President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.

While much of the critical discussion about the emerging genre of 9/11 fiction has centred on the trauma of 9/11 and on novels by EuroAmerican writers, this book draws attention to the diversity of what might be meant by "post" -9/11 by exploring the themes of uncanny terror through a close reading of four "post" -9/11 South Asian diasporic fictions.

The literary virgin is eighteenth-century England's most enduring and unlikely celebrity. Despite her ignominious association with Catholicism and her incorrigibility with respect to the methods of the new science, the virgin emerges, by the middle of the eighteenth century, as the triumphant heroine of sentimental fiction as well as a muse for both satire and pornography. This book explores how and why the virgin turns out to be such a highly contested character at the center of many enlightenment debates. By focusing on the figure and fate of the virgin, the book offers new arguments about the relationship of novelist epistemologies to other modes of knowing, about the significance of virginity to patriarchy, and about the feminization of the novel.

While scholars have begun to study popular women's novels of the 19th century, there has been relatively little attention paid to popular women's fiction of the early 20th century. This is the first study to focus on popular fiction written by, for, and about women in the period between the two world wars. The author examines such well-known best sellers as Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" and Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth," as well as dozens of other popular novels that have been all but forgotten today, and seeks to uncover the values and attitudes widely held by middle-class women of the era by examining the basic beliefs affirmed in the books they read.

Examining innovations in audience behaviour, musical ensembles and mass-music movements, this book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works of the day, Weliver draws upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by professional musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive. This interdisciplinary undertaking will interest those working in the fields of English literature, musicology, social history and cultural studies.

Clareson reveals the interplay between literary expressionism and intellectual history and shows how science fiction was a popular response to world events during the period 1870-1930. He emphasizes that at least before World War II, the predominant tone of American science fiction was optimistic and that one way or another--through advanced technology or a return to primitiveness--the writers were going to produce Some Kind of Paradise.

This book reveals a "female sexual economy" in the marketplace of contemporary short fiction which locates a struggle for sexual power between mothers and daughters within a larger struggle to pursue that to pursue that object of the American dream: "whiteness."

The novels of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are increasingly regarded as representing a new trend, an 'aesthetic sea change' in contemporary American literature. 'Post-postmodernism' and 'New Sincerity' are just two of the labels that have been attached to this trend. But what do these labels mean? What characterizes and connects these novels? Den Dulk shows that the connection between these works lies in their shared philosophical dimension. On the one hand, they portray excessive self-reflection and endless irony as the two main problems of contemporary Western life. On the other hand, the novels embody an attempt to overcome these problems: sincerity, reality-commitment and community are portrayed as the virtues needed to achieve a meaningful life. This shared philosophical dimension is analyzed by viewing the novels in light of the existentialist philosophies of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Camus.

This account of Orwell's life is chiefly concerned with what influenced Orwell, his relations with publishers and editors, and the analysis of certain key experiences. These include the deposition that during the Spanish Civil War he was guilty of espionage and high treason; his work at the BBC; his interest in pamphlet literature; and his time as a war correspondent. The work offers an assessment of his earnings from 1922 to 1945, and a look at his attitudes of class, women and religious belief. Special attention is paid to his essays.

After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.

Imagine reading a classic novel like James Joyce's "Ulysses" as though for the first time. Such an exercise, especially when informed by contemporary narrative theory, makes possible a different reading experience of the work, one with a renewed focus on plot and a surprising amount of suspense. Veteran Joyce scholar Margot Norris offers an innovative study of the processes of reading "Ulysses" as narrative and focuses on the unexplored implications, subplots, subtexts, hidden narratives, and narratology in one of the twentieth century's most influential novels. It is a striking and essential contribution to literary criticism that will change the readings and understandings of Joyce's most important work.

Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yade Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Gunter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Muller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality; yet any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Drawing on feminist and new historicist methodologies, Catherine Waters argues that Dickens' novels record a shift in notions of the family away from stress on the importance of lineage and blood toward a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

Jane Austen and the State of the Nation explores Jane Austen's references to politics and to political economics and concludes that Austen was a liberal Tory who remained consistent in her political agenda throughout her career as a novelist. Read with this historical background, Austen's books emerge as state-of-the-nation or political novels.

Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as "The Comforters" (1957), DEGREESThe Public Image" (1968), "The Driver's Seat" (1970), "Reality and Dreams" (1996), and "Aiding and Abetting" (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction.

The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.

This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction. Studying this debate reveals a set of local literary histories, based on both canonical and non-canonical texts, that complicate received notions of the didactic Middle Ages, the sophisticated Renaissance, and the fallow fifteenth century in between.

An unusual grouping of mainly British writers, this insightful study includes some, like Henry James, who are indisputably leaders of the canon regardless of genre, and others, like Algernon Blackwood, who wrote almost exclusively in the supernatural; all, however, were clearly masters of this genre. The author, Edward Wagenknecht, writes from a long lifetime of scholarly study and publishing, thoroughly internalized familiarity with all of the exemplary works chosen for examination, and personal friendship fostered by extensive epistolary intercourse with two of the subjects, Walter de la Mare and Marjorie Bowen. The seven chapters on the individual writers each examine plot, character, mood, and setting in a traditional sense, sparked by personal observations and unique comparisons. Each study is preceded by a biographical sketch and documented by comprehensive bibliography and notes. In the case of the less studied writers, like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, these chapters may be the fullest accounts ever published. For all, Wagenknecht combines a fan's appreciation with a scholar's insights to produce an important and enjoyable book.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpiecesGCo The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied herGCoranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environmentGCobut also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility.

This volume examines a wide variety of the ways in which the fantastic has impacted upon contemporary women's fiction. Some of the issues addressed include: the importance of the cyborg and the spectre to critical and fictional discourses of gender; the interface between the grotesque and contemporary readings of feminist utopianism; and the growing similarity between late 20th century gothicism and the magical real. The study is based upon the work of 15 writers and includes novels by Allende, Atwood, Carter, Head, Morrison, Weldon, Winterson and Wittig.

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte's literary representations of illness and disease reflect the major role illness played in the lives of the Victorians and its frequent reoccurrence within the Brontes' personal lives. An in-depth analysis of the history of nineteenth-century medicine provides the necessary cultural context to understand these representations, giving modern readers a sense of how health, illness, and the body were understood in Victorian England. Together, medical anthropology and the history of medicine offer a useful lens with which to understand Victorian texts. Reading the Bronte Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Bronte novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

Fiction can be a powerful force to educate students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. This anthology includes articles from a number of individuals from a range of different disciplines and perspectives. All of the contributors to Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature are committed to treating literary texts with integrity and believe that business should have a larger claim upon people's literary consciousness. In addition, they all value the important role of literature in dealing with the complexities of a capitalist culture. This collection of essays provides a means to appreciate the richness and variety of fictional portrayals of businesses and businesspersons. The works selected for examination reflect the variety of philosophical, political, economic, cultural, social, and ethical perspectives that have been found over time in American society. The novels and plays analyzed include high literature, mid-range literature, popular literature, ancient epics, grand narratives, hero tales, masterpieces, ideological texts, science fiction, and more. There are a great many works of literature waiting to be read and studied by business and economically-minded individuals from many different viewpoints and fields of study. This volume provides a space to explore a wide range of fictional works and opinions about them.