This collection of essays about the writings of Eudora Welty reflects a range of Welty criticism. Themes, forms, and stylistic features in her work are given careful consideration by some of the most notable scholars on her work: John Alexander Allen, J.A. Bryant, Jr., Daniel Curley, Julia L. Demmin, Albert J. Devlin, Chester E. Eisinger, Warren French, Seymour Gross, John Edward Hardy, Robert B. Heilman, Michael Kreyling, Barbara McKenzie, Daniele Pitavy-Souques, and Ruth M. Vande Kieft.

This edition, selected from the twenty-seven essays published in 1979 as "Eudora Welty: Critical Essays," retains the breadth of subject and approach that marked the earlier volume.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Andrey Bely's Petersburg, this volume offers a cross-section of essays that address the most pertinent aspects of his 1916 masterpiece. The plot is relatively a simple one: Nikolai Apollonovich is ordered by a group of terrorists to assassinate his father, the prominent senator, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nevertheless, Bely's polyphonic, experimental prose invokes such diverse themes as: Greek mythology, the apocalypse, family dynamics, psychology, Russian history, theosophy, revolution, and European literary influences. Considered by Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the twentieth century's four greatest masterpieces, Petersburg is the first novel in which the city is the hero. Frequently compared to Joyce's Ulysses, no novel did more to help launch modernism in turn-of-the century Russia.

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. Volume 5 focuses on the fiction of the early and mid-Victorian period, including works by Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Meredith.

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.

Ian Rankin is considered by many to be Scotland's greatest living crime fiction author. Most well known for his Inspector Rebus series-which has earned critical acclaim as well as scores of fans worldwide-Rankin is a prolific author whose other works include spy thrillers, nonfiction books and articles, short stories, novels, graphic novels, audio recordings, television/film, and plays. This companion-the first to provide a complete look at all of his writings-includes alphabetized entries on Rankin's works, characters, and themes; a biography; a chronology; maps of Rebus' Edinburgh; and an annotated bibliography. A champion of both Edinburgh and Scotland, Rankin continues to combine engaging entertainment with socio-political commentary showing Edinburgh as a microcosm of Scotland, and Scotland as a microcosm of the world. His writing investigates questions of Scottish identity, British history, masculinity, and contemporary culture while providing mystery readers with complex, suspenseful plots, realistic character development, and a unique mix of American hard-boiled and procedural styles with Scottish dialects and sensibilities.

The world of books in one little book. It doesn't matter how well read you are, A Little Book About Books is packed full of quotes, one-liners and famous lines from names that everyone will recognise. For bibliophiles, they'll enjoy recognising their favourite passages and authors, all captured in one place. For the less-well-read, they can enjoy discovering new, illuminating quotes and passages that will provide guidance, humour and food for thought. Enjoy exploring the world of books, and the power of writing, in one small, perfectly giftable book. SAMPLE QUOTES: 'Let us read and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.' -Voltaire. 'Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.' - A. A. Milne. 'There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book' - Marcel Proust. 'When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president... the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels.' - Barack Obama.

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.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

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.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz, and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

W. B. Yeats is one of the most important writers in English of the twentieth century, and the system of A Vision is generally recognized as fundamental to the power and achievement of his later poetry. Yet this strange mixture of esoteric geometry, lunar symbolism, and sweeping generalization has proven frustrating to generations of readers, who have found it obscure in both matter and presentation. This book helps readers to approach and understand the origins, structure, and implications of the system. Concentrating on the 1937 revised edition of A Vision, the treatment is divided into major topic areas with several levels: a general introduction to each topic; a fuller and deeper examination of that topic, drawing on A Vision's two versions and the manuscript background, and forming the bulk of each chapter; an examination of how the topic manifests in Yeats's literary work; full notes to explore conceptual and textual problems. The first three chapters examine the background and origins of A Vision; the central seven chapters look at the major elements involved in the system; the following four at the major processes of life and history. The main treatment ends with a summary and conclusion, and is supplemented by a glossary of terms and appendices.

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

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.