This essential text for newcomers and experts alike combines a broad survey of African American women's writing with a vivid critique by Sandi Russell, inspired by her discovery of her own cultural inheritance.

This was the first book to focus on the full scope of African American women's writing and creativity. It has now been completely revised and is reissued with a new introduction. Filling as it does the growing demand for critical work on black women's writing, it is particularly suited to undergraduate courses in literature, women's studies and American studies.

A Jumble of Stories by Katie Gray is a compilation of eight individual short stories for a variety of audiences. The stories include: Case of Self Defence A warning to husbands who are not appreciative of their wives. Do you know what she gets up to during the day? Merry Little Christmas Even the most intelligent and apparently contented of of young ladies might discover there is more to life than they realise! All on a cold and frosty morning We all have a talent of which we might be unaware. One young lady unexpectedly realises hers. Christmas at Frederico's Something of a cautionary tale. Do as you would be Done By, or Be Done By as you Did! A Christmas Story Retirement does not have to be the end, there could be a whole new career just around the corner. Sally's Story If you think you can........... you might surprise yourself and attain much more than you might have hoped. Fairy Godmother She was just playing a part - or was she? What do you think I am Not someone with whom to be trifled - EVER!!

Novelist and critic Colm Toibin explores the relationships of writers with their families and their work in the brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original "New Ways to Kill Your Mother."
Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind.
Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, "New Ways to Kill Your Mother "is a fascinating look at writers' most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.

"The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a Modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!) and well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological and literary importance, containing the lion's share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc. Jackson Crawford's modern versions of these poems are authoritative and fluent and often very gripping. With their individual headnotes and complementary general introduction, they supply today's readers with most of what they need to know in order to understand and appreciate the beliefs, motivations, and values of the Vikings." -Dick Ringler, Professor Emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison

This book explores the inter-relationships between Agatha Christie and her works to seek the wholeness in the Christie experience. The authors perceive an integration in personal experience and moral and aesthetic values between the woman and her art.

Where are the dogs in southern African literature? The short answer is: everywhere, if you keep looking. Few texts centralise them, but they appear everywhere in the corners of people's lives: pets walking alongside, strays in the alleys, accompanying policemen, at the dog shows, outhunting, guarding gates. There are also the related canids- jackals, hyenas, wolves-making real and symbolic appearances. Dogs have always been with us, friends and foes in equal measure. This is the first collection of studies on dogs in southern African literatures. The essays range across many dogs' roles: as guides and guards, as victims and threats. They appear in thrillers and short stories. Their complex relations with colonialism and indigeneity are explored, in novels and poetry, in English as well as Shona and Afrikaans. Comparative perspectives are opened up in articles treating French and Russian parallels. This volume aims to start a serious conversation about, and acknowledgement of, the important place dogs have in our society.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle over Kafka's legacy: as a writer in German, should his papers come to rest with those of the other great German writers, in the country where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as Kafka was also a great Jewish writer, should they be considered part of the cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time he died in 1924? Alongside an acutely observed portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial also provides a gripping account of the recent series of Israeli court cases - cases that addressed dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the final fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It tells of a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed to Jews; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in the Israeli courts. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question not only whether Kafka's legacy belongs by right to the country of his language, that of his birth, or that of his cultural and religious affinities - but also whether any nation state can lay claim to writers who belong more naturally to the international republic of letters.

A Game of Four ....Ralph Connor arrives at work one morning to find his world turned upside down by a sinister, cloaked character known as the Watcher, who claims to have kidnapped his wife and seems to mysteriously know his every move and deepest, most innermost secrets..... .....Ralph unwittingly becomes the key player in a deadly battle of wits with a psychopathic rival, whose sole obsession is to destroy the very core of his world, by any means....

The History of Intimacy is the fourth collection by award-winning poet Gabeba Baderoon. These poems render various intimacies and private hurts with eloquence and tenderness: the lost innocence of a child, a loved one in an ambulance, young passion across a man-made divide, a mother visiting her son in jail, elegies to an admired musician, mentor and poet, and the reverberations of past injustices in District Six, the Cape Flats and Hangklip.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

Isandro has left his Spanish Andalucian village to search for his sister in Paris. There he meets members of the International Brigade and moves to Madrid to form a protest group against Franco's tyranny. The road ahead is long and hard and fraught with danger ... not least the rage that burns within him, ready to ignite in a political climate that demands a cool head...

Myth is oral, collective, sacred, and timeless. Fantasy is a modern literary mode and a popular entertainment. Yet the two have always been inextricably intertwined. Stories about Stories examines fantasy as an arena in which different ways of understanding myth compete and new relationships with myth are worked out. The book offers a comprehensive history of the modern fantastic as well as an argument about its nature and importance. Specific chapters cover the origins of fantasy in the Romantic search for localized myths, fantasy versions of the Modernist turn toward the primitive, the post-Tolkienian exploration of world mythologies, post-colonial reactions to the exploitation of indigenous sacred narratives by Western writers, fantasies based in Christian belief alongside fundamentalist attempts to stamp out the form, and the emergence of ever-more sophisticated structures such as metafiction through which to explore mythic constructions of reality.

A scholarly edition of a work by James Thomson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy is the first collection of essays in English focusing on how fantasy draws deeply on ancient Greek and Roman mythology, philosophy, literature, history, art, and cult practice. Presenting fifteen all-new essays intended for both scholars and other readers of fantasy, this volume explores many of the most significant examples of the modern genre-including the works of H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, and more-in relation to important ancient texts such as Aeschylus' Oresteia, Aristotle's Poetics, Virgil's Aeneid, and Apuleius' The Golden Ass. These varied studies raise fascinating questions about genre, literary and artistic histories, and the suspension of disbelief required not only of readers of fantasy but also of students of antiquity. Ranging from harpies to hobbits, from Cyclopes to Cthulhu, and all manner of monster and myth in-between, this comparative study of Classics and fantasy reveals deep similarities between ancient and modern ways of imagining the world. Although antiquity and the present day differ in many ways, at its base, ancient literature resonates deeply with modern fantasy's image of worlds in flux and bodies in motion.

A scholarly edition of poetical works by Charles Churchill. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.