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.

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.

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.

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. -- .

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.

The first full account of North America's largest collection of traditional Irish-language manuscripts. Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library's documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author's introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America's intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University's scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution's program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository's records of the Irish past, and of America's Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.

The reputation of Janet Frame, modern New Zealand writer, languishes. [Janet Frame] will bring more recognition to Frame. Among its well-known contributors are Patricia Moran, Suzette A. Henke and Claire Bazin. The collection truly has a global reach, with professors in the U.S., England, France, and Australia, and all of the essays are written by women. Given Frame's opposition to patriarchy and preoccupation with "Womanly" language and feminist themes, women bring a unique point of view to analysis of Frame. Essays are organized around three themes: Frame's autobiography, Frame's short stories, and Frame's novels. The essays explore generally neglected topics in Frame's writings: her mother's Christadelphian faith; Frame's relationships with two 20th century icons, one an important artist of the Bay Area Figurative Movement (William Theophilus Brown) and the other a by now infamous scientist (John Money) who explored gender and sexuality at Johns Hopkins. Henke's "Janet Frame's New Zealand Odyssey," previously published in Shattered Subjects, is made accessible. Henke explores Frame through trauma studies. Comparative studies include Frame and Doris Lessing and Frame and Virginia Woolf. French scholars enrich Frame studies with little-evoked Gallic approaches, using Bakhtin, Foucault and Rabelais. Thus, the book is central to Frame studies.

When George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, the world lost one of its most well-known authors, a revolutionary who was as renowned for his personality as he was for his humour, humanity, and rebellious thinking. He remains a compelling figure who deserves attention not only for how influential he was in his time, but for how relevant he is to ours. This collection sets Shaw's life and achievements in context, with forty-two scholarly essays devoted to subjects that interested him and defined his work. Contributors explore a wide range of themes, moving from factors that were formative in Shaw's life, to the artistic work that made him most famous and the institutions with which he worked, to the political and social issues that consumed much of his attention, and, finally, to his influence and reception. Presenting fresh material and arguments, this collection will point to new directions of research for future scholars.

British literature often refers to pagan and classical themes through richly detailed landscapes that suggest more than a mere backdrop of physical features. The myth-inspired writings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Blackwood, Aleister Crowley, Lord Dunsany and even Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows informed later British films and television dramas such as Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), Excalibur (1981) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). The author analyzes the evocative language and aesthetics of landscapes in literature, film, television and music, and how "psycho-geography" is used to explore the influence of the past on the present.

With the incredibly long history of Batman and associated comics, it is unusual for something new to come along and grab a new generation's attention. That is exactly what happened in 1992 when young fans were introduced to Harley Quinn, a strange and eccentric female sidekick to the already popular villain the Joker. Since Harley's introduction, she has maintained a steady fan base as viewers of the cartoon series have followed the character through the comic books, live action plays, video games, and now movies with the release of the Suicide Squad movie in 2015. Those interested in a deeper understanding of Harley's bubbly and sometimes malicious character will delight in reading the first book dedicated to her in all her duality.

The first-ever collection of Aaniiih/Gros Ventre narratives to be published in the Aaniiih/Gros Ventre language, this book contains traditional trickster tales and war stories. Some of these stories were collected by Alfred Kroeber in 1901, while others are contemporary, oral stories, told in the past few years. As with the previous titles in the First Nations Language Readers series, Aaniiih/Gros Ventre Stories comes with a complete glossary and provides some grammar usage. Delightfully illustrated, each story is accompanied by an introduction to guide the reader through the material. The Aaniiih/Gros Ventre people lived in the Saskatchewan area in the 1700s, before being driven south during the 1800s to the Milk River area in Montana, along the USA/Canada border.

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.

The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, and fandom, as well as across the culture writ large. Through essays that address not only the history of science fiction in America but also the influence and significance of American science fiction throughout media and fan culture, this companion serves as a key resource for scholars, teachers, students, and fans of science fiction.