An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.

The American Renaissance has been a foundational concept in American literary history for nearly a century. The phrase connotes a period, as well as an event, an iconic turning point in the growth of a national literature and a canon of texts that would shape American fiction, poetry, and oratory for generations. F. O. Matthiessen coined the term in 1941 to describe the years 1850-1855, which saw the publications of major writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This Companion takes up the concept of the American Renaissance and explores its origins, meaning, and longevity. Essays by distinguished scholars move chronologically from the formative reading of American Renaissance authors to the careers of major figures ignored by Matthiessen, including Stowe, Douglass, Harper, and Longfellow. The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.

Law and Literature presents an authoritative, fresh and accessible new overview of the many ways in which law and literature interact. Written by a team of international experts, it provides a multi-focused history of literary studies' critical interest in ideas of law and justice. It examines the effects of law on writers and their work, ranging from classical tragedy to comics, and from East Africa to Elizabethan England. Over twenty chapters, contributors reveal the intricate and multivalent historical interactions between law and literature, both past and present, and trace the intellectual genesis of the concept of law in literary studies, focusing on major developments in the history of the interdisciplinary project of law and literature, as well as the changing ideas of law, and the cultural contests in which it has figured. Law and Literature will appeal to graduates and scholars working on the intersection between law and literature and in key related areas such as literature and human rights.

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.

Dante's Convivio, composed in exile between 1304 and 1307, is a series of self-commentaries on three of Dante's long poems. These allegorical love poems and philosophical verse become the basis for philosophical, literary, moral, and political exposition. The prose is written in Italian so that those who were not educated in Latin could take part in what Dante called his 'banquet of knowledge'. In this edition, eminent Dante translator-scholar Andrew Frisardi offers the first fully annotated translation of the work into English, with an extensive introduction, making Dante's often complex writings accessible to scholars and students. The parallel Italian text is also included for the first time in an English translation of the Convivio. Readers of this work can gain a strong understanding of the philosophical themes across Dante's work, including the Divine Comedy, as well as the logic, politics and science of his time.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets offers a fascinating introduction to Irish poetry from the seventeenth century to the present. Aimed primarily at lovers of poetry, it examines a wide range of poets, including household names, such as Jonathan Swift, Thomas Moore, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. The book is comprised of thirty chapters written by critics, leading scholars and poets, who bring an authoritative and accessible understanding to their subjects. Each chapter gives an overview of a poet's work and guides the general reader through the wider cultural, historical and comparative contexts. Exploring the dual traditions of English and Irish-speaking poets, this Companion represents the very best of Irish poetry and highlights understanding that reveals, in clear and accessible prose, the achievement of Irish poetry in a global context. It is a book that will help and guide general readers through the many achievements of Irish poets.

What is Sci-Fi? Science fiction is a non-realist genre that foregrounds a sense of material plausibility, insisting that despite seeming outlandish, it is consonant with history and the laws of nature. By turns subtle and bombastic, sci-fi revels in discovery and revelation, whether through human ingenuity or world-altering paradigm shifts. The same impulse informs both the idealism of Star Trek and the existential terror of Frankenstein. Each chapter of this book examines a specific trope or theme through a different critical lens - including eco-criticism, feminism and historicism - while also providing a historical overview of the genre, from its disputed origins to the pulp era, the New Wave, and the exponential growth of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms. Revered masters such as Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler and Iain M. Banks are considered alongside newer talents, including Rebecca Roanhorse and N. K. Jemisin. Other chapters provide overviews of different media, from television (Doctor Who, Westworld) to comics/manga (2000AD, Metal Hurlant), video games (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and theatre (Alistair McDowall's X). Sci-Fi: A Companion not only provides an accessible introduction to sci-fi for general readers and researchers alike, but also illuminates new approaches to a familiar genre.

Peter Temple held crime writing up to the light and, with his poet's ear and eye, made it his own incomparable thing. Peter Temple started publishing novels late, when he was fifty, but then he got cracking. He wrote nine novels in thirteen years. Along the way he wrote screenplays, stories, dozens of reviews. When Temple died in March 2018 there was an unfinished Jack Irish novel in his drawer. It is included in The Red Hand, and it reveals the master at the peak of his powers. The Red Hand also includes the screenplay of Valentine's Day, an improbably delightful story about an ailing country football club, which in 2007 was adapted for television by the ABC. Also included are his short fiction, his reflections on the Australian idiom, a handful of autobiographical fragments, and a selection of his brilliant book reviews. .

One of the great American authors of the 20th century, John Steinbeck (1902-1968) continues to be a focus of academic study and the source of interest to readers around the globe. All of the Nobel-prize winner's major works remain in print, as new generations discover the power of such novels as Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath, as well as nonfiction works like Travels with Charley, The Log from the Sea of Cortez and America and Americans. In addition to reissued works by Steinbeck, each year new articles and books are written about him, examining the themes of his works and his impact on literature. With such a prolific output, bibliographic resources have become a necessity, and in 1967, Scarecrow Press published the first Steinbeck bibliography, with subsequent volumes following in 1974, 1981, and 1998. In the latest volume, Steinbeck scholar and historian Michael J. Meyer has compiled Steinbeck material written or published between 1996 and 2006. The John Steinbeck Bibliography: 1996-2006 includes thousands of citations that cover a broad range of publications, including newspaper articles, full length critical studies, dissertations, theses, book reviews in English, and missed work from previous volumes, as well as websites and other media. The bibliography also cites foreign language translations of Steinbeck's works as well as foreign language books, journals and reviews. The comprehensive index will help scholars determine which entries are related to various novels, themes and historical events that are part of the Steinbeck canon. As a resource for literature scholars and researchers, The John Steinbeck Bibliography: 1996-2006 will prove to be as invaluable as the previous volumes.

This is an expansion of the first dictionary of symbols to be based on literature, rather than on 'universal' psychological archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the literary symbols that we frequently encounter (such as swan, rose, moon, gold) and gives thousands of cross-references and quotations. The dictionary concentrates on English literature, but its entries range widely from the Bible and classical authors to the twentieth century, taking in American and European literatures. For this third edition, Michael Ferber has included some twenty completely new entries (such as birch, childbirth, grove, mill and railroad) and has added to many of the existing entries. Its rich references make this book an essential tool not only for literary and classical scholars but also for all students of literature.

Well known for his contrarianism and solitude, Henry David Thoreau was nonetheless deeply responsive to the world around him. His writings bear the traces of his wide-ranging reading, travels, political interests, and social influences. Henry David Thoreau in Context brings together leading scholars of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature and culture and presents original research, valuable synthesis of historical and scholarly sources, and innovative readings of Thoreau's texts. Across thirty-four chapters, this collection reveals a Thoreau deeply concerned with and shaped by a diverse range of environments, intellectual traditions, social issues, and modes of scientific practice. Essays also illuminate important posthumous contexts and consider the specific challenges of contextualizing Thoreau today. This collection provides a rich understanding of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature, political activism, and environmentalist thinking that will be a vital resource for students, teachers, scholars, and general readers.

This volume widens the field of Soviet literature studies by interpreting it as a multinational project, with national literatures acting not as copies of the Russian model, but as creators of a multidimensional literary space. The book proposes a reconsideration of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of literary field and analyzes the interactions of literature, power, and economics under the communist rule. The articles selected include theoretical discussions and case studies from different national literatures presenting different structural elements of the Soviet literary field, as well as different phenomena created by the complexity of the field itself, such as the Aesopian language, state of emergency literature, or compromise as the essential element of the writers' identity.

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 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.

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.

Outsold only by the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, the works of Agatha Christie stand as some of the most celebrated crime fiction of our era. This book takes ten of Agatha Christie's most famous works and shows their relationship to ten of crime history's most famous and sensational cases- cases whose notoriety still resounds to this day. Addressing both novels and short stories, this work illuminates the relationship between Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and the sensational Lindbergh Kidnapping Case of 1932; the connections between Christie's Mrs. McGinty's Dead and the horrific true case of England's most loathed wife-killer, the American Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, and eight more engrossing pairings of Agatha Christie's ingenious mystery puzzles with vintage true crime's most sensational events.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.