Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's ""If We Must Die,"" Countee Cullen's ""Yet Do I Marvel,"" Gwendolyn Brooks's ""First fight. Then fiddle."" Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets. Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Muller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. In this book, Muller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.

A trustworthy record is one that is both an accurate statement of facts and a genuine manifestation of those facts. Record trustworthiness thus has two qualitative dimensions: reliability and authenticity. Reliability means that the record is capable of standing for the facts to which it attests, while authenticity means that the record is what it claims to be. This study explores the evolution of the principles and methods for determining record trustworthiness from antiquity to the digital age, and from the perspectives of law and history. It also examines recent efforts undertaken by researchers in the field of archival science to develop methods for ensuring the trustworthiness of records created and maintained in electronic systems. Audience: The target audience for this study is legal scholars working in the field of evidence law, historians working in the field of historical methodology, and recordkeeping professionals (records managers, information technology specialists, archivists) working on the design and implementation of contemporary organizational recordkeeping systems.

The study of prosody is perhaps the area of speech research which has undergone the most noticeable development during the past ten to fifteen years. As an indication of this, one can note, for example, that at the latest International Conference on Spoken Language Processing in Philadelphia (October 1996), there were more sessions devoted to prosody than to any other area. Not only that, but within other sessions, in particular those dealing with dialogue, several of the presentations dealt specifically with prosodic aspects of dialogue research. Even at the latest Eurospeech meeting in Rhodes (September 1997), prosody, together with speech recognition (where several contributions dealt with how prosodic cues can be exploited to improve recognition processes) were the most frequent session topics, despite the fact that th'ere was a separate ESCA satellite workshop on intonation in conjunction with the main Eurospeech meeting which included over 80 contributions. This focus on prosodic research is partly due to the fact that developments in speech technology have made it possible to examine the acoustic parameters associated with prosodic phenomena (in particular fundamental frequency and duration) to an extent which has not been possible in other domains of speech research. It is also due to the fact that significant theoretical advances in linguistics and phonetics have been made during this time which have made it possible to obtain a better understanding of how prosodic parameters function in expressing different kinds of meaning in the languages of the world.

One of the most important Irish novelists of the twentieth century, Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was also a pioneer of women's writing. In a career that spanned almost fifty years, nine novels, nine plays, two travelogues, and copious criticism, O'Brien rebelled against the narrow nationalism and restrictive Catholicism prevalent in independent Ireland. In this highly original approach to O'Brien's work, Davison traces the influence of three leading Spanish writers-Jacinto Benavente, Miguel de Cervantes, and Teresa of Avila. O'Brien's lifelong fascination with Spanish literature and culture offered an oblique way of resisting the Catholic and conservative imperatives of the Irish Free State. In a series of close comparative readings, Davison identifies the origin of O'Brien's creative disinhibition and ultimately situates her within a tradition of dissident Irish women writers.

Ars Topica is the first full-length study of the nature and development of topoi, the conceptual ancestors of modern argument schemes, between Aristotle and Cicero.

Aristotle and Cicero configured topoi in a way that influenced the subsequent tradition. Their work on the topos-system grew out of an interest in creating a theory of argumentation which could stand between the rigour of formal logic and the emotive potential of rhetoric. This system went through a series of developments and transformations resulting from the interplay between the separate aims of gaining rhetorical effectiveness and of maintaining dialectical standards.

Ars Topica presents a comprehensive treatment of Aristotle s and Cicero s methods of topoi and, by exploring their relationship, it illuminates an area of ancient rhetoric and logic which has been obscured for more than two thousand years.

Through an interpretation which is philologically rooted in the historical context of topoi, the book lays the ground for evaluating the relevance of the classical approaches to modern research on arguments, and at the same time provides an introduction to Greek and Roman theory of argumentation focussed on its most important theoretical achievements."

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials stands as a landmark in fantasy literature. Comprised of the novels The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, the award-winning epic trilogy has been adapted for radio, stage, and film in both Britain and the United States, though it remains controversial for its negative depiction of religion. Herein, scholars from various literary, philosophical, and theatrical fields explore His Dark Materials, addressing numerous topics relevant to reading, studying and understanding the work, including its basis in Milton's Paradise Lost; the influence of science fiction on the series; issues of social class, religion, sexuality, and gender; postcolonial perspectives; and recent stage productions.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. The nine tales in this volume, published between 1884 and 1888, include 'The Aspern Papers', set in Venice and featuring a devious scholar attempting to steal the letters of an American poet from his former lover, and 'The Liar,' on the world of painters and their models. These tales exemplify James's continuing interest in the art of short fiction during a period which saw him responding to the stimulations of French naturalism and successfully reworking the international theme that had made him famous at the end of the 1870s. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand the tales' historical, cultural and literary references.

From the earliest slave narratives to modern fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, African American authors have drawn on African spiritual practices as literary inspiration, and as a way to maintain a connection to Africa. This volume has collected new essays about the multiple ways that African American authors have incorporated Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in their work. Among the authors covered are Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ntozake Shange, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Ishmael Reed.

This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and wording to style more broadly conceived. The book is concerned not only with prose fiction but with creative non-fiction, a growing area of interest for readers and aspiring writers. Written by internationally-renowned critics, novelists and biographers, the essays provide readers and writers with ways of understanding the workings of prose. They are exemplary of good critical practice, pleasurable reading for their own sake, and both informative and inspirational for practising writers. The Cambridge Companion to Prose will serve as a key resource for students of English literature and of creative writing.

The bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms provides clear and concise definitions of the most troublesome literary terms, from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. Now expanded and in its fourth edition, it includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. Completely revised and updated, this edition also features brand-new entries on terms such as distant reading, graphic novels, middle generation, and misery memoir. Many new bibliographies have been added to entries and recommended web links are available via a companion website.

Playwright, biographer, screenwriter, and critic S. N. Behrman (1893-1973) characterized the years he spent writing for The New Yorker as a time defined by ""feverish contact with great theatre stars, rich people and social people at posh hotels, at parties, in mansions and great estates."" While he hobnobbed with the likes of Mary McCarthy, Elia Kazan, and Greta Garbo and was one of Broadway's leading luminaries, Behrman would later admit that the friendships he built with the magazine's legendary editors Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Katharine S. White were the ""one unalloyed felicity"" of his life. People in a Magazine collects Behrman's correspondence with his editors along with telegrams, interoffice memos, and editorial notes drawn from the magazine's archives - offering an unparalleled view of mid-twentieth-century literary life and the formative years of The New Yorker, from the time of Behrman's first contributions to the magazine in 1929 until his death.

As Westeros returns to our screens, relive all eight seasons of Game of Thrones with the ONLY official tie-in guide to the biggest TV series in the world THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ANYONE OBSESSED WITH HOUSE OF THE DRAGON __________ Delve deeper into Westeros than ever before . . . Covering all eight seasons of the hit HBO show, this remarkable volume offers a unique and exciting visual exploration into the incredible world of Game of Thrones. In two parts, the book follows the story of the South, where kings and queens battle for the Iron Throne, and of the North, where the White Walkers and their army of the dead gather. Fully illustrated with stunning photography, infographics, timelines and insightful essays, this is the essential guide for any Game of Thrones fan. * Find out more about your favourite characters with in-depth biographies * Read explanations of key relationships from Jon & Daenerys, to Jaime & Brienne * Discover the locations of King's Landing, Oldtown, The Iron Islands and more * Piece together ancestry with family trees of the four Houses * Learn about the creatures of GOT, from Dragons to Direwolves * Get the full story of major battles and events * Discover must-know facts about everything from Heartsbane to Greyscale And so much more . . . __________ 'Everything a fan could want' Woman & Home 'An exciting exploration into the incredible world of Game of Thrones' My Weekly

Exploring the role of boundaries and limits in the writing of James Joyce Beating the Bounds examines the role of boundaries and limits in James Joyce's later works, primarily Finnegans Wake but also Ulyssesand other texts. Building on the ideas of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Giordano Bruno, and scholar Fritz Senn, Roy Benjamin explains and reconciles Joyce's contrary tendencies to establish and transgress limits. Benjamin begins by contrasting Joyce's exploration of the artificial impositions of ritual and political power with the writer's attention to natural boundaries of rivers and mountains. The next section considers sexual, spiritual, and interpersonal boundaries in the Wake. Benjamin then discusses how Joyce simultaneously affirms and undermines the limits of philosophy, geometry, and aesthetics. The final section covers Joyce's representation of the boundaries imposed in cosmogonic myths, the collision between the bounded medieval world and the boundless world of modern science, and the drive to escape from the boundaries of place. In this detailed and original analysis, Benjamin demonstrates that in Joyce's writing, the tendency to disintegrate into chaos is countered by an urge to impose order. Benjamin's close readings put an abundance of subjects in conversation through the concept of limits, showing the Wake's relevance to many different fields of thought. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.

This collection of essays places Flannery O'Connor's work in constructive and collaborative dialogue with Spanish literature and literary aesthetics. The international scholars who contributed to this volume explore the ways in which O'Connor's literary and religious vision continues to work in the imaginations of both American and European-mostly Spanish-authors. The subtitle of the collection-From Andalusia to Andalucia-is a play on the name of O'Connor's family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia-Andalusia-where she spent the last sixteen years of her life living with her mother. It is said that the farm's name was chosen because its location in Milledgeville was the farthest north the Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century traveled in the eastern U.S. before returning to Florida to establish permanent Spanish settlements. While perhaps colloquial in its origins, it is, nevertheless, a fitting and emblematic link between the Southern Gothic aesthetics of O'Connor's Andalusia and the baroque heritage of southern Spain's Andalucia. The essays in this collection explore O'Connor's literary vision through three interpretive lenses: first, through the relationship of the literary grotesque (a genre that often defines her work) with the Spanish baroque aesthetics that have come to define Spain's artistic heritage; second, through the relationship between O'Connor's literary imagination and the literature of other European writers that broaden the intellectual conversation about her work; and, third, through comparisons with other writers whose Catholic imaginations made their work-as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it-"counter, original, spare, strange." As the essays contained in this volume show, the work of Flannery O'Connor continues to bear rich intellectual and spiritual fruit when engaging with enculturated literary and aesthetic traditions.

Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.

This exhaustive reference work examines the complete fictional works of Dick Francis, a former steeplechase jockey to Queen Elizabeth and accomplished British novelist. As of 2006, Francis has written one volume of collected short stories and 38 novels, most of which contain one or more elements related to British horse racing. Organized alphabetically, the book lists and discusses both the major and peripheral characters in Francis' novels and short stories, along with the horses, plots, locations, and themes central to each work. In one appendix, the author provides a "Private Handicap" for Francis' work, or his own personal estimation of each novel's literary merit.

Margaret Cohen s careful editorial revision modernizes and renews Flaubert s stylistic masterpiece. In addition, Cohen has added to the Second Edition a new introduction, substantially new annotations, and twenty-one striking images, including photographs and engravings, that inform students understanding of middle-class life in nineteenth-century provincial France. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert created a cogent counter discourse that exposed and resisted the dominant intellectual and social ideologies of his age. The novel s subversion of conventional moral norms inevitably created controversy and eventually led to Flaubert s prosecution by the French government on charges of offending "public and religious morality." This Norton edition is the only one available that includes the complete manuscript from Flaubert s 1857 trial. "Criticism" includes sixteen studies regarding the novel s central themes, twelve of them new to the Second Edition, including essays by Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, and Naomi Schor. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included."

Linda Wagner-Martin brings a wealth of new information to this detailed portrait of Hemingway and his world, concentrating particularly on his friendships with women and the history of his four marriages.

Gary Paulsen surveys the major titles and themes of America's top adventure writer for tweens. Entries cover the Brian and Tucket series and analyze the significance of alcoholism, coming of age, survival, war, and slavery to such bestsellers as Nightjohn, Soldier's Heart, Woods Runner, and Hatchet. Blunt, no nonsense prose in The Rifle, The Foxman, and The Crossing and the witty escapades of Harris and Me and Zero to Sixty illustrate Paulsen's unique range. Tender scenes in The Quilt and A Christmas Sonata attest to his empathy for children stymied by suffering. Essential to an appreciation of Paulsen's canon are generous citations from his writings and public appearances. A proponent of literacy and uncensored reading, the author communes one-on-one and through letters with troubled kids who have endured the neglect and despair that marred Paulsen's early childhood. Commentary accents the importance of dogs in his life and career as an Iditarod competitor and lover of animals.

"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of conflating annotation on the different versions."-Derek Pearsall The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes. The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Andrew Galloway's Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the commentary, dealing with the final three passus of the poem, extant only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton. Overall, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English literature. Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University.

This provocative and unique work reveals the remarkably influential role of futuristic literature on contemporary political power in America. Tracing this phenomenon from its roots in Victorian Britain, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines offers a fascinating exploration of how fictional speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies profoundly influence the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. Gannon convincingly demonstrates that military fiction anticipated and even influenced the evolution of the tank, the development of the airplane, and also the bitter political battles within Britain's War Office and the Admiralty. In the United States, future-fictions and Cold-War thrillers were an officially acknowledged factor in the Pentagon's research and development agendas, and often gave rise_and shape_to the nation's strategic development of technologies as diverse as automation, atomic weaponry, aerospace vehicles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars'). His book reveals a striking relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technocentric ideologies. With its detailed political, historical, and literary analysis of U.S. and British fascination with hi-tech warfare, this lively and revealing study will appeal to students, literary and cultural scholars, military and history enthusiasts, and general readers.

Crime fiction is one of the most popular literary genres and has been for more than a century. At the heart of almost all forms of mysteries-from the Golden Age puzzler to the contemporary police procedural, from American hardboiled fiction to the Japanese timetable mystery-is the investigator. He-or, increasingly, she-can be a private eye, a police officer, or a general busybody. But whatever forms these investigators take, they are the key element of crime fiction. Criminals and their crimes come and go, while our attention is captured by these fascinating characters who exist at the intersection of so many different literary and social roles. 100 Greatest Literary Detectives offers a selection of the most influential, important, and intriguing fictional sleuths-amateur or professional-from around the world. From Sherlock Holmes to Harry Hole, Kinsey Millhone to Kiyoshi Mitarai, the detectives profiled here give readers a broader picture of one of fiction's most popular genres. Each entry summarizes the distinctive features of notable investigators and their approaches to crime, provides a brief outline of major features of their fictional careers, and makes a case for their importance based on literary-historical impact, novelty, uniqueness, aesthetic quality, or cultural resonance. The characters profiled here include Lew Archer, Martin Beck, Father Brown, Brother Cadfael, Adam Dalgliesh, Mike Hammer, Miss Jane Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, Kay Scarpetta, Sam Spade, Phillip Trent, V. I. Warshawski, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, and many others. Readers will find some of their favorite detectives here, learn more about their literary and cultural significance, and discover other great sleuths-old and new, local and international-in this engaging volume. 100 Greatest Literary Detectives provides a fascinating look into some of the most intriguing fictional characters of all time.