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.

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiqueing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with western poetics. The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two pulished collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley's introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of diaspora and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an afterword written by the poet with Chris Dunton.

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

Clear all moorings, one-half impulse power, and set course for a mare incognitum. A popular culture artifact of the New Frontier/Space Race era, Star Trek is often mistakenly viewed as a Space Western. However, the Western format is not what governs the actual worldbuilding of Star Trek, which was, after all, also pitched as `Hornblower in space'. The future of Star Trek is modeled on the world of the British Golden Age of Sail as it is commonly found in the genre of sea fiction. Star Trek and the British Age of Sail re-historicizes and remaps the origins of Star Trek and subsequently the entirety of its fictional world-the Star Trek continuum-on an as yet uncharted transatlantic bearing.

The definitive guide to Moliere's world and his afterlife, this is an accessible contextual guide for academics, undergraduates and theatre professionals alike. Interdisciplinary and diverse in scope, each chapter offers a different perspective on the social, cultural, intellectual, and theatrical environment within which Moliere operated, as well as demonstrating his subsequent impact both within France and across the world. Offering fresh insight for those working in the fields of French Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies and French History, Moliere in Context is an exceptional tribute to the premier French dramatist on the 400th anniversary of his birth.

The Francophone Caribbean boasts a trove of literary gems. Distinguished by innovative, elegant writing and thought-provoking questions of history and identity, this exciting body of work demands scholarly attention. Its authors treat the traumatic legacies of shared and personal histories pervading Caribbean experience in striking ways, delineating a path towards reconciliation and healing. The creation of diverse personal narratives-encompassing autobiography, autofiction (heavily autobiographical fiction), travel writing, and reflective essay-remains characteristic of many Caribbean writers and offers poignant illustrations of the complexinterchange between shared and personal pasts and how they affect individual lives. Through their historically informed autobiography, the authorsin this study-Maryse Conde, Gisele Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat, and Dany Laferriere-offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with, and reconciling their past. The employment of personal narratives as the vehicle to carry out this investigation points to a tension evident in these writers' reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal. As an inescapably complex network, their past extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. These contemporary authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti intertwine their personal memories with reflections on the histories of their homelands and on the European and North American countries they adopt through choice or necessity. They reveal a multitude of deep connections that illuminate distinct Francophone Caribbean experiences.

This companion to Frank Herbert's six original Dune novels-Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune-provides an encyclopedia of characters, locations, terms and other elements, and highlights the series' underrated aesthetic integrity. An extensive introduction covers themes of ecology, chaos theory, concepts and structures, and Joseph Campbell's monomyth in Herbert's narrative.

The book focuses on popular genres of romance, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, thriller, and What-if historical fiction in popular books, in artistic literature and on the borderline between the two. The author analyses the work of writers such as Jennifer Greene, Barbara Delinsky, and Lilian Darcy, Jennifer Lee Carrel, Michael Crichton, Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, Michel Faber and William Golding. She applies an analytical approach based on semiotics, structuralism and narratology and discusses genre mixture, adaptation and intertextuality, as well as world modelling.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 75 is 'Othello'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised Edition is a collection of anecdotal reflections that relate many of the experiences that shaped Barry Gifford as a writer. Representative of Gifford's body of work, this volume is divided into three sections: books, film and television, and music. Within these sections, Gifford's best work is showcased, including a nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, in which Gifford examines the public and private lives of those involved in the film, producing an innovative framework for the movie. New to the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look at the novels of Alvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford's schooling under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Elliot Chaze and his novel, Black Wings Has My Angel; and a short piece on Sailor and Lula.

What does it mean to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada? The Ukrainian Canadian writers in Unbound challenge the conventions of genre - memoir, fiction, poetry, biography, essay - and the boundaries that separate ethnic and authorial identities and fictional and non-fictional narratives. These intersections become the sites of new, thought-provoking and poignant creative writing by some of Canada's best-known Ukrainian Canadian authors. To complement the creative writing, editors Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski offer an overview of the history of Ukrainian settlement in Canada and an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian Canadian literature in English. Unbound is the first such exploration of Ukrainian Canadian literature and a book that should be on the shelves of Canadian literature fans and those interested in the study of ethnic, postcolonial, and diasporic literature.

Scarlett O'Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner's Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now. Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, food-themed issues of Oxford American and Southern Cultures, and a spate of new scholarly and popular books demonstrate this interest. Writing in the Kitchen explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely. This collection examines food writing in a range of literary expressions, including cookbooks, agricultural journals, novels, stories, and poems. Contributors interpret how authors use food to explore the changing South, considering the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and region affect how and what people eat. They describe foods from specific southern places such as New Orleans and Appalachia, engage both the historical and contemporary South, and study the food traditions of ethnicities as they manifest through the written word.

This book describes a new approach to teaching foreign languages for primary and secondary school that shifts the attention from learning the language to communicate skillfully in the foreign language. The approach focuses on developing students' literacy skills as a way to discover language and make it meaningful. In the first four chapters the rationale for the approach is explained and illustrated with examples from different units of work in different languages (French, English and Spanish). Chapter 5 talks the reader through a complete unit of work based on a YouTube video, while chapter 6 looks at how this approach can be integrated into an existing curriculum. The book ends by looking at teachers and their difficulties in implementing this approach, and finally sets the Literacy Approach against recent developments in education. This volume will be of interest to academics, students and teachers in fields including foreign language education, literacy development, and CLIL.

Now available in a single volume paperback, this advanced reference resource for the novel and novel theory offers authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, and genre of the novel, in over 140 articles of 500-7,000 words. Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world; formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator); technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure and style); subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel; theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel; book history; and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines. The Encyclopedia is arranged in A-Z format and features entries from an international cast of over 140 scholars, overseen by an advisory board of 37 leading specialists in the field, making this the most authoritative reference resource available on the novel. This essential reference, now available in an easy-to-use, fully indexed single volume paperback, will be a vital addition to the libraries of literature students and scholars everywhere.

Eliot's Four Quartets is arguably the finest long poem in modern English literature. It is also one that presents considerable problems of interpretation. In Word Unheard, first published in 1969, Blamires aims to unravel some of these problems by guiding the reader line by line through the poem, blending paraphrase with commentary. Blamires pays particular attention to the philosophical and theological dimensions of the poem and to its multifarious personal, historical and literary allusions. This title will be of interests to students of literature.

'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.

Set in the South of France during the waning days of the French Revolution and the early years of Napoleonic rule, The Rover (1923) is the last novel that Conrad completed in his lifetime. A popular success on its publication, it explores, against the backdrop of dramatic political change and the Anglo-French hostilities leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar, the themes of personal and national identity, loyalty and love. The 'Introduction' situates the novel in Conrad's career and traces its sources and contemporary reception. Explanatory notes illuminate literary and historical references and indicate Conrad's sources. The essay on the text and the apparatus lay out the history of the work's composition and publication, detail the interventions in the text by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors and explain editorial policy. This edition of The Rover, established through modern textual scholarship, presents the novel in a form more authoritative than any so far printed.

Establishing Edith Sitwell at the center of British modernism, this volume showcases her many achievements in poetry, autobiography, novel writing, criticism, art, and performance. Forgoing the gossip about her eccentric appearance and self-fashioned persona that has too often overshadowed serious writing about her work, the contributors explore how Sitwell combined persona and poetry to foster an outpouring of iconoclastic creativity. The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell argues that Sitwell was crucial to the development of a British avant-garde that operated alongside the conventionally accepted transatlantic modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. With Sitwell as an influential literary player and social architect, the British interwar arts scene was not an ascetic escape from personality?as the modernism of Pound and Eliot has often been characterized?but an alternative space of flamboyant, extravagant, and ornate performance.

This volume celebrates the contribution of Professor Colin Williams, an immensely important and influential scholar in the field of language policy for more than forty years. Eighteen chapters by former students, colleagues and collaborators address a range of topics involving different aspects of language legislation and language rights, governance, economics, territoriality, land use planning, and onomastics. Six chapters address policy issues in Professor Williams's native Wales while others focus on Canada, Catalonia, Ireland and Scotland. The volume concludes with an Afterword by Professor Williams himself. The book will be suitable for postgraduates and researchers not only in the field of language policy and planning but also sociolinguistics, geography, law and political science.

Between 1948 and the end of the 1950s, Italian and American government agencies and corporations commissioned hundreds of short films for domestic and foreign consumption on topics such as the fight against unemployment, the transformation of rural and urban spaces, and the re-establishment of democratic regimes in Italy and throughout Europe. In Schooling in Modernity, Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which these sponsored films promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people.

The author uses extensive archival research and various theoretical approaches to examine the politics of sponsored filmmaking in postwar Italy. Among the many topics explored are target audiences and audience response, sources of funding, censorship, debates on cinematic realism, and the connections and differences between American and Italian strategies and styles of documentary filmmaking. Insightful and richly detailed, Schooling in Modernity shows the importance of these under-appreciated films in the postwar modernization process, the transition from Fascism to democracy, and Italy's involvement in the Cold War.

This volume in the Arthurian Characters and Themes series treats the fascinating character of Perceval, the naive and flawed but gifted youth who becomes the Grail hero in some texts and yet is eclipsed in others by Galahad. Also includes eight musical examples.

Now in its 29th edition, this title is a comprehensive and practical source of biographical information on the key personalities and organizations of the literary world, whether world-famous or lesser known. This descriptive directory is revised annually by our editorial team and all entrants are given the opportunity to update their career details, publications and contact information. International in scope and covering all literary genres, this title will prove an invaluable acquisition for public and academic libraries, journalists, television and radio companies, PR companies, literary organizations and anyone needing up-to-date information in this field. Entries: Biographical details are listed for writers of all kinds, including novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, essayists, editors, columnists, journalists, as well as literary agents and publishers. Each entry provides personal information, career details, works published, literary awards and prizes, memberships and contact information, where available. Key Features: - nearly 8,000 entries, including hundreds of new entries for this edition - an additional directory section that includes current and detailed lists of major literary awards and prizes, literary organizations, literary festivals and national libraries from around the world.

This volume of fourteen interviews covers the prolific and rich career of author Jerome Charyn (b. 1937). Four of the interviews appear in English for the first time, and two interviews appear here in print for the first time as well. As one of his autobiographical volumes claims, Jerome Charyn is a ""Bronx Boy,"" a child born from immigrant parents who went through Ellis Island in the 1920s like so many other travelers without luggage, a ""little werewolf"" who grew up on his own in the chaos of the Bronx ghetto. ""I think I was defined by two things: World War Two and the movies."" His work remains deeply marked by this childhood largely forgotten by the American Dream. If Charyn has spent much of his life in Paris, he has paradoxically never left the Bronx: ""'El Bronx' is there inside my head, and I revisit it the way Hemingway would fish the Big Two-Hearted River in his dreams."" His whole work is a long attempt at evoking his own history and celebrating his lifelong marveling at the power of language--""our second skin""--as well as his deep, unflinching belief in the promises of fiction. Since 1964, Charyn has published more than fifty books ranging from fiction to nonfiction and including short stories, very popular crime novels, graphic novels co-written with European artists, essays on American culture and cinema as well as on New York, autobiography and biography--an ever-changing production that has made it difficult for critics to classify him. And yet in many ways Charyn's writing thrives on constant currents: the words ""voice,"" ""song,"" ""undersong,"" or ""rhythm"" return frequently in his interviews as he explains what literature is to him and ceaselessly asserts that he is trying ""to find a music for a musicless world,"" a language for ""people who cannot speak.""

"Conversations with Steve Martin" presents a collection of interviews and profiles that focus on Martin as a writer, artist, and original thinker over the course of more than four decades in show business. While those less familiar with his full body of work may think of Martin as primarily the "wild and crazy guy" with an arrow through his head, this book makes the case that he is in fact one of our nation's most accomplished and varied artists. It shows the full range of Martin's creative work, tracing the source of his comic imagination from his early standup days, starting in the mid to late 1960s through the films he has written and starred in, and emphasizing his more recent creative outpourings as playwright, essayist, novelist, memoirist, songwriter, composer, musician, and art critic.

"Standup is the hardest material in the world to write for someone else; it's like trying to condense 10 years of experience into 20 minutes of new material.," Martin says. But commenting on his fiction writing, he says. "I think you have to be able to find as a writer that state where you don't know what you're going to say or what the character is going to say or who the characters are. That's the biggest thrill of all. When you start to trust that subconscious thing and you don't censor yourself--just remember you can always throw it away--that's when the good stuff comes out."

The selected materials consist not only of pieces focused primarily on Martin's writings, but also broader profiles and conversations that help explain Martin's development as a writer within the larger context of his many other accomplishments, talents, and performance skills.

"Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning" boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production "Desdemona" and her tenth and latest novel, "Home." These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of "Desdemona" and "Home" within the wider scope of Morrison's career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison's fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in "Home."

In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison's focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from "Home," and framed by two poems: Rita Dove's "The Buckeye" and Sonia Sanchez's "Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo."