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.

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.

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.

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.

Celebrated as a novelist and made famous by her novel Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942) is far less known for also writing and publishing hundreds of poems over a period of half a century.Although this output included a chapbook and a full-length collection in which she presented herself primarily as a nature poet, most of her poems appeared in periodicals, including women's magazines, farm papers, faith-based periodicals, daily and weekly newspapers, and magazines for children. As a shrewd businesswoman, she learned to find the balance between literary quality and commercial saleability and continued to publish poetry even though it paid less than short fiction. A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894-1921, the second volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, gathers a selection of fifty poems originally published across a twenty-five-year period. Benjamin Lefebvre organizes this work within the context of Montgomery's life and career, claiming her not only as a nature poet but also as the author of a wider range of "songs": of place, of memory, of lamentation, of war, of land and sea, of death, and of love. Many of these poems echo motifs that readers of Montgomery's novels will recognize, and many more explore surprising perspectives through the use of male speakers. These poems offer today's readers a new facet of the career of Canada's most enduringly popular author.

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.

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.

Now in its 28th 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: - over 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

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.

A detailed and fascinating journey to the roots of The Lord of the Rings, by award-winning Tolkien expert Professor Tom Shippey. The Road to Middle-Earth is a fascinating and accessible exploration of J.R.R.Tolkien's creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Tom Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien's professional background led him to write The Hobbit and how he created a work of timeless charm for millions of readers. He discusses the contribution of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales to Tolkien's great myth-cycle, showing how Tolkien's more 'complex' works can be read enjoyably and seriously by readers of his earlier books, and goes on to examine the remarkable 12-volume History of Middle-earth by Tolkien's son and literary heir Christopher Tolkien, which traces the creative and technical processes through which Middle-earth evolved. The core of the book, however, concentrates on The Lord of the Rings as a linguistic and cultural map, as a twisted web of a story, and as a response to the inner meaning of myth and poetry. By following the routes of Tolkien's own obsessions - the poetry of languages and myth - The Road to Middle-earth shows how Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Elder Edda and many other works form part of a live and continuing tradition of literature. It takes issue with many basic premises of orthodox criticism and offers a new approach to Tolkien, to fantasy, and to the importance of language in literature. This new edition is revised and expanded, and includes a previously unpublished lengthy analysis of Peter Jackson's film adaptations and their effect on Tolkien's work.

The first volume of this edition of Katherine Mansfield's letters, correspondents A-J, is heavily weighted towards the Beauchamp family and several of her closest friends. This second volume, quite by chance, puts the emphasis far more on Mansfield's literary and intellectual friendships especially members of the Bloomsbury group. It includes letters to Sylvia Lynd, the Hon. Bertrand Russell, Sydney and Violet Schiff, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf and Hugh Walpole, as well as those individuals who gathered around Lady Ottoline Morrell (herself the recipient of one of the largest number of letters in this volume) at Garsington Manor. With over twenty new letters not published in previous editions of her letters, as well substantial revisions and additions to a number of other letters, accompanied by thoroughly researched annotations, this volume offers many new insights into Mansfield's epistolary relationships.

First Published in 2002. This is a collection of essays and commentary on some of Shakespeare's Sonnets looking at the areas of symbolism, time and eternity, integration and their expansion and moves onto the metaphysical poem of the Phoenix and the Turtle and considers if it has the same love as celebrated in the Sonnets.

The International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2012 is an invaluable and practical source of biographical information on the key personalities and organizations of the literary world. All entrants have the opportunity to update their entries, confirming existing titles and contributions and listing new ones, providing career details and professional experience, and updating their contact information. This title is international in its scope and covers all literary genres.

Now in its twenty-seventh edition, this descriptive directory is revised and updated annually by our editorial team and covers the most important authors and writers at work today, along with lesser known ones for whom information is harder to find. 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:

• almost 8,000 entries
• 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
• entries for established writers, as well as for those who have recently risen to prominence, featuring latest contact information, such as email and web addresses
• hundreds of new entries are included in this edition.

William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer's career, racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in Faulkner's prose. Faulkner's fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race along with challenges to the racial codes and standards of the region, and complex portrayals of the interactions between blacks and whites. Throughout his work, Faulkner contests white identity--its performance by whites and those passing for white, its role in shaping the South, and its assumption of normative identity in opposition to non-white "Others." This is true even in novels without a strong visible African American presence, such as "As I Lay Dying," "The Hamlet," "The Town," and "The Mansion."

"Faulkner and Whiteness" explores the ways in which Faulkner's fiction addresses and destabilizes the concept of whiteness in American culture. Collectively, the essays argue that whiteness, as part of the Nobel Laureate's consistent querying of racial dynamics, is a central element. This anthology places Faulkner's oeuvre--and scholarly views of it--in the contexts of its contemporary literature and academic trends exploring race and texts.

First published in 2002. This is the Volume III of the five G. Wilson Knight collected works series and focuses on Shakespeare's tragic heroes for his early to later tragedies or Timon of Athens, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. This book has grown from Knight's dramatic recital 'Shakespeare's Dramatic Challenge', and therefore includes a prefatory note on his stage experience. The complete record, with illustrations, has already been documented in Shakespearian Production (enlarged 1964), but a rather more personal account is offered here.

This is Volume IX of the G.Wilson Knight collected works and includes commentary on the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, an essay on Shelley and Keats. It concludes with a chapter looking at Symbolic Eternities and an appendix on spiritualism and poetry.

This book presents a series of essays that examine the ideological, personal, and political difficulties faced by the group variously termed the Anglo-Irish, the Protestant Ascendancy, or the English in Ireland, a group that existed in a world of contested ideological, political, and cultural identities. At the root of this conflicted sense of self was an acute awareness among the Anglo-Irish of their liminal position as colonial dominators in Ireland who were viewed as 'other' both by the Catholic natives of Ireland and their English kinsmen. The work in this volume is highly interdisciplinary, bringing to bear examination of issues that are historical, literary, economic, and sociological. Contributors investigate how individuals experienced the ambiguities and conflicts of identity formation in a colonial society, how writers fought the economic and ideological superiority of the English, how the cooption of Gaelic history and culture was a political strategy for the Anglo-Irish, and how literary texts contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. In seeking to understand and trace the complex process of identity formation in early modern Ireland, the essays in this volume attest to its tenuous, dynamic, and necessarily incomplete nature.

This is the standard reference guide to the works of Charles Dickens. The material is arranged alphabetically, in dictionary style, and provides a quick means of reference to the plots of the novels and to all the characters and places mentioned in the novels. There are also useful explanatory notes on allusions and phrases.

First Published in 2002. This is a collection of essays and commentary on the later Shakespearian tragedies of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Anthony and Cleopatra and Richard II.

Literary Research and British Postmodernism is a guide for scholars that aims to connect the complex relationships between print and multimedia, technological advancements, and the influence of critical theory that converge in postwar British literature. This era is unique in that strict boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, multimedia and print are not useful. Postmodern literature is defined by the breaking down of boundaries as a reaction to modernism and requires an innovative, multifaceted approach to research. In this guide the authors explore these complex relationships and offer strategies for researching this new period of literature. This book takes a holistic approach to postmodern literature that recognizes the way in which digital media, film, critical theory, popular music and more traditional print sources are inextricably linked. Through this approach, the authors present a broad view of "postmodernism" that includes a wide variety of British authors writing in the last half of the twentieth century. The book's definition of "postmodern" includes any British literature following World War II that engages issues central to postmodern theory, including the social construction of gender, sexuality, and power; the subjectivity of truth; technology as a social force; intertextuality; metafiction; post-colonial narrative; and fantasy. This guide aims to aid researchers of postwar British literature by defining best practices for scholars conducting research in a period so broadly varied in the way it defines literature.

The International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2011 provides an invaluable and practical source of biographical information on the key personalities and organizations of the literary world.

Now in its twenty-sixth edition, the book is revised and updated annually by our editorial team and covers the most important authors and writers at work today. This title will prove an invaluable acquisition for journalists, television and radio companies, public and academic libraries, 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, 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:

• almost 8,000 entries
• a directory section, including detailed lists of major international literary awards and prizes, principal literary organizations, literary festivals and national libraries
• entries for established writers, as well as for those who have recently risen to prominence
• hundreds of new entries are included in this edition.

The International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2010 provides an invaluable and practical source of biographical information on the key personalities and organizations of the literary world.

Now in its twenty-fifth edition, the book is revised and updated annually by our editorial team and covers the most important authors and writers at work today. This title will prove an invaluable acquisition for journalists, television and radio companies, public and academic libraries, 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, 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:

• almost 8,000 entries
• a directory section, including detailed lists of major international literary awards and prizes, principal literary organizations literary festivals and national libraries
• entries for established writers, as well as for those who have recently risen to prominence
• hundreds of new entries are included in this edition.

In the wake of U.S. military intervention abroad and collapsing domestic economies, scholars have turned their attention to neoliberalism and militarization, two ideological and material projects that are often treated as coincident, though not interdependent. Bodies at War examines neoliberal militarism, a term that signifies the complex ways in which neoliberalism and militarism interanimate each other as they naturalize dis/empowering notions of masculinity and femininity, alter democratic practices, and circumscribe the meaning of citizenship and national belonging. Bodies at War examines the rise of neoliberal militarism from the early 1970s to the present and its transformation of political, economic, and social relations. It charts neoliberal militarism's impact on democratic practices, economic policies, notions of citizenship, race relations, and gender norms by focusing on how these changes affect the Chicana/o community and, more specifically, on how it shapes and is shaped by Chicana bodies. The book raises important questions about the cultural legacies of war and the gendering of violence-topics that reach across multiple disciplinary fields of inquiry, including cultural and media studies. It draws attention to the relationship between war and society, to neoliberal militarism's destructive social impact, and to the future of Latina soldiering. Through Chicana art, activism, and writing, Rincon offers a visionary foundation for an antiwar feminist politic.

International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2009 provides an invaluable and practical source of biographical information on the key personalities and organizations of the literary world.

Now in its twenty-fourth edition, the book is revised and updated annually by our editorial team and covers the most important authors and writers at work today. This title will prove an invaluable acquisition for journalists, television and radio companies, public and academic libraries, 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, 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. Entries listed include Thomas Pynchon, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Xinran Xue, Fred Vargas and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Key features:

• 
  
• almost 8,000 entries
• 
  
• a directory section, including detailed lists of major international literary awards and prizes, principal literary organizations, and literary agents
• 
  
• entries for established writers, as well as for those who have recently risen to prominence
• 
  
• hundreds of new entries are included in this edition.