Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel is a study of the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. This volume focuses on novels of the 1920s and engages in a study of Joyce's epiphany and language play, Yeats's esoteric philosophy, Lawrence's vitalism, and Woolf's stream of consciousness techniques. In this book readers enter the minds of Joyce's characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the modern city, the esoteric quests of William Butler Yeats, the vitalism and explorations of D. H. Lawrence, the interiority of Virginia Woolf, and the artistic perspectives of the Bloomsbury Group. Within the field of intellectual history, Robert McParland's groundbreaking study places Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and Woolf within the cultural and historical context of the first half of the twentieth century. McParland takes a philosophical humanist approach to the innovative techniques and quests of literary modernism and draws from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the inquiries of Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson. This work also follows from the work of intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes, the studies of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann and Helene Cixous, and David Lodge's Consciousness in Fiction.

Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation. Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the development of both the novel and national identities-to Mexican popular culture-during its foundational period. In the twentieth century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales, themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study? Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds) have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand some of the possible answers to these questions through five case studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to larger notions of how national identities are created through narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political implications.

Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary posits that Robinson's widely celebrated novels and essays are best understood as emerging from a foundational theology that has 'the Ordinary' as its source. Reading Robinson's published work, and drawing on an original interview with Robinson, Andrew Cunning constructs an authentically Robinsonian theology that is at once distinctly American and conversant with contemporary continental philosophy of religion. This book demonstrates that the Ordinary is the source of Robinson's writing and, as a phenomenon that opens onto a surplus of meaning, is where Robinson's notion of transcendence emerges. Robinson's theology is one centered on the material reality of the world and on the subjective nature of one's encounter with oneself and the physical stuff of existence. Arguing that the Ordinary demands an artistic response, this book reads Robinson's fiction as her theological response to the surplus of meaning in ordinary experience. Under the themes of grace, language, time and self, Cunning locates the ordinary, everyday grounding of Robinson's metaphysics.

Habent sua fata libelli honors the work of Craig Kallendorf, offering studies in several fields in which he chiefly distinguished himself: the history of the book and reading, the classical tradition and reception studies, Renaissance humanism, and Virgilian scholarship with a special focus on the creative transformation of the Aeneid through the centuries. The volume is rounded out by an appreciation of Craig Kallendorf, including a review of his scholarship and its significance. In addition to the topics mentioned above, the volume's twenty-five contributions are of relevance to those working in the fields of classical philology, Neo-Latin, political philosophy, poetry and poetics, printing and print culture, Romance languages, art history, translation studies, and Renaissance and early modern Europe generally. Contributors: Alessandro Barchiesi, Susanna Braund, Helene Casanova-Robin, Jean-Louis Charlet, Federica Ciccolella, Ingrid De Smet, Margaret Ezell, Edoardo Fumagalli, Julia Gaisser, Lucia Gualdo Rosa, James Hankins, Andrew Laird, Marc Laureys, John Monfasani, Timothy Moore, Colette Nativel, Marianne Pade, Lisa Pon, Wayne Rebhorn, Alden Smith, Sarah Spence, Fabio Stok, Richard Thomas, and Marino Zorzi.

Though known primarily as a sculptor and painter, Michelangelo was also a poet. In his lifetime, Michelangelo wrote over 300 poems, many of which were works of devotion and love poems of a spiritual and mystical nature. In 1961, Joseph Tusiani offered the first English translations of the complete corpus of Michelangelo's poems. These translations illuminated the subtleties of both the source and target language, giving Michelangelo's verse a freshness, a depth, and an inventiveness that time has not been able to obscure. The Complete Poems of Michelangelo reproduces Tusiani's masterful translation. In addition to Tusiani's introduction and translations, this new edition contains Michelangelo's original Italian poetry, a chronology of his life and works, a biographical profile of Tusiani, and an interview with Tusiani exploring his musings on classic literature and the subtle art of translation. The Complete Poems of Michelangelo sheds light on Tusiani's many exceptional accomplishments during his long and prolific life as a scholar, poet, translator, and artist.

Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping-crucial to understanding life in the southern United States-from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery, sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a practical problem, but it quickly developed into an entrenched power structure situated between slavery and freedom that exploited the labor of Blacks and poor whites to produce agricultural commodities. Sharecropping was the economic linchpin in the South's social structure, and the region's political system, race relations, and cultural practices were inextricably linked with this peculiar form of tenant farming from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights movement. Driven to the Field analyzes literary portrayals of this system to explain how it defined the culture of the South, revealing multiple genres of literature that depicted sharecropping, such as cotton romances, agricultural uplift novels, proletarian sharecropper fiction, and sharecropper autobiographies-important works of American literature that have never before been evaluated and discussed in their proper context.

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by. In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature.

A key figure in contemporary speculative fiction, Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (b. 1960) is the first Black queer woman as well as the youngest person to be named a "Grand Master" of Science Fiction. Her Caribbean-inspired narratives-Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon's Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine-project complex futures and complex identities for people of color in terms of race, sex, and gender. Hopkinson has always had a vested interest in expanding racial and ethnic diversity in all facets of speculative fiction from its writers to its readers, and this desire is reflected in her award-winning anthologies. Her work best represents the current and ongoing colored wave of science fiction in the twenty-first century. In twenty-one interviews ranging from 1999 until 2021, Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson reveals a writer of fierce intelligence and humor in love with ideas and concerned with issues of identity. She provides powerful insights on code-switching, race, Afrofuturism, queer identities, sexuality, Caribbean folklore, and postcolonial science fictions, among other things. As a result, the conversations presented here very much demonstrate the uniqueness of her mind and her influence as a writer.

Critics agree in the abstract that "metafiction" refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, but metafiction has been largely associated with the postmodern era. In this innovative new book Tabitha Sparks identifies a sustained pattern of metafiction in the Victorian novel that illuminates the art and intentions of its female practitioners.From the mid-nineteenth century through the fin de siecle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Bronte, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but underexamined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer. Victorian Metafiction reveals how these novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots. Countering an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader's attention to the book and not the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions, Victorian Metafiction effectively argues how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel and wrote metafiction in order to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.

"When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that was moving…and this is a great one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think it might be the best novel we've ever read!" —Oprah Winfrey

In his journal, John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives, nurtured by the love of all those around him: the other grows up in loneliness, enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.

Classical Studies is Volume 8 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life. Pater carried this spirit into his studies of Greek mythology and sculpture in the 1870s and 1880s-among the most important encounters of any Victorian writer with the classical tradition. Pater's classical studies offer revisionary accounts of the myths of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy. Deeply informed by, but never beholden to, the verities of classical scholarship, Pater approaches Greek myth and art from the perspective of what he famously called 'aesthetic criticism': with an eye to their beauty and the ways they speak to modern life. Pater's interpretations of classical culture cut against the grain of the high Victorian appreciation of ancient Greece, which imagined a placid world of reason and pure white beauty. Like his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Pater is by contrast attentive to the dark side of antiquity, highlighting its depths of emotion, its dissident sexuality, its gaudy colours, and its transgressive challenges to the ruling order. These essays were highly influential among Pater's younger contemporaries, and would later inform works like James Joyce's Ulysses, which likewise traces links between ancient Greece and modern life.

Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a subterranean literary figure, receiving effusive praise from his fans, befuddled or cautious assessments from reviewers, and scant scholarly attention. Erickson's obscurity comes in part from the difficulty of categorizing his work within current trends in fiction, and in part from the wide variety of concerns that populate his writing: literature, music, film, politics, history, time, and his fascination with his home city of Los Angeles. His dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp, and paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction but difficult to classify neatly within that same realm. He is at once thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that America's triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception-and that he presciently described decades ago certain features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the remarkable consistency of Erickson's vision over time while simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve Erickson will deepen readers' understanding of how Erickson's books work-and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater attention.

Alice Pleasance Liddell inspired what is considered today to be the greatest children's story of all time - Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland brought Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll together forever. The story behind this story is a dramatic saga of a very creative, curious, and magnetic young girl who grew up to become a cultural icon and one of the most celebrated women of the last 100 years. It is a story of love, tragedy, duty, courage and loyalty to family and country - that will surprise and deeply move you.
In 2006, award-winning author C.M. Rubin and her daughter, Gabriella Rubin (who are related to the Liddell family), began an incredible journey to create the ultimate book about the original Alice in Wonderland's life. Their grand pictorial, biographic vision for the book involved collecting photographs spanning two centuries, reaching out to many celebrated Alice in Wonderland artists (including Vik Muniz, Annie Liebovitz, Mark Steele, Lizzy Rockwell, Helen Oxenbury, Frances Broomfield, Jeanne Argent, David Cooper, Bruce Fuller, Tatiana Ianovskaia, Jewel, and Tom Otterness), and connecting with museums, libraries and schools around the world. The Real Alice in Wonderland book is told using never before seen pictures along with prominent voices from Alice's lifetime and from the present day. C.M. Rubin and her daughter Gabriella explore the theme of inspiration. Behind every great person there is the person who inspires and believes in him or her. The person who motivates them to realize their dreams. This magnificent cross-atlantic epic will fascinate you -- it will make you think again: what does it mean to inspire?
The Real Alice In Wonderland book is dedicated to all those who inspire the minds and souls of human beings.

The Antilles remain a society preoccupied with gradations of skin color and with the social hierarchies that largely reflect, or are determined by, racial identity. Yet francophone postcolonial studies have largely overlooked a key figure in plantation literature: the be ke , the white Creole master. A foundational presence in the collective Antillean imaginary, the be ke is a reviled character associated both with the trauma of slavery and with continuing economic dominance, a figure of desire at once fantasized and fetishized. The first book-length study to engage with the literary construction of whiteness in the francophone Caribbean, Fictions of Whiteness examines the neglected be ke figure in the longer history of Antillean literature and culture. Maeve McCusker examines representation of the white Creole across two centuries and a range of ideological contexts, from early nineteenth-century be ke s such as Louis de Maynard and Joseph Levilloux; to canonical twentieth- and twenty-first-century novelists such as Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and Maryse Conde ; extending to lesser-known authors such as Vincent Placoly and Marie-Reine de Jaham, and including entirely obscure writers such as Henri Micaux. These close analyses illuminate the contradictions and paradoxes of white identity in the Caribbean's vieilles colonies, laboratories in which the colonial mission took shape and that remain haunted by the specter of slavery.

David Mikics has been hailed by Harold Bloom as one of our finest literary critics. In this fresh and revealing book, he examines Saul Bellow's work through the real-life relationships and friendships that Bellow transmuted into the genius of his art. The book is divided into eight chapters on some of the extraordinary people who mattered most to Bellow-family members like his irascible brother Morrie; friends like the novelists and critics Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom; and wives and lovers. Bellow's People is a perfect introduction to Bellow's life and work and an incisive study of the art of literature. As Mikics argues, "Bellow is our novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings. Only through personality, he tells us, can we know the world."

A hierarchical model of human societies' relations with the natural world is at the root of today's climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the ""mesh"" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters' mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.