The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.

This first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952) reveals a major English writer whose prodigious output included stories of history, romance, and the supernatural. As Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda writes in his Foreword, Bowen may be "the finest British woman writer of the uncanny of the last century," a view that echoes the high regard of cultural historian Edward Wagenknecht, who called her "a literary phenomenon," one whose best work places her alongside such contemporaries as Edith Wharton and Daphne du Maurier. Publicly acclaimed-known only by a series of pseudonyms (including "Marjorie Bowen")-but privately inscrutable, she was and is a mysterious and complex character. Drawing for the first time upon archival resources and the cooperation of the Bowen Estate, this book reveals a woman who saw herself as a rationalist and serious historian, but also as a mystic and "dark enchantress of dread." Above all, through a lifetime of domestic storms and creative ecstasy, Bowen worked tirelessly as both a professional writer and a consummate artist, always seeking, as she once confessed, "to find beauty in dark places.

We live in an information economy, a vast archive of data ever at our fingertips. In the pages of science fiction, powerful entities-governments and corporations-seek to use this archive to control society, enforcing conformity or turning citizens into passive consumers. Opposing them are protagonists fighting to liberate the collective mind from those who would enforce top-down control. Archival technology and its depictions in science fiction have developed dramatically since the 1950s. Ray Bradbury discusses archives in terms of books and television media, Margaret Atwood in terms of magazines and journaling. William Gibson focused on technofuturistic cyberspace and brain-to-computer prosthetics, Bruce Sterling on genetics and society as an archive of social practices. Neal Stephenson imagined post-cyberpunk matrix space and interactive primers. As the archive is altered, so too are the humans that interact with ever-advancing technology.

The on-going debate surrounding the Christian aspects of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has revealed not only the prominence of religious themes in fantasy fiction, but also the readers' concern over the portrayal of religion in fantasy. Yet while the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Pullman, and Rowling have been discussed in excess, other fantasy series have so far received markedly less attention. Thus, the following book offers a critical study of the fantastic religions and religious themes present in the works of selected American and Canadian writers: Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, Celia S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy, and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series. The aim of the proposed study is to reveal and investigate these series' references to biblical tradition and Christian teachings in order to examine their overall approach to Christianity and to comment on the relationship between Christianity and the fantasy genre. The study is conducted in reference to the theories and methods designed by the discipline of the phenomenology of religion.

From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree-a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history-and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers-intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually-than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn't need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem's secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems-and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

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.

Searching for perfect book lovers gifts? Rejoice! Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany, is a love letter to all things bookish. Author Jane Mount brings literary people, places, and things to life through her signature and vibrant illustrations. It's a must-have for every book collection, and makes a wonderful literary gift for book lovers, writers, and more. Readers of Jane Mount's Bibliophile will delight in: Touring the world's most beautiful bookstores Testing their knowledge of the written word with quizzes Finding their next great read in lovingly curated stacks of books Sampling the most famous fictional meals Peeking inside the workspaces of their favorite authors A source of endless inspiration, literary facts and recommendations: Bibliophile is pure bookish joy and sure to enchant book clubbers, English majors, poetry devotees, aspiring writers, and any and all who identify as book lovers. If you have read or own: I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life; The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization; or How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines; then you will want to read and own Jane Mount's Bibliophile.

Dystopian fiction has captured the imaginations of countless readers as they consider life in worlds at once eerily similar and shockingly foreign to their own. Essays on Dystopian Fiction as Critique of Culture showcases the most recent research on dystopian fiction whose readership has surged dramatically since the 1990s. Sixteen chapters-written by scholars from the United States, England, Ireland, India, and Poland-explore literary and popular dystopian novels focusing on the genre as a form of social critique. The essays reveal how both literary and popular dystopias arise from the same impulse as utopian fiction: the desire for an idealized and always illusory society in which evil is purged and justice prevails. Written from a variety of critical perspectives, these essays explore some of the literary novels (such as The Lord of the Flies and The Heart Goes Last) as well as some new popular ones (such as The Giver, The Hunger Games, and The Strain Trilogy). The essays collected here hold value for both fans and scholars of dystopian literature, a genre that has demonstrated its mass market appeal and its validity as an area of academic study.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote in 19th century American English and referenced long-vanished cultural contexts. A "private poet," she created her own vocabulary, and many of her poems have quite specific local and personal connections. Twenty-first century readers may find her poetry elusive and challenging. Promoting a richer appreciation of Dickinson's work for a modern audience, this book explores unfamiliar aspects of her language and her world.

What would it mean to reorient the study of Haitian literature toward ethics rather than the themes of politics, engagement, disaster, or catastrophe? Looking for Other Worlds engages with this question from a distinct feminist perspective and, in the process, discovers a revelatory lens through which we can productively read the work of contemporary Haitian writers. Regine Michelle Jean-Charles explores the "ethical imagination" of three contemporary Haitian authors-Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Evelyne Trouillot-contending that ethics and aesthetics operate in relation to each other through the writers' respective novels and that the turn to ethics has proven essential in the twenty-first century. Jean-Charles presents a useful framework for analyzing contemporary literature that brings together Black feminism, literary ethics, and Haitian studies in a groundbreaking way.

The sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the fourteenth century. The Cote d'Azur has provided the inspiration and setting for some of the greatest literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers is a reader's journey along this fabled coast, from Hyeres and Saint-Tropez in the west to the Italian border in the east, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way, from distinguished Nobel laureates to new authors who found their voices there. Ted Jones's encyclopaedic work covers them all: writers such as Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, who spent much of their lives there; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Guy de Maupassant, whose work it dominates; and the countless writers who simply lingered there, including Louisa M. Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Bennett, William Boyd, Bertholt Brecht, Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, A.A.Milne, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Tchekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats - and many others.

In recent decades, the international recognition of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has placed Colombian writing on the global literary map. A History of Colombian Literature explores the genealogy of Colombian poetry and prose from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a national literary tradition, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Colombian literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as Jose Eustacio Rivera, Tomas Carrasquilla, Alvaro Mutis, and Dario Jaramillo Agudelo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Colombian literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Colombian writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Acknowledged as one of the founding figures of science fiction scholarship and teaching, and one of the genre's leading writers, James Gunn in 1951 wrote what is likely the first master's thesis on modern science fiction, Modern Science Fiction: A Critical Analysis. It achieved some degree of legendary status when portions appeared in the short-lived pulp magazine Dynamic, but has otherwise remained unavailable for scholars and general readers of science fiction. Appearing for the first time in book form, this early critical work by a science fiction master is an important historical addition to the field of science fiction studies. Gunn's observations on many of the classic Golden Age stories of the 1940s, before they were classic, highlight this exuberant and astute early academic critical assessment of science fiction. Here the reader will witness the development of Gunn's critical perspective that informed his essential genre history Alternate Worlds and the monumental anthology series The Road to Science Fiction. Michael R. Page's introduction and commentary show the historical significance of Gunn's work and frame it within the context of the later development of science fiction criticism and theory.

Joe R. Lansdale (b. 1951), the award-winning author of such novels as Cold in July (1989) and The Bottoms (2000), as well as the popular Hap and Leonard series, has been publishing novels since 1981. Lansdale has developed a tremendous cult audience willing to follow him into any genre he chooses to write in, including horror, western, crime, adventure, and fantasy. Within these genres, his stories, novels, and novellas explore friendship, race, and life in East Texas. His distinctive voice is often funny and always unique, as characterized by such works as Bubba Ho-Tep (1994), a novella that centers on Elvis Presley, his friend who believes himself to be John F. Kennedy, and a soul-sucking ancient mummy. This same novella won a Bram Stoker Award, one of the ten Bram Stoker Awards given to Lansdale thus far in his illustrious career. Wielding a talent that extends beyond the page to the screen, Landsdale has also written episodes for Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series. Conversations with Joe R. Lansdale brings together interviews from newspapers, magazines, and podcasts conducted throughout the prolific author's career. The collection includes conversations between Lansdale and other noted peers like Robert McCammon and James Grady; two podcast transcripts that have never before appeared in print; and a brand-new interview, exclusive to the volume. In addition to shedding light on his body of literary work and process as a writer, this collection also shares Lansdale's thoughts on comics, atheism, and martial arts.

Australian crime fiction grew from the country's modern origins as a very distant English prison. Early stories described escaped convicts becoming heroic bushrangers, or how the system maltreated mis-convicted people. As Australia developed, thrillers emerged about threats to the wealth of free settlers and crime among gold-seekers from England and America, and then urban crime fiction including in 1887 London's first best-seller, Fergus Hume's Melbourne-located The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. The genre thrived, with bush detectives like Billy Pagan and Arthur Upfield's half-Indigenous 'Bony', and from the 1950s women like June Wright, Pat Flower and Patricia Carlon linked with the internationally burgeoning psychothriller. Modernity has massified the Australian form: the 1980s saw a flow of private-eye thrillers, both Aussie Marlowes and tough young women, and the crime novel thrived, long a favorite in the police-skeptical country. In the twenty-first century some authors have focused on policemen, and more on policewomen- and finally there is potent Indigenous crime fiction. In this book Stephen Knight, long-established as an authority on the genre and now back in Melbourne, tells in detail and with analytic coherence this story of a rich but previously little-known national crime fiction.

Cervantes's Don Quixote, recently chosen the world's best book by well-known authors from fifty-four countries, has from its publication in 1605 been widely translated and imitated. Throughout the world "quixotic" and "tilting at windmills" are commonplaces, and the thin knight-errant and his plump squire Sancho Panza familiar icons. Critics regard Cervantes as the inventor of fiction, author of the first novel. Consistently judged too long and complex to be read in its entirety, Don Quixote, has always inspired abbreviations and adaptations. Major and now forgotten writers were deeply influenced by the Spanish author; in English they wrote chapbooks, satiric verses, essays, plays, and novels. Cervantes's post chivalric romance inspired by the Counter Reformation in Spain became a classic for Protestant England that condemned Catholic medieval romances. Don Quixote, as children's literature, informed by adult renderings, is a major but neglected part of this remarkable tradition. In extravagant Edwardian books, collections, home libraries, and schoolbooks, words and pictures by distinguished artists retold adventures both noble and "mad." Recent adaptations-including comics and graphic novels-express current difference but also support the knight-errant's affinity to children and lasting influence.

A History of New Zealand Literature traces the genealogy of New Zealand literature from its first imaginings by Europeans in the eighteenth century. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the growth of, and challenges to, a nationalist literary tradition, the essays in this History illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of New Zealand literature, surveying the multilayered verse, fiction and drama of such diverse writers as Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism, biculturalism and multiculturalism in New Zealand literature. A History of New Zealand Literature is of pivotal importance to the development of New Zealand writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Designed to introduce the student or general reader to a largely unfamiliar area of Elizabethan theatrical activity, Five Elizabethan progress entertainments focuses on a group of entertainments mounted for the monarch in the closing years of her reign. Richly annotated, and prefaced by a substantial introduction, the texts enable an understanding of the motives underlying not only the progress itself, but the choice of locations the monarch elected to visit and the personal and political preoccupations of those with whom she determined to stay. Selected for their diversity, the entertainments exhibit the tensions underlying some royal visits, the lavish expenditure entailed for the monarch's hosts and the overlap in terms of both material and authorship between the progress entertainments and the more widely studied products of the sixteenth-century stage. -- .

'We lolled in the sea until it was time to return for tea, another of Mother's gastronomic triumphs. Tottering mounds of hot scones; crisp paper-thin biscuits; cakes like snowdrifts, oozing jam; cakes dark, rich and moist, crammed with fruit; brandy snaps brittle as coral and overflowing with honey. Conversation was almost at a standstill; all that could be heard was the gentle tinkle of cups, and the heartfelt sigh of some guest, accepting another slice of cake.' - My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell In Dining with the Durrells, David Shimwell has delved into the Durrell family archives to uncover Louisa Durrell's original recipes for the scones, cakes, jams, tarts, sandwiches and more that are so deliciously described by the Durrell family. From her recipe for 'Gerry's Favourite Chicken Curry' to 'Dixie-Durrell Scones with Fig and Ginger Jam', and including the family stories and photos that accompany them, this book will transport you to long lunches enjoyed on the terrace of a strawberry-pink villa, sunshine-filled picnics among the Corfu olive groves and candlelit dinners overlooking the Ionian Sea.

The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" places the allegorical dream-vision of the poem within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the work, 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 with 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. Covering passus C.15-19 and B.13-17, Volume 4 of the Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" creates a complete vade mecum for readers, identifying and translating all Latin quotations, uncovering allusions, providing full cross-reference to other parts of the poem, drawing in relevant scholarship, and unraveling difficult passages. Like the other commentaries in the series, this volume contains an extensive overview and analysis of each passus, and the subdivisions within, large and small, and discusses all differences between the two versions. It pays careful attention to the poem at the literal level as well as to Latin texts that are analogues or even possible sources of Langland's thought and it emphasizes the comedy of the poem, of which these passus offer a number of examples.

As the miscreant Detective McNulty applies bite marks to a deceased man's posterior with a set of dentures in Season Five of The Wire, so are the viewers introduced to the topic of `fake news' and the wider contemporary problems with mainstream media representations of reality. The Wire brilliantly details the manner in which neoliberal market fundamentalism trades in fabrication and falsity. `Juking the stats' is the phrase used throughout the show to signal this corruption but it refers specifically to a quantified method for measuring success that was developed during the Cold War. Doctor Strangelove lovingly describes the essence of the `doomsday machine' as free from "human meddling," while the machine begins the inexorable process of destroying the world with nuclear bombs. The film's comedy derives from the absurdity of placing the requirements of systems and institutions above moral human considerations, a common theme of Stanley Kubrick's films. This problem is central, perhaps, to human survival, as a system which seems beyond our control renders our environment more hostile to our continued existence with each passing day. Harkness and `Ballard,' the novels' protagonists seek a spiritual or sublime meaning in a world shadowed by a man-made god, one that now contains the power of the apocalypse. The former seeks it in the jargon of Cold War technocracy but finds only death without meaning; a void at the heart of the culture signified by the bomb. The latter in blood sacrifices to the new technological god, in staged car crashes offered up as miniature apocalypses. The Cold War profoundly shaped neoliberalism in ways that are as yet not fully realised. Herein is a careful and extensively researched look at the narratives that pierce the heart of the Cold War zeitgeist and its aftermath and reveal to us that we may be living in a post-Cold War world.

Foregrounds the diversity of periodicals, fiction and other printed matter targeted at women in the postwar period Foregrounds the diversity and the significance of print cultures for women in the postwar period across periodicals, fiction and other printed matter Examines changes and continuities as women's magazines have moved into digital formats Highlights the important cultural and political contexts of women's periodicals including the Women's Liberation Movement and Socialism Explores the significance of women as publishers, printers and editors Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s draws attention to the wide range of postwar print cultures for women. The collection spans domestic, cultural and feminist magazines and extends to ephemera, novels and other printed matter as well as digital magazine formats. The range of essays indicates both the history of publishing for women and the diversity of readers and audiences over the mid-late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century in Britain. The collection reflects in detail the important ways in magazines and printed matter contributed to, challenged, or informed British women's culture. A range of approaches, including interview, textual analysis and industry commentary are employed in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the impact of postwar print media may be understood.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection is both a key scientific work of research, still read by scientists, and a readable narrative that has had a cultural impact unmatched by any other scientific text. First published in 1859, it has continued to sell, to be reviewed and discussed, attacked and defended. The Origin is one of those books whose controversial reputation ensures that many who have never read it nevertheless have an opinion about it. Jim Endersby's major scholarly edition debunks some of the myths that surround Darwin's book, while providing a detailed examination of the contexts within which it was originally written, published and read. Endersby provides a very readable introduction to this classic text and a level of scholarly apparatus (explanatory notes, bibliography and appendixes) that is unmatched by any other edition.

As science fiction becomes as a major topic for literary study, one reason for its increasing stature is the influence of the J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, long held at the University of California, Riverside. For three decades, these regular gatherings attracted most of the world's leading experts on science fiction and fantasy, as well as distinguished scholars in other fields and famous science fiction writers, who presented papers on specific aspects of science fiction and fantasy. These papers were then assembled in published Eaton volumes now found in university libraries throughout the world. This volume brings together twenty-two of the best papers from those conferences, most with provocative new afterwords by their authors, assembled in chronological order to provide a picture of how science fiction criticism has evolved since 1979 to the present day. The book's editors are two veteran science fiction writers-Gregory Benford and Howard V. Hendrix-and two noted critics -Gary Westfahl and Joseph D. Miller-who frequently attended and participated in Eaton Conferences. Its contributors include eight scholars who have won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Association's Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship.