This book analyses the gender roles and political contexts of spy fiction narratives published during the years of the Cold War. It offers an introduction to the development of spy fiction both in England and in the United States and explores the ways in which issues such as the atomic bomb, double agents, paranoia, propaganda and megalomania manifest themselves within the genre. The book examines the ongoing marginalization of women within spy fiction texts, exploring the idea that this unique period in global history is responsible for the active promotion and celebration of masculinity and male superiority. From James Bond to Jason Bourne, the book evaluates the ongoing enforcement of patriarchal ideas and oppressions that, in the name of national security and patriotic duty, have contributed to the development of a genre in which discrimination and bias continue to dominate.

The Historian's Wizard of Oz synthesizes four decades of scholarly interpretations of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel as an allegory of the Gilded Age political economy and a comment on the gold standard. The heart of the book is an annotated version of The Wizard of Oz that highlights the possible political and monetary symbolism in the book by relating characters, settings, and incidents in it to the historical events and figures of the 1890s, the decade in which Baum wrote his story. Dighe simultaneously values the leading political interpretations of Oz as useful and creative teaching tools, and consolidates them in a sympathetic fashion; yet he rejects the commonly held, and by now well-debunked, view that those interpretations reflect Baum's likely motivations in writing the book. The result is a unique way for readers to acquaint themselves with a classic of children's literature that is a bit different and darker than the better-known film version. Students of history and economics will find two great stories: the dramatic rise and fall of monetary populism and William Jennings Bryan and the original rendering of a childhood story that they know and love. This study draws on several worthy versions of the Oz-as-Populist-parable thesis, but it also separates the reading of Baum's book in this manner from Baum's original intentions. Despite an incongruence with Baum's intent, reading the story as a parable continues to provide a remarkable window into the historical events of the 1890s and, thus, constitutes a tremendous teaching tool for historians, economists, and political scientists. Dighe also includes a primer on gold, silver, and the American monetary system, aswell as a brief history of the Populist movement.

This book envisions the confines of medieval manuscripts as the potential territory of many virtual worlds: realms that readers call forth through their imaginative interactions with a book's material features. Each component of a medieval manuscript--its alphabetical characters, pages, images, text, gloss--offers an avenue of involvement with the world of books, and with the worlds "in" books. The explorations presented here follow those paths in a selection of manuscripts and texts produced in late-medieval Britain, tracing the fortunes of characters who become subject to and sometimes subjects in the very books the read and write.

Contents:
I. Introduction
Austen in the world: postcolonial mappings Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
II. Austen in the world
Jane Austen goes to the seaside: Sanditon, English identity and the 'West Indian' schoolgirl Elaine Jordan Learning to ride at Mansfield Park Donna Landry Austen's treacherous ivory: female patriotism, domestic ideology, and empire Jon Mee Domestic retrenchment, colonial expansion, and the traffic of improvement: the property plots of Mansfield Park Clara Tuite Of windows and country walks: frames of space and movement in 1990s Austen adaptations Julianne Pidduck
III. Austen abroad
Reluctant janeites: daughterly value in Jane Austen and Sarat Chatterjee's Swami Nalini Natarajan Jane Austen goes to India: Emily Eden's home thoughts from abroad Judith Plotz Farewell to Jane Austen: uses of realism in Vikram Seths Suitable Boy Himansu Mohapatra and Jatin Nayak Father's daughters: critical realism examines patriarchy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Pak Wanso's A Faltering Afternoon [Hwichongkorinun Ohu] You-me Park Clueless in the neocolonial world order Gayle Wald
IV. Poem
To a 'Jane Austen' class at Ibadan University Molara Ogundipe

1) This book contains the original letters exchanged between Rabindranath Tagore and James Henry Cousins. 2) It explores their shared ideas on culture, art, and education in India along with anti-imperialism. 3) This book will be of interest to department of South Asian literature, modern history, cultural studies, comparative literature, education, India studies, South Asian Studies, Irish studies, political studies, and the Bengali diaspora across the world.

As the first study to examine the concept of uncertainty of meaning as it relates to modern and contemporary literature and literary theory, Literary Theories of Uncertainty demonstrates how this notion functions as a literary feature, narrative device and theoretical concept in 20th and 21st-century texts. Calling upon theories of interpretation and challenging the distinction between literature and theory, this exploration is broken down into three sections: Poststructuralist legacies of uncertainty; life-writing and uncertainty; and contemporary literary uncertainties. The volume takes into account related terms such as undecidability, indeterminacy, ambiguity, unreadability, and obscurity, and the topics examined include: undecidability and the motif of suspension in deconstruction; Derrida and Bataille; poetry as a mode of critical discourse and point of convergence between logico-mathematical ideas of undecidability and literary forms of uncertainty; uncertainty in relation to speech and the impact of Robert Antelme on Mascolo and Blanchot; Proust and temporal uncertainty; uncertainty in relation to death, trauma and autobiography; moral uncertainty in the Scandinavian welfare state and Nordic Noir; the aesthetically disruptive and anti-authorian effect of uncertainty in in the works of German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar; uncertainty in the form of 'the double' and in relation to meta-fiction; and many more. Literary Theories of Uncertainty collates original and diverse discussions by some of the most prominent, inquiring minds in literary, cultural and critical theory today to map out the contours of the field of 'theory of uncertainty'.

Gloria E. Anzaldua, best known for her books "Borderlands/La Frontera" and "This Bridge Called My Back", is often considered as one of the foremost modern feminist thinkers and activists. As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldua has played a major role in redefining queer, female and Chicano/a identities, and in developing inclusionary movements for social justice. In this memoir-like collection, Anzaldua's powerful voice speaks clearly and passionately. She recounts her life, explains many aspects of her thought, and explores the intersections between her writings and postcolonial theory. Each selection deepens our understanding of an important cultural theorist's lifework. The interviews contain clear explanations of Anzaldua's original concept of her work and her subsequent revisions of these ideas; her use of the term "new tribalism" as a disruptive category that redefines previous ethnocentric forms of nationalism; and what Anzaldua calls "conocimientos" - alternate ways of knowing that synthesize reflection with action to create knowledge systems that challenge the status quo. Highly personal, these interviews, arranged and introduced by AnaLouise Keating,

Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States. The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson's constantly shifting early-modernist thought-"I liked everything by turns and nothing long," he said memorably-and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically. Herwig Friedl's broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedl's sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recalls-and is as revelatory as-the work of Stanley Cavell.

Forgiveness was a preoccupation of writers in the Victorian period, bridging literatures highbrow and low, sacred and secular. Yet if forgiveness represented a common value and language, literary scholarship has often ignored the diverse meanings and practices behind this apparently uncomplicated value in the Victorian period. "Forgiveness in Victorian Literature" examines how eminent writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde wrestled with the religious and social meanings of forgiveness in an age of theological controversy and increasing pluralism in ethical matters. In novels, poems, and essays, Richard Gibson here discovers unorthodox uses of the language of forgiveness and delicate negotiations between rival ethical and religious frameworks, which complicated forgiveness's traditional powers to create or restore community and, within narratives, offered resolution and closure. Illuminated by contemporary philosophical and theological investigations of forgiveness, this study also suggests that Victorian literature offers new perspectives on the ongoing debate about the possibility and potency of forgiving.

This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. Shields's essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields's writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction. These essays read Shields's fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction.

This book addresses the narrative construction of Russian cultural memory in the work of Julian Barnes. It investigates how Barnes's texts tend to display a memory process as a transcultural mode of the creation of English and Russian national identities. Examining a need to revisit Russian canonical works, the detailed discursive analysis of the selected English texts exposes an intertextual remembering by duplication, thus contributing to the prevention of forgetting through the recuperation of still misrecollected cultural meanings. By creatively incorporating Russian intertextual elements into his work as a novelist, the author seems to insist on sweeping across and beyond national boundaries, revealing how frail the invention of tradition is when leading to the illusion of a solid collective memory and its political legitimation. The book considers not only a constructive dialogue between Barnes's fiction and Russian classical literature, but also this writer's interpretative, mostly imaginative, integration of Russian literature and culture into his work as a novelist. Exploring the double meaning of a literary metaphor as a mnemonic image of memory and a product of imagination, it offers a comprehensive analysis of Barnes's texts which play with intertextuality as an efficient tool of displacement of official memory, providing a deeper understanding of historical and cultural processes related to the constantly moving architecture of transcultural memory.

This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the profound ecological, ethical and political challenges of a multispecies world. The text explores written work such as Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, video media such as the film "Creature Comforts" and the video game Into the Dead, and photography. With chapters written by an international group of philosophers, literary and cultural studies scholars, historians and others, the volume brings together established experts and forward-thinking early career scholars to provide an interdisciplinary engagement with ways of thinking and writing the creaturely to establish a postanthropocentric sense of human-animal relationality.

Fictional depictions of intermarriage can illuminate perceptions of both 'ethnicity' and 'whiteness' at any given historical moment. Popular examples such as Lucy and Ricky in I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Joanna and John in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Toula and Ian in My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) helped raise questions about national identity: does 'American' mean 'white' or a blending of ethnicities? Building on previous studies by scholars of intermarriage and identity, this study is an ambitious endeavor to discern the ways in which literature and films from the 1960s through 2000s rework nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intermarriage tropes. Unlike earlier stories, these narratives position the white partner as the 'other' and serve as useful frameworks for assessing ethnic and American identity. Lauren S. Cardon sheds new light on ethno-racial solidarity and the assimilation of different ethnicities into American dominant culture.

1. This book is the first to frame Tolstoy's life and work through a queer, psychoanalytical and historico-political lens 2. It uniquely blends literary theory, queer/gender studies, sexology and ethics 3. Using illustrations throughout, this book also draws on the work of Freud, Cervantes, Rousseau and Kant.

The novel has proven to be the premier literary form in the exploration of social ideas and protest. This reference guide is unique in providing concise information on 200 landmark novels and their impacts on society throughout history and around the world. The social issues of geographically organized countries are first plotted on a timeline. Each country's novels are then presented chronologically through lucid essays relating the works to their historical contexts and tracing their impact since publication. With an extensive section covering the rich historical tradition of the novel in North America, illuminating essays show how works such as "The Grapes of Wrath," "Uncle ToM's Cabin," and "The Jungle" protested specific conditions and evoked tangible changes in American policies and laws.

This volume surveys works written in or translated into English from 30 different countries throughout the world, including Senegal's "So Long a Letter," Australia's "coonardo," and the Chinese novel "waves," which attacked Communism and its cultural revolution. Readers will discover fresh insights into familiar European works, such as the plight of poor middle-class women in "Jane Eyre," and the exposure of socialist threat to individualism in "Animal Farm" and "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Teachers using literature for interdisciplinary studies will find this guide helpful in identifying and researching essential works of world literature. Organization of information into four indexes, all keyed to entry numbers, facilitate easy access to specific titles, authors, geography, and issues. This guide can be used to research the development of both contemporary and historical social concerns in specific areas or to compare and contrast the treatment of issues such as feminism in the literature of different cultures. Further suggested readings are provided for each novel, along with a general appendix, Additional Protest Novels to Explore.

Author Biography:
Clara Calvo is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her publications include Power Relations and Fool-Master Discourse in Shakespeare, and she is a regular contributor to The Year's Work in English Studies.
Jean Jacques Weber is Professor of English at University Centre Luxembourg. His publications include Critical Analysis of Fiction, Twentieth-Century Fiction (co-edited, Routledge 1995) and The Stylistics Reader (co-edited for Routledge 1996).

"The Literature Workbook" is a practical introductory textbook for literary studies, which can be used either for independent study or as part of a class. Laying the foundation for the further study of literature, "The Literature Workbook" introduces the beginning student to the essential analytic and interpretative skills that are needed for literary appreciation and evaluation. It also equips the teacher with practical tools and materials for use in seminars or when assigning written assessments and projects. Arranged according to genre and chronology, the chapters acquaint the reader with a range of key figures in English literature and encourages the reader to think about them in their historical and cultural contexts. Adopting a user-friendly case-study approach each chapter contains exercises and activities, discussion hints, project work and suggestions for further reading. The workbook also includes a glossary and a subject and name index.

This book addresses the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches by combining both praxis and theory in a case study of a new international collaborative digital project, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). MAPP is an international collaborative digital project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, that uses digital tools to showcase archival traces of twentieth-century publishing. The twenty-first century has witnessed, and is living through, some of the most dynamic changes ever experienced in the publishing industry, arguably altering our very understanding of what it means to read a book. This book brings to both general readers and scholarly researchers a new way of accessing, and thereby assessing, the historical meanings of change within the twentieth-century publication industry by building a resource which organises, interacts with, and uses historical information about book culture to narrate the continuities and discontinuities in reading and publishing over the last century.

This volume offers detailed accounts of the cults of individual writers and a comparative perspective on the spread of centenary fever across Europe. It offers a fascinating insight into the interaction between literature and cultural memory, and the entanglement between local, national and European identities at the highpoint of nation-building.

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students - from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic. Addressing the impact on students' ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses: Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux. This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky is one of the most celebrated poets of our time, preoccupied with the the nature and destiny of poetry in our era. This volume analyzes Brodsky's career in terms of key elegies and investigates the critical role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics. In his elegies for poetic ancestors, family, friends, and the self, Brodsky demonstrates a concern for a paradox that is at the heart of modern elegiac poetry: attempting to find a basis for consolation in the face of death, but at length being compelled to discard traditional consolations, such as religion or art. The only source of relief is language itself, which Brodsky saw as both the origin and the final repository of values and truths.

"Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction "advances the idea that" "American, Southern, white, planter class authors have appropriated models and modes of masculinity from William Shakespeare. Keener traces the history of this appropriation and its attendant masculinities from authors as early as William Gilmore Simms, through Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, to William Faulkner. This project distinctively ignores artificial divisions of literary studies, circumventing place and time in search of meaning. The work's inter-textual and inter-cultural approach affords a unique perspective on how masculinity is defined, modified by cultural circumstances, and expressed in succeeding literature. This far-reaching book bridges Shakespearean, American Southern, cultural materialist, and gender studies; offering a critical reappraisal. ""

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in "autonomous" poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.