At the age of thirty-eight, Phyllis Dorothy James White, National Health Service employee, reinvented herself as P.D. James, crime novelist. By the time she died in 2014 at the age of ninety-four, James had long since been informally christened England's Queen of Crime. Sixteen of James's twenty novels feature one of her beloved series detectives, Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard and private eye Cordelia Gray, while her stand-alone works include dystopian The Children of Men (1992) and Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. James's careful mystery plotting has earned comparison with Golden Age British detective writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. At the same time, James's work is thoroughly modern, with realistic descriptions of police procedures and the echoing aftereffects of crime. This definitive companion to P. D. James includes over 800 encyclopedia-style entries on all her published writing, characters, settings, and themes, as well as a career chronology, a chronological and alphabetical listing of her works, and an exhaustive index, making it an invaluable resource for devoted fans and new readers alike.

The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century, the Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, 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 work'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 medieval 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. Volume 2, by Ralph Hanna, deliberately addresses the question of the poem's perceived "difficulty," by indicating the legitimate areas of unresolved dilemmas, while offering often original explanations of a variety of textual loci. Perhaps more important, his commentary indicates what has not always appeared clear in past approaches-that the poem only "means" in its totality and within some critical framework, and that its annotation needs always to be guided by a sense of Langland's developing arguments.

A Wider View of the Universe traces the origins and development of Henry David Thoreau's painstaking and profound study of the natural world. Arguing that Thoreau in his early career did not perceive nature a worthy subject for his pen, the author chronicles his growing interest and the reasons behind the shift in viewpoint. Making do with a superficial knowledge of nature-even while living at Walden Pond-Thoreau began to study the subject more acutely in 1849 and 1850. Over the next dozen years, he applied himself especially to botany and ornithology, while seeking to integrate this more exact knowledge into the large patterns of life. Independently deriving what now would be considered an ecological world view, Thoreau devoted the last years of his writing career to nature studies, written in his own unique and exacting fashion. Henry Thoreau wrote after the fashion of a painter. How he arrived at this art provides an intriguing and arresting story.

Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern sought to advance not only the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including fighting against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization's outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have persisted, even after the Comintern's demise in 1943. Tracing these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures both the failure and the enduring allure of a Soviet-centred world revolution. The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception but also highlight alternatives to capitalism - namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.

Science and science fiction have become inseparable-with common stories, interconnected thought experiments, and shared language. This reference book lays out that relationship and its all-but-magical terms and ideas. Those who think seriously about the future are changing the world, reshaping how we speak and how we think. This book fully covers the terms that collected, clarified and crystallized the futurists' ideas, sometimes showing them off, sometimes slowing them down, and sometimes propelling them to fame and making them the common currency of our culture. The many entries in this encyclopedic work offer a guided tour of the vast territories occupied by science fiction and futurism. In his Foreword, David Brin says, "Provocative and enticing? Filled with 'huh!' moments and leads to great stories? That describes this volume."

This literary companion surveys the life, works, and awards of Irish playwright Brian Friel. Entries investigate his milieu and such topics as religion, violence, and achievement. Character summaries reprise his most significant figures, particularly St. Columba, the victims of Derry's Bloody Sunday, and Hugh O'Neill, the Lord of Tyrone. Coverage of Friel's column in the Irish Times and his short fiction in the New Yorker leads up to the style and influence of his most recent plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa.

Richard Holloway is one of our most beloved public thinkers. Throughout his life he has turned to poets and writers to help answer the big questions, and for solace and guidance in the face of life's challenges. Now he shares those poems and words which have been his own guide, offered in the hope they will help us too. This is a book to turn to for inspiration, guidance and comfort. It offers lessons from those who, in Richard's words, 'know best how to listen and teach us to listen', all united by 'the sensual appeal of words, the pain and pleasure they impart'. It is a book to treasure.

Analysis of LGBTQ life before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 traditionally has been dominated by the powerful negative image of the closet, the metaphorical space where that which was deemed ""queer"" was necessarily sheltered from hostile, heteronormative public view. Literary studies of queer themes and characters in crime fiction have tended to focus on works published in the freer environment that has existed in the years since Stonewall, queer material, so the traditional belief runs, having been, for the most part, only negatively or obliquely presented in crime fiction of the closet-bound pre-Stonewall era. This book tempers this traditional view, offering readers a groundbreaking collection of twenty-three essays, in which the authors investigate queer aspects to crime fiction published over eight decades, from the corseted Victorian era to the unbuttoned Swinging Sixties, on the very eve of Stonewall. ""Murder will out,"" so the saying goes, and this is true as well of queer material in pre-Stonewall crime fiction, if one but follows the clues.

Twenty percent of Palestinians-1.57 million Israeli citizens and over seven hundred thousand exiles and immigrants around the world-live in Europe and the Americas, participating daily in languages and cultures other than Arabic. The dispersion of Palestinians and the consequent diversity of experiences running through three generations since the Nabka of 1948 have significantly dispelled a sense of cultural homogeneity. This cultural diversification is powerfully reflected in literature as an increasing number of Palestinians are writing in Hebrew, English, Spanish, Italian, and Danish, among other languages. In Being There, Being Here, Ebileeni calls for a renewed definition of Palestinian writing, one that includes Anglophone, Nordic, Latinate, and Hebrew language literary works into the national canon. The relevance of studying Palestinian writings composed in languages other than Arabic is grounded in the tension between the idea of remaining loyal to a more-or-less fixed national narrative and the desire to understand the ongoing lingual and cultural proliferations of the Palestinian story. The concept of "homeland" remains inextricable to Palestinian experiences notwithstanding generation and location, but, it may not necessarily connote to the notion of home for those who were born and raised in the West. Although most of the works discussed here are steeped in the historic injustices committed against Palestinians, Ebileeni's intention is to unsettle this foundation for the purpose of yielding a richer and fuller understanding of Palestinian literary texts.

The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from "past/future" and "anticipation/unexpected" to "extinction/adaptation" and "serial/simultaneous." Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time-not space, as the postmoderns had it-is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.

'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.

This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions, and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality, and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies, and the history of storytelling in America.

This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions, and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality, and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies, and the history of storytelling in America.

Swift's parodies are among his most fascinating works, but perhaps require most explication for the modern reader. Valerie Rumbold brings a new depth and detail to the editing of Swift's Bickerstaff papers, 'Polite Conversation', 'Directions to Servants' and other works on language and conduct. Highlights include a fresh investigation of the political and print contexts of the Bickerstaff papers, full commentaries on such smaller works as 'A Modest Defence of Punning' and 'On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland', identification and explanation of many additional sayings in 'Polite Conversation', and a detailed contextualisation of 'Directions to Servants' in contemporary domestic theory and practice. A substantial thematic Introduction is supplemented by an individual headnote and full annotation to each work. The Textual Introduction explores the publishing strategies adopted by Swift and his booksellers, and a separate Textual Account of each work presents and discusses changes in the texts over time.

Texts from the papyrus collection of Washington University have already appeared in Veme B. Schuman, Washington University Papyri 1: Non Literary Texts (American Studies in Papyrology 17), Chico (Califomia) 1980. This new volume is intended as a continuation, and the texts appearing in it have been numbered accordingly, subsequent to Schuman's. We divided our texts at an early stage, and while we have consulted each other extensively since then, we retain chief responsibility each for the pieces we began with: Maresch for 69-72, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 88, 90-94, 101, 102, 104, 107, and 108; Packman for 62-68, 73-76, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 95-100, 103, 105, and 106. The editors of P.Wash.Univ. II were brought together by Reinhold Merkelbach, to whom they are grateful for his continuing support and advice. Our thanks are due to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, whose suppon enabled Maresch to visit St. Louis in 1988, and the American Council of Leamed Societies, whose fellowship brought Packman to Cologne in 1989- 90. An ACLS grant in 1966 made possible the photographs on which has depended most of the work done on the collection since: Some of them appear in the plates of this volume.

The first chronological overview of O'Connor criticism from the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952 to the present. Flannery O'Connor is one of the most widely read, discussed, and taught of all American authors. She is immensely popular with students, general readers, and literary critics. Her work, often characterized as "Southern Gothic," betrays in its focus on morality her devout Roman Catholic faith even as it displays a wicked sense of humor. She has been the subject of numerous articles and books, and indeed an entire journal devoted to her writings has existedfor decades. There is not, however, any chronological overview of the history of O'Connor criticism. The present volume fills that very conspicuous gap. It is the sort of book that practically every college and university library,as well as many public libraries, will need to own, and it will appeal not only to scholars and students but to non-academic readers of O'Connor, whose numbers are legion. A particular value of the book is that it synthesizes criticism and commentary that is now only available in individual essays that are widely scattered. Robert C. Evans is Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery. Among his many books is Critical Insights: ShortFiction of Flannery O'Connor (2016).

Every Sunday, readers of The New York Times Book Review turn with anticipation to see which novelist, historian, short story writer, or artist will be the subject of the popular By the Book feature. These wide-ranging interviews are conducted by Pamela Paul, the editor of the Book Review, and here she brings together sixty-five of the most intriguing and fascinating exchanges, featuring personalities as varied as David Sedaris, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, and James Patterson. The questions and answers admit us into the private worlds of these authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, pet peeves, and recommendations. By the Book contains the full uncut interviews, offering a range of experiences and observations that deepens readers' understanding of the literary sensibility and the writing process. It also features dozens of sidebars that reveal the commonalities and conflicts among the participants, underscoring those influences that are truly universal and those that remain matters of individual taste. For the devoted reader, By the Book is a way to invite sixty-five of the most interesting guests into your world. It's a book party not to be missed.

Since the late 1960s, the novels of Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck detective series, along with the works of Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser and Stieg Larsson, have sparked an explosion of Nordic crime fiction - grim police procedurals treating urgent sociopolitical issues affecting the contemporary world. Steeped in noir techniques and viewpoints, many of these novels are reaching international audiences through film and television adaptations. This reference guide introduces the world of Nordic crime fiction to English-speaking readers. Caught between the demands of conscience and societal strictures, the detectives in these stories - like the heroes of Norse mythology - know that they and their world must perish, but fight on regardless of cost. At a time of bleak eventualities, Nordic crime fiction interprets the bitter end as a celebration of the indomitable human spirit.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield. The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty's fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the Complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty's uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty's work with such Subjects as Bob Dylan's songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.

Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narratives. The volume also examines the public and personal everyday contexts within which popular texts are read, highlighting the ways in which such narratives have circulated across a variety of constantly changing media, including theatre, television, cinema and new computer-based digital forms. Case studies from key genres - crime fiction, romance and Gothic horror - as well as a full chronology and guide to further reading make this collection indispensable to all those interested in this complex and vibrant cultural field.

Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture aims to fill a gap that has become more and more conspicuous among the wealth of scholarly periodicals in the field of Jewish Studies. Whereas existing journals provide space to medium - and large sized articles, they neglect the small but poignant contributions, which may be as important as the extended, detailed study. The yearbook Zutot serves as a platform for small but incisive contributions, and provides them with a distinct context. The substance of these contributions is derived from larger perspectives and, though not always presented in an exhaustive way, will have an impact on contemporary discussions. Zutot covers Jewish Culture in its broadest sense, i.e. encompassing various academic disciplines - literature, languages and linguistics, philosophy, art, sociology, politics and history - and reflects binary oppositions such as religious and secular, high and low, written and oral, male and female culture.

The French Revolution ignited the biggest debate on politics and society in Britain since the Civil War 150 years earlier. The public controversy lasted from the initial, positive reaction to French events in 1789 to the outlawing of the radical societies in 1799. This Cambridge Companion highlights the energy, variety and inventiveness of the literature written in response to events in France and the political reaction at home. It contains thirteen specially commissioned essays by an international team of historians and literary scholars, a chronology of events and publications, and an extensive guide to further reading. Six essays concentrate on the principal writers of the Revolution controversy: Burke, Paine, Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Others deal with popular radical culture, counter-revolutionary culture, the distinctive contribution of women writers, novels of opinion, drama, and poetry. This volume will serve as a comprehensive yet accessible reference work for students, advanced researchers and scholars.

The French Revolution ignited the biggest debate on politics and society in Britain since the Civil War 150 years earlier. The public controversy lasted from the initial, positive reaction to French events in 1789 to the outlawing of the radical societies in 1799. This Cambridge Companion highlights the energy, variety and inventiveness of the literature written in response to events in France and the political reaction at home. It contains thirteen specially commissioned essays by an international team of historians and literary scholars, a chronology of events and publications, and an extensive guide to further reading. Six essays concentrate on the principal writers of the Revolution controversy: Burke, Paine, Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Others deal with popular radical culture, counter-revolutionary culture, the distinctive contribution of women writers, novels of opinion, drama, and poetry. This volume will serve as a comprehensive yet accessible reference work for students, advanced researchers and scholars.

The yearbook Zutot serves as a platform for small but incisive contributions, and provides them with a distinct context. The substance of these contributions is derived from larger perspectives and, though not always presented in an exhaustive way, will have an impact on contemporary discussions.

It is the not-too-distant future, and the rapture has occurred. Every born-again Christian on the planet has, without prior warning, been snatched from the earth to meet Christ in the heavens, while all those without the requisite faith have been left behind to suffer the wrath of the Antichrist as the earth enters into its final days.

This is the premise that animates the enormously popular cultural phenomenon that is the Left Behind series of prophecy novels, co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and published between 1995 and 2007. But these books are more than fiction: it is the sincere belief of many evangelicals that these events actually will occur--soon. "Plotting Apocalypse" delves into the world of rapture, prophecy, and tribulation in order to account for the extraordinary cultural salience of these books and the impact of the world they project. Through penetrating readings of the novels, Chapman shows how the series offers a new model of evangelical agency for its readership. The novels teach that although believers are incapable of changing the course of a future that has been preordained by God, they "can" become empowered by learning to read the prophetic books of the Bible--and the signs of the times--correctly. Reading and interpretation become key indices of agency in the world that Left Behind limns.

"Plotting Apocalypse" reveals the significant cultural work that Left Behind performs in developing a counter-narrative to the passivity and fatalism that can characterize evangelical prophecy belief. Chapman's arguments may bear profound implications for the future of American evangelicalism and its interactions with culture, society, and politics.