The American Revolution and the Civil War bracket roughly eight decades of formative change in a republic created in 1776 by a gesture that was both rhetorical and performative. The subsequent construction of U.S. national identity influenced virtually all art forms, especially prose fiction, until internal conflict disrupted the project of nation-building. This volume reassesses, in an authoritative way, the principal forms and features of the emerging American novel. It will include chapters on: the beginnings of the novel in the US; the novel and nation-building; the publishing industry; leading novelists of Antebellum America; eminent early American novels; cultural influences on the novel; and subgenres within the novel form during this period. This book is the first of the three proposed US volumes that will make up Oxford's ambitious new eleven-volume literary resource, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHONE), a venture being commissioned and administered on both sides of the Atlantic

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!

Russian literature for children and young people has a history that goes back over 400 years, starting in the late sixteenth century with the earliest alphabet primers and passing through many different phases over the centuries that followed. It has its own success stories and tragedies, talented writers and mediocrities, bestsellers and long-forgotten prize winners. After their seizure of power in 1917, the Bolsheviks set about creating a new culture for a new man and a starting point was children's literature. 70 years of Soviet control and censorship were succeeded in the 1990s by a re-birth of Russian children's literature. This book charts the whole of this story, setting Russian authors and their books in the context of translated literature, critical debates and official cultural policy.

Why have scholars located the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England? What historical forces and stylistic developments helped to turn a disreputable type of writing into an eminent literary form?
This Reader's Guide explores the key critical debates and theories about the rising novel, from eighteenth-century assessments through to present day concerns. Nicholas Seager:

surveys major criticism on authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen
covers a range of critical approaches and topics including feminism, historicism, postcolonialism and print culture
demonstrates how critical work is interrelated, allowing readers to discern trends in the critical conversation.
Approachable and stimulating, this is an invaluable introduction for anyone studying the origins of the novel and the surrounding body of scholarship.

Victorian writer Frances Trollope has largely been relegated to a mere footnote in literary history as simply the mother of Anthony. Equally unfortunate is that, aside from her nonfiction work "Domestic Manners of the Americans," her 34 novels have been out of print since the nineteenth century. She was, nonetheless, the most provocative female writer of the early Victorian period who used the novel to impel social change. She has been credited for writing the first anti-slavery novel that predates "Uncle ToM's Cabin," along with a number of works that incited reform legislation regarding bastardy clauses, poor laws, and labor conditions.

Expert contributors examine her life and writings, her social activism, and the impact of her works. The book includes discussions of her influence on Anthony Trollope, the rivalry between Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens, her belief in the power of female friendship, her ambivalence toward the ability of women to effect social change, her thoughts on Evangelicalism, her views on women and aging, and her innovative contribution to early crime fiction. Contributors argue for the value of reprinting her novels and travel books and point to her enduring literary legacy.

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This edition presents Jonathan Swift's most important Irish writings in both prose and verse, together with an introduction, head notes and annotations that shed new light on the full context and significance of each piece. Familiar works such as "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Tale of a Tub" acquire new and deeper meanings when considered within the Irish frameworks presented in the edition. Differing in noteworthy ways from the more traditional, canonical, Anglocentric picture conveyed by other published volumes, the Swift that emerges from these pages is a brilliant polemicist, popular satirist, political agitator, playful versifier, tormented Jeremiah, and Irish patriot.

The figure of the detective has long excited the imagination of the wider public, and the English police detective has been a special focus of attention in both print and visual media. Yet, while much has been written in the last three decades about the history of uniformed policemen in England, no similar work has focused on police detectives. The Ascent of the Detective redresses this by exploring the diverse and often arcane world of English police detectives during the formative period of their profession, from 1842 until the First World War, with special emphasis on the famed detective branch established at Scotland Yard.
The book starts by illuminating the detectives' socioeconomic background, how and why they became detectives, their working conditions, the differences between them and uniformed policemen, and their relations with the wider community. It then goes on to trace the factors that shaped their changing public image, from the embodiment of 'un-English' values to plebeian knights in armour, investigating the complex and symbiotic exchange between detectives and journalists, and analysing their image as it unfolded in the press, in literature, and in their own memoirs.

This new volume in the "Literary Lives" series focuses on the career of the popular Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), and provides a new account of his professional life in the literary world of nineteenth-century Britain. It draws on recently available business and personal correspondence to establish a fresh portrait of one of Victorian Britain's busiest authors, taking in Collins's notoriously complicated private life and his friendship with Charles Dickens, as well his work as journalist, reviewer and playwright. New insights are given into the international dimensions of Collins's career. There is discussion of Collins's best-known novels, including "The Woman in White," "The Moonstone" and "Armadale," but attention is also given to lesser-known works and to Collins's plays, which have long been neglected. The volume will appeal to all students of Wilkie Collins and also to those interested in the literary world of Victorian Britain and the social and business networks which lay at its heart.

The extraordinary flowering of Southern literary talent in the early twentieth century, the Southern Literary Renascence, has continued virtually unabated, showing increasing vitality in recent decades. These newer fiction writers, poets, dramatists, and journalists reflect in their work the changing social conditions of the South while also presenting traditional Southern values and qualities. Their astonishing output constitutes a phenomenon worthy of being called a Second Southern Literary Renascence. Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, editors of the acclaimed Fifty Southern Writers before 1900 and Fifty Southern Writers after 1900, found that they could only begin to suggest the continuing abundance and significance of Southern writing in the latter volume. Retaining the same format, they have developed two new volumes for the contemporary period. The first, focusing on fiction, comprises forty-nine talented novelists, including such popular figures as Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, T. R. Pearson, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. The companion volume, (Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook forthcoming from Greenwood Press) will cover primarily poets, playwrights, and essayists as well as fiction writers who have made major contributions to these other genres. The essays, written by scholars and critics, present in each case a biographical sketch, an analysis of the writer's style and major themes, an assessment of reviews and scholarship, a chronological list of works, and a bibliography of selected criticism. Considered individually and comparatively and with attention to the editors' introductory essay, these bio-bibliographical studiesclearly demonstrate the state and strength of Southern letters.

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.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

Prosecuted for obscenity in her novel Monsieur Venus, Marguerite Eymery (pen name Rachilde), an apparently genteel young woman from a provincial bourgeois family, burst onto the French literary scene in 1884 amid scandal. This story of a sadistic transvestite and her pretty male lover was the first in a long series of novels, plays and stories dealing often in the most macabre and sensationalistic terms with sadism, gender inversion, and sexual desire.
At the heart of the French literary world, Rachilde's life and writing defied patriarchal rules, particularly in relation to female sexuality, but she consistently and vehemently rejected feminism. Her extraordinary life and work, including a vast output as a literary reviewer, offer a prism through which to view the vibrant social and cultural history of France from the belle epoque to the Second World War. This book is the first serious critical study of Rachilde's work. Exploring the interwoven themes of French naturalism, modernism, decadence and feminism, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in French culture, literature and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the 1980s and 1990s French fiction has rediscovered its mission to entertain and tell stories, as well as to negotiate a path through traumatic experiences such as the legacy of France's colonial and wartime past, the Holocaust, the spectre of Aids, the labyrinths of desire and personal identity. Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize examine some of the most popular and some of the most challenging of texts which emerged during François Mitterrand's presidency of France (1981-1995) and relate them to the dominant literary and cultural trends of the period.

This groundbreaking collection of essays represents Herman Melville as an artist for whom questions of sensation, pleasure, and form cannot be separated from philosophical and political concerns. Contributors offer original and provocative readings that span Melville's career and engage the resurgence of interest among literary scholars in aesthetics. The first of its kind, this collection returns us to the particularities of Melville's extraordinarily varied works and transforms the subject of aesthetics into an invigorating and unpredictable source of interpretive energy.

A full account of Lawrence, ranging from his talent as a young writer to the continuing genius of his later work, and concentrating on his exceptionally acute powers of observation, both human and natural.

This title explores the surprisingly important part that children play in the novels of Jane Austen and the contribution they make to understanding her adult characters. Jane Austen is not usually associated with children - especially since she had none of her own. But there are in fact more children in her novels than one might at first think. She herself was from a sizeable family, with numerous nephews and nieces. She was, by all accounts, good with children and popular with them. It was therefore natural for her to include them in her novels, even if sometimes offstage. This book, by one of the world's leading authorities on Austen, looks at both the real and the literary children in her life - children seen and unseen (and dead); children as models of behaviour, good and bad; as objects of affection, amusement, usefulness, pity, regret, jealousy, resentment; children in the way; children as excuses; and, children as heirs. In the process, it casts fascinating light on a hitherto largely ignored aspect of her work and the age in which she lived.

The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

For too long Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was dismissed as a timid New England local colorist, known principally for her novels and short stories based in her native state of Maine. But in addition to her fiction, she also wrote poetry, plays, and essays. She enjoyed an extensive acquaintance with most of the established writers of her time and was on friendly terms with many lesser-known women of her era. With the publication of a selection of her letters in 1956, scholarly books and articles soon followed. And with the advent of the women's movement came a renewal of interest in Jewett's life and writings. She is now recognized as a uniquely sharp, compassionate observer of women and their lives in 19th-century New England.

Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for Jewett's writings, characters, family members, friends, acquaintances, and professional associates and admirers. Entries on the most important works and persons include brief bibliographies. The volume begins with a concise introductory essay, and a chronology highlights the chief events in Jewett's life and career. The book closes with a general bibliography of works about Jewett. Given Jewett's complex characterizations and her subtle crafting of plots and settings, this book will be a valuable guide both for those approaching Jewett's works for the first time and for more advanced readers.

This book is a concise and engaging analysis of contemporary literature viewed through the critical lens of cosmopolitan theory. It covers a wide spectrum of issues including globalization, cosmopolitanism, nationhood, identity, philosophical nomadism, posthumanism, climate change, devolution and love.

Offering a revolutionary way of reading 19th-century slave narratives, Fishburn seeks to recover the philosophical foundations of African American literature. Underlying slave narrative is an expression of the problem of physical embodiment; that is, the dualistic thinking of the mind-body division. Fishburn's work uncovers the tension between needing to acknowledge the fact of human embodiment and wishing to overcome its consequences in a racist society. One of the strongest points made by this pioneering work is the controversial claim that these slave narratives offer one of the most telling, if largely overlooked, pre-Heideggerian critiques of liberal humanism ever attempted in the West.

Gathering some of the most important Wright scholarship in the world, along with perspectives from emerging Wright critics, "Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century," ""explores new themes and theoretical orientations. Essays center on modernism, racism and spatial dimensions, the transnational and political Wright, Wright and class, Wright and the American 1950s and 1960s, and some of the first analyses of Wright's recently published "A Father""'""s Law" (2008). This dynamic collection combines literary and cultural theory with methods of archival research to provide an expanded vision of Wright's impact on thinking in the twenty-first century.