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

This book traces the development of a Left feminist consciousness as women became more actively involved in the American Left during and immediately following World War II. McDonald argues that women writers on the Left drew on the rhetoric of antifascism to critique the cultural and ideological aspects of women's oppression. In Left journals during World War II, women writers outlined the dangers of fascist control for women and argued that the fight against fascism must also be about ending women's oppression. After World War II, women writers continued to use this antifascist framework to call attention to the ways in which the emerging domestic ideology in the United States bore a frightening resemblance to the fascist repression of women in Nazi Germany.

This critique of American domestic ideology emphasized the ways in which black and working-class women were particularly affected and extended to an examination of women's roles in personal and romantic relationships. Underlying this critique was the belief that representations of women in American culture were part of the problem. To counter these dominant cultural images, women writers on the Left depicted female activists in contemporary antifascist and anticolonial struggles or turned to the past, for historical role models in the labor, abolitionist, and antisuffrage movements. This depiction of women as models of agency and liberation challenged some of the conventions about femininity in the postwar era.

The book provides a historical overview of women writers who anticipated issues about women's oppression and the intersections of gender, race, and class that would become central tenants of feminist literary criticism and black feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. It closely considers works by writers both well-known and obscure, including Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Martha Dodd, Sanora Babb, and Beth McHenry.

Like Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Fielding's Tom Jones, Modern Chivalry is a tale of adventuring, episodic and exciting. Despite the author's European inspirations, it is a distinctively American book, not just because of its homespun, native characters and slapstick humor, but also because it is a narrative of journeying and questing. As it follows Captain Farrago and his sidekick on their travels, the book's premise becomes clear-that democracy as practiced in America is valuable and worthy, but that it is subject to malfunctions when tinkered with by unfit men. A pointed caricature of American life, Modern Chivalry will be of great value to all interested in American history and literature.

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.

Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov brings together candid, revealing interviews with one of the twentieth century's master prose writers. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian American scientist, poet, translator, and professor of literature. Critics throughout the world celebrated him for developing the luminous and enigmatic style that advanced the boundaries of modern literature more than any author since James Joyce. In a career that spanned over six decades, he produced dozens of iconic works, including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and his classic autobiography, Speak, Memory. The twenty-eight interviews and profiles in this collection were drawn from Nabokov's numerous print and broadcast appearances over a period of nineteen years. Beginning with the controversy surrounding the American publication of Lolita in 1958, he offers trenchant, witty views on society, literature, education, the role of the author, and a range of other topics. He discusses the numerous literary and symbolic allusions in his work, his use of parody and satire, as well as analyses of his own literary influences. Nabokov also provided a detailed portrait of his life-from his aristocratic childhood in prerevolutionary Russia, education at Cambridge, apprenticeship as an emigre writer in the capitals of Europe, to his decision in 1940 to immigrate to the United States, where he achieved renown and garnered an international readership. The interviews in this collection are essential for seeking a clearer understanding of the life and work of an author who was pivotal in shaping the landscape of contemporary fiction.

An essential chronological framework for students of Portuguese literature. This companion volume offers an introduction to European Portuguese literature for university-level readers. It consists of a chronological overview of Portuguese literature from the twelfth century to the present day, by some ofthe most distinguished literary scholars of recent years, leading into substantial essays centred on major authors, genres or periods, and a study of the history of translations. It does not attempt an encyclopaedic coverage of Portuguese literature, but provides essential chronological and bibliographical information on all major authors and genres, with more extensive treatment of key works and literary figures, and a particular focus on the modern period. It is unashamedly canonical rather than thematic in its examination of central authors and periods, without neglecting female writers. In this way it provides basic reference materials for students beginning the study of Portuguese literature, and for a wider audience looking for general or specific information. The editors have made a principled decision to exclude both Brazilian and African literature, which demand separate treatment. STEPHEN PARKINSON, CLAUDIA PAZOS ALONSO and T. F. EARLE are all members of the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at the University of Oxford. CONTRIBUTORS: Vanda Anastacio, Helena Carvalhao Buescu, Rip Cohen, T. F. Earle, David Frier,Luis Gomes, Mariana Gray de Castro, Helder Macedo, Patricia Odber de Baubeta, Hilary Owen, Stephen Parkinson, Claudia Pazos Alonso, Juliet Perkins, Teresa Pinto Coelho, Phillip Rothwell, Mark Sabine, Claire Williams, Clive Willis.

At the heart of this book is a belief that poetry matters, and that it enables us to enjoy and understand life. In this accessible guide, Andrew Hodgson equips the reader for the challenging and rewarding experience of unlocking poetry, considering the key questions about language, technique, feeling and subject matter which illuminate what a poem has to say. In a lucid and sympathetic manner, he considers a diverse range of poets writing in English to demonstrate how their work enlarges our perception of ourselves and our world. The process of independent research is modeled step-by-step, as the guide shows where to start, how to develop ideas, and how to draw conclusions. Providing guidance on how to plan, organise and write essays, close readings and commentaries, from initial annotation to final editing, this book will provide you with the confidence to discover and express your own personal response to poetry.

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

Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy-the rhetoric of religious offense-and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane coercive dogmas-including ecclesiastical and terrestrial ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar Anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. The transgressions of these writers spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemous Modernism enriches the scope of modernist scholarship by resonating with broader cultural and ideological concerns.

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.

Imagine a world without Principia Mathematica, Rights of Man, the Bible, Shakespeare, or the Mahabharata. Books that Changed History features 75 of the world's most momentous titles - from The Art of War to Anne Frank's Diary - and reveals their far-ranging impact. Books are the medium through which scientists, storytellers, and philosophers introduce their ideas. Discover seminal religious and political titles, cornerstones of science such as On the Origin of Species, and ancient texts such as the I Ching, which is still used today to answer fundamental questions about human existence. Get up close to see fascinating details, such as Versalius' exquisite anatomical illustrations in Epitome, Leonardo da Vinci's annotated notebooks, or the hand-decorated pages in the Gutenberg Bible. Discover why Euclid's Elements of Geometry was the most influential maths title ever published, and marvel at rare treasures such as the Aubin Codex, which tells the history of the Aztecs and the early Spanaish colonial period in Mexico. Books that Changed History gathers stories, diaries, scientific treatises, plays, dictionaries, and religious texts into a stunning celebration of the power of books.

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Zizek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Zizekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Zizek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek affirms Zizek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Zizekian criticism. Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Zizek

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020 traces the region's contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of Anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean Literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms.

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.

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus was among the most celebrated authors of the Second Sophistic and an important figure in the transmission of Hellenism. Born to wealthy landowners in Mysia in 117, he studied in Athens and Pergamum before he fell chronically ill in the early 140s and retreated to Pergamum's healing shrine of Asclepius. By 147 Aristides was able to resume his public activities and pursue a successful oratorical career. Based at his family estate in Smyrna, he traveled between bouts of illness and produced speeches and lectures, declamations on historical themes, polemical works, prose hymns, and various essays, all of it displaying deep and creative familiarity with the classical literary heritage. He died between 180 and 185. This edition of Aristides, new to the Loeb Classical Library, offers fresh translations and texts based on the critical editions of Lenz-Behr (Orations 1-16) and Keil (Orations 17-53). Volume II contains Orations 3 and 4, which along with Oration 2 (A Reply to Plato) take issue with the attack on orators and oratory delivered in Plato's Gorgias.

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.

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.

From wondrous fairy-lands to nightmarish hellscapes, the elements that make fantasy worlds come alive also invite their exploration and study. This first book-length study of critically acclaimed novelist Patricia A. McKillip's lyrical other-worlds analyzes her characters, environments and legends and their interplay with genre expectations. The author gives long overdue critical attention to McKillip's work and demonstrates how a broader understanding of world-building enables a deeper appreciation of her fantasies.

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.

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.

The booklover's ultimate journal! Filled with the best bookish art from avowed bibliophile Jane Mount, plus themed reading lists and room for notes, it's the perfect companion for any reader.

Astra Magazine is a brand new international literary magazine, an emerging must-read for anyone interested in the best new literature from around the world. Astra Magazine connects readers and writers from around the world - New York to Mexico City, Lagos to Berlin, Copenhagen to Singapore and beyond. We want to bring about a new, borderless, and vital mode of reading. Astra is a magazine for our new moment, bringing us together while, the world over, we create new language for ourselves. Issue Number 2: Filth is dedicated to the dirty and the lowly, to the beautiful as well as the abject. Filth is a term that encompasses everything from actual trash to cultural garbage, the foetid, the foul and the pestilent and ranges into obscenity, smut and shame. This issue will explore the splendor in squalor and the pleasure in pain. Featuring thrilling and original new fiction, poetry, essays, art, and comics from writers and arists around the world.

This handbook is the first work to document all the fairy tales which appeared in the Grimm Brothers lifetime and locates them in their historico-cultural context. There is a detailed commentary on each tale, which draws on the most important international research literature; particular attention is paid both to thematic links within the collection and to the Tales continued survival and revitalisation in the most varied literary genres and audio-visual media. The Guide contains comprehensive indexes of names, works and subjects, together with indexes of titles, types of tale, motifs, sources and contributors. Key features: detailed commentaries on all tales extensive information on motifs, sources and subjects"