There is no one aspect that makes a being human--self-awareness, emotion, artistic expression, or problem-solving--since human characteristics reside in other species along with shared DNA. Instead, posthumanism looks at the ways our bodies, intelligence, and behavior connect and interact with the environment, technology, and other species. In Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, editors Anita Tarr and Donna R. White collect twelve essays that explore this new discipline's relevance in young adult literature. Adolescents often tangle with many issues raised by posthumanist theory, such as body issues. The in-betweenness of adolescence makes stories for young adults ripe for posthumanist study. Contributors to the volume explore ideas of posthumanism, including democratization of power, body enhancements, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, and the environment, by analyzing recent works for young adults, including award-winners like Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, as well as the works of Octavia Butler and China Mieville.

Robert Browning, the great Victorian poet, is often claimed to be hard to understand, largely on account of the obscurity of his language, the complexity of his thought, and his poetic style. The Browning Cyclopaedia, first published in 1891, presents an exposition of the prominent ideas of each poem, as well as its tone, its sources - historical, legendary or fanciful - and a glossary of every difficult word or allusion which might obscure the poem's meaning. This volume remains indispensable for students of Robert Browning, as well as those interested in the general aesthetic climate of Victorian poetry.

Ulrike Draesner is a prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, critical essays and poetry, and one of the foremost authors in Germany today. While a number of volumes have been published in German on her work, the current Companion offers the first volume on Draesner in English, capitalising on the interest in her work in Germany and further afield. Introducing Draesner's major novels and short stories, poetry collections and essays, as well as giving an overview of existing research focusing on migration, memory, science, gender and bodily experience, chapters by international scholars in this volume also break new ground by focussing on visual culture, poetology, nature, the posthuman and Draesner's reception of English literature and medieval culture. A comprehensive bibliography, commissioned interview and original writing by Draesner make the volume a valuable research tool for scholars and students. This will become essential reading for all those interested in Draesner, women's writing, literature and history, and contemporary German prose and poetry.

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction to the key thinkers and theories integral to the study of literature. Organized thematically, the book provides historical introductions and uses a variety of relevant contemporary examples to illuminate the field. Evan Gottlieb contextualizes the latest developments with regard to forms; discourses; subjectivities and embodiments; media, networks, and machines; and animals, affects, objects, and environments. Each chapter elucidates its concepts through in-depth discussions of major contemporary theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Sara Ahmed, and Catherine Malabou, and uses engaging examples from a canonical novel, a contemporary text, and a new-media artifact to demonstrate theoretical applications. Additional text boxes regularly introduce emerging or overlooked theorists of interest, including Fred Moten and Sianne Ngai. An ideal guide for students of literary and critical theory, this book will give readers the background they need to continue their own explorations of this vibrant field of study.

Adopting a unique historical approach to its subject and with a particular focus on the institutions involved in the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature, this handbook surveys the way in which the Cold War shaped literature and literary production, and how literature affected the course of the Cold War. To do so, in addition to more 'traditional' sources it uses institutions like MFA programs, university literature departments, book-review sections of newspapers, publishing houses, non-governmental cultural agencies, libraries, and literary magazines as a way to understand works of the period differently. Broad in both their geographical range and the range of writers they cover, the book's essays examine works of mainstream American literary fiction from writers such as Roth, Updike and Faulkner, as well as moving beyond the U.S. and the U.K. to detail how writers and readers from countries including, but not limited to, Taiwan, Japan, Uganda, South Africa, India, Cuba, the USSR, and the Czech Republic engaged with and contributed to Anglo-American literary texts and institutions.

Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in practice, both in and outside the classroom, and provides insights into the rhetorical labor that is often unacknowledged and made invisible in multilingual communication. Sites of Translation is relevant to researchers and teachers of writing as well as technology designers interested in creating systems, pedagogies, and platforms that will be more accessible and useful to multilingual audiences. Sites of Translation presents multilingual communication as intellectual labor that should be further valued in both academic and professional spaces, and supported by multilingual technologies and pedagogies that center the expertise of linguistically diverse communicators.

To explore the depth of the literary connection between William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara, particularly in relation to their American roots, this book examines their distinct responses to Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School artists. Although an outsider to this movement, Williams paid attention to its increasing popularity and ultimately valued its importance in the progression of American art. As an outsider, O'Hara functioned as a vital critic and promoter of this group. Foremost among the artists discussed here are Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell, and David Smith.