George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) remains a book of the moment. This Companion builds on successive waves of generational inheritance and debate in the novel's reception by asking new questions about how and why Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, what it means, and why it matters. Chapters on a selection of the novel's interpretative contexts, the literary histories from which it is inseparable, the urgent questions it raises, and the impact it has had on other kinds of media, ranging from radio to video games, open up the conversation in an expansive way. Established concerns (e.g. Orwell's attitude to the working class, his anxieties about the socio-political compartmentalization of the post-war world) are presented alongside newer ones (e.g. his views on evil, and the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on comics). Individual essays help us see in new ways how Orwell's most famous work continues to be a novel for our times.

Much has been written on Beckett and Sade, yet nothing systematic has been produced. This Element is systematic by adopting a chronological order, which is necessary given the complexity of Beckett's varying assessments of Sade. Beckett mentioned Sade early in his career, with Proust as a first guide. His other sources were Guillaume Apollinaire and Mario Praz's book, La Carne, La morte e il Diavolo Nella Letteratura Romantica (1930), from which he took notes about sadism for his Dream Notebook. Dante's meditation on the absurdity of justice provides closure facing Beckett's wonder at the pervasive presence of sadism in humans.

Food is a signifier of power for both adults and children, a sign of both inclusion and exclusion and of conformity and resistance. Many academic disciplines - from sociology to literary studies - have studied food and its function as a complex social discourse, and the wide variety of approaches to the topic provides multidisciplinary frames for understanding the construction and uses of food in all types of media, including children's literature.Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature is a survey of food's function in children's texts, showing how the sociocultural contexts of food reveal children's agency. Authors Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard examine texts that vary from historical to contemporary, noncanonical to classics, and Anglo-American to multicultural traditions, including a variety of genres, formats, and audiences: realism, fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, YA novels, and film. Table Lands offers a unified approach to studying food in a wide variety of texts for children. Spanning nearly 150 years of children's literature, Keeling and Pollard's analysis covers a selection of texts that show the omnipresence of food in children's literature and culture and how they vary in representations of race, region, and class, due to the impact of these issues on food. Furthermore, they include not only classic children's books, such as Winnie-the-Pooh, but recent award-winning multicultural novels as well as cookbooks and even one film, Pixar's Ratatouille.

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.

With no comparable study in the English language, the first English translation of Fan Boqun's A History of Popular Modern Chinese Literature presents one of the most authoritative and significant studies on modern Chinese literature to a new readership. Starting in the late Qing Dynasty, a period often overlooked by literary scholars, Fan maps the blueprint of modern Chinese popular literature through a broad range of popular literary genres. Thoughtfully illustrated throughout and utilising courtesan novels, martial arts fiction, pictorial journalism and detective novels, Fan's innovative approach to this rich material develops pioneering new arguments which will be of interest to all interested in modern Chinese literature, popular and visual culture in late Qing and Republican China.

Edited collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It is also often taken as axiomatic that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding do so agree. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format before even a word is read. After examining the origins of this critique, this Element explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. It examines each component part of the critique, showing that they are either largely unfounded or susceptible of solution. It proposes the edited collection as a model of one possible idea of scholarly community: collaboration, trust, and mutual obligation in pursuit of a wider good.

In THE ART OF DISCWORLD, Terry Pratchett takes us on a guided tour of the Discworld, courtesy of his favourite Discworld artist, Paul Kidby. Following on from THE LAST HERO, THE ART OF DISCWORLD is a lavish 112-page large format, sumptuously illustrated look at all things Discworldian. Terry Pratchett provides the written descriptions while Paul Kidby illustrates the world that has made Pratchett one of the best-selling authors of all time. Here you will find favourites old and new: the City Watch, including Vimes, Carrot and Angua, the three witches - Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick - and the denizens of the Unseen University Library, not forgetting the Librarian, of course: they're all here in sumptuous colour, together with the places: Ankh-Morpork, Lancre, Uberwald and more ...No Discworld fan will want to be without this beautiful gift book.

Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers both essential background to the understanding of this material and sixteen chapters by leading scholars which are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide range of fascinating but now little-known texts to the handful of more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More's Utopia, Milton's Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus. All Latin is translated throughout the volume.

Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America's leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott's unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented. Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott's off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott's fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy. Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America's leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays of this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality-a term used by anthropologist Floriberto DIaz to describe modes of life of indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor-permeating all writing processes. Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities in which it grew. In an increasingly violent world, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may as well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Succinct and thoughtful, this collection of 100 classics of past and present Catholic literature covers topics ranging from biography, spirituality, theology, and poetry to history, mystical writings, and fiction. Each of the chronologically arranged entries introduces one book in its historical context, provides information about the author, and gives a clear and focused summary of its content. Whether readers are looking for an overview of Catholic thought and writing across the centuries or want to begin discovering these classics for themselves, this book offers an illuminating gateway to some of the great achievements of the human heart and mind.

The aim of this Element is to offer a reassessment of Beckett's alleged Cartesianism using the theoretical framework of extended cognition - a cluster of present-day philosophical theories that question the mind's brain-bound nature and see cognition primarily as a process of interaction between the human brain and the environment it operates in. The principal argument defended here is that, despite the Cartesian bias introduced by early Beckett scholarship, Beckett's fictional minds are not isolated 'skullscapes'. Instead, they are grounded in interaction with their fictional storyworlds, however impoverished those may have become in the later part of his writing career.

The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.

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. One of James's strangest works, The Sacred Fount, explores ideas of sexual desire and power in an English country house setting. The novel aroused considerable critical bewilderment and hostility on its original publication in 1901 but was retrieved by a subsequent generation of critics who found its ambiguity and stylistic elaboration an instance of James's 'mastery' and an early example of literary modernism. This is the first critical edition of James' landmark text and is supported by a full critical apparatus including introduction, notes, glossary, textual variants and bibliography. The volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars and advanced students of Henry James, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American fiction and literature.

The nineteenth century was seemingly a period of great progress. Huge advancements and achievements were made in science, technology and industry that transformed life and work alike. But a growing pride in modernity and innovation was tainted by a sense of the loss of the past and the multiple threats which novelty posed. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought provides an impressive survey of the period's major ideas and trends. Leading scholars explore some of the most influential concepts and debates within philosophy, history, political thought, economics, religion and the social sciences, as well as feminism and imperialism. Some of these debates continued into the following century and many still remain relevant in the present day. This Companion is an excellent tool for readers seeking to understand the genesis of modern discourse across a range of humanities and social science subjects.

The power of Shakespeare's complex language - his linguistic playfulness, poetic diction and dramatic dialogue - inspires and challenges students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers across the globe. It has iconic status and enormous resonance, even as language change and the distance of time render it more opaque and difficult. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language provides important contexts for understanding Shakespeare's experiments with language and offers accessible approaches to engaging with it directly and pleasurably. Incorporating both practical analysis and exemplary readings of Shakespearean passages, it covers elements of style, metre, speech action and dialogue; examines the shaping contexts of rhetorical education and social language; test-drives newly available digital methodologies and technologies; and considers Shakespeare's language in relation to performance, translation and popular culture. The Companion explains the present state of understanding while identifying opportunities for fresh discovery, leaving students equipped to ask productive questions and try out innovative methods.

a ~A useful starting point.... It is the breadth of the coverage that makes the Encyclopedia of African Literature stand out.a (TM) a " Booklist/RBB
a ~[A] comprehensive work for general readers.... Highly recommended.' a "Pennsylvania School Librarians Association Best Reference Titles

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this easy-to-use book contains over 600 alphabetically arranged entries that cover major and less established African authors and texts, criticism and theory, and African Literaturea (TM)s development as a field of scholarship.

Now available in paperback, this volume is an essential resource for students of African literature and a useful tool for those considering African culture across the fields of Literary Studies, African Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies.

The literature of Wales is one of the oldest continuous literary traditions in Europe. The earliest surviving poetry was forged in the battlefields of post-Roman Wales and the 'Old North' of Britain, and the Welsh-language poets of today still write within the same poetic tradition. In the early twentieth century, Welsh writers in English outnumbered writers in Welsh for the first time, generating new modes of writing and a crisis of national identity which began to resolve itself at the end of the twentieth century with the political devolution of Wales within the United Kingdom. By considering the two literatures side by side, this book argues that bilingualism is now a normative condition in Wales. Written by leading scholars, this book provides a comprehensive chronological guide to fifteen centuries of Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English against a backdrop of key historical and political events in Britain.

A disproportionate number of male writers, including such figures as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Haki Madhubuti, continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. Though there has arisen an increasing amount of scholarship that recognizes leading women artists, activists, and leaders of this period, these new perspectives have yet to recognize adequately the ways women aspired to far more than a mere dismantling of male-oriented ideals.

In "Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement," Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement. Angela Jackson, Johari Amiri, and Carolyn Rodgers reflect in their writing specific cultural, local, and regional insights, and demonstrate the capaciousness of Black Art rather than its constraints. Expanding from these three writers, Phelps analyzes the breadth of women's writing in BAM. In doing so, Phelps argues that these and other women attained advantageous and unique positions to represent the potential of the BAM aesthetic, even if their experiences and artistic perspectives were informed by both social conventions and constraints. In this book, Phelps's examination brings forward a powerful and crucial contribution to the aesthetics and history of a movement that still inspires.

In her own private ways, Emily Dickinson participated in the popular entertainments of her time. On her piano, she performed popular musical numbers, many from the tradition of minstrelsy, and at theaters, she listened to famous musicians, including Jenny Lind and, likely, the Hutchinson Family Singers. In reading the Atlantic Monthly, the Springfield Republican, and Harper's, she kept up with the roiling conflicts over slavery and took in current fiction and verse. And, she enjoyed the occasional excursion to the traveling circus and appreciated the attractions of the dime museum. Whatever her aspirations were regarding participation in a public arena, the rich world of popular culture offered Dickinson a view of both the political and social struggles of her time and the amusements of her contemporaries."Theatricals of Day" explores how popular culture and entertainments are seen, heard, and felt in Dickinson's writing. In accessible prose, Sandra Runzo proposes that the presence of popular entertainment in Dickinson's life and work opens our eyes to new dimensions of the poems, illuminating the ways in which the poet was attentive to strife and conflict, to amusement, and to play.

While humans have used their hands to engage in combat since the dawn of man, boxing originated in Ancient Greece as an Olympic event. It is one of the most popular, controversial and misunderstood sports in the world. For its advocates, it is a heroic expression of unfettered individualism. For its critics, it is a depraved and ruthless physical and commercial exploitation of mostly poor young men. This Companion offers engaging and informative essays about the social impact and historical importance of the sport of boxing. It includes a comprehensive chronology of the sport, listing all the important events and personalities. Essays examine topics such as women in boxing, boxing and the rise of television, boxing in Africa, boxing and literature, and boxing and Hollywood films. A unique book for scholars and fans alike, this Companion explores the sport from its inception in Ancient Greece to the death of its most celebrated figure, Muhammad Ali.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot includes several new chapters, providing an essential introduction to all aspects of Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and original insights into the work of one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century, author most famously of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. From an introduction that traces her originality as a realist novelist, the book moves on to extensive considerations of each of Eliot's novels, her life and her publishing history. Chapters address the problems of money, philosophy, religion, politics, gender and science, as they are developed in her novels. With its supplementary materials, including a chronology and an extensive section of suggested readings, this Companion is an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

'A holiday in the complex, joyful, indelicate medieval world' John Higgs, author of Watling Street Chaucer's People is an absorbing and revealing guide to the Middle Ages, populated with Chaucer's pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales. These are lives spent at the pedal of a loom, maintaining the ledgers of an estate or navigating the high seas. Drawing on contemporary experiences of a vast range of subjects including trade, religion, toe-curling remedies and hair-raising recipes, bestselling historian Liza Picard recreates the medieval world in glorious detail.

Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.