Jews and Jewishness loom large in the contemporary South Asian cultural imaginary, both on the subcontinent, and in the diaspora. Along with less canonical authors, Writing Indians and Jews examines many of South Asia's most celebrated and best known contemporary writers working in English - Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh - who have placed Jewish characters and themes at the center of recent works. Anna Guttman argues that the work of Indian Jewish writers complicates the fields of postcolonial studies and her investigations make an important contribution to the study of contemporary South Asian and diasporic literature, and understandings of anti-Semitism, religious fundamentalism, and globalization.

The financial crisis of 2008 quickly gave rise to a growing body of fiction: "crunch lit". Populated by a host of unsympathetic characters and centred around banking institutions, these 'recession writings' take the financial crisis as their central narrative concern to produce a new wave of literary and popular writings that satirise the origins and effects of modern life, consumer culture and the credit boom. Examining a range of texts from such writers as John Lanchester, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Sebastian Faulks and Bret Easton Ellis, this book offers the first wide-ranging guide to this new genre. Exploring the key themes of the genre and its antecedents in fictional representations of finance by the likes of Dickens, Conrad, Zola and Trollope, Crunch Lit also includes a timeline of key historical events, guides to further and online resources and biographies of key authors. Supported by online resources, the book is an essential read for students of 21st century literature and culture.

The strategies that people use to come to terms with death mirror cultural beliefs about such crucial concerns as life's purpose, the idea of happiness, and the nature of ethical relationships. This book considers Nathaniel Hawthorne's representations of strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations--emphasizing their effects on the relationship between men and women. Drawing upon a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, feminist theory, and formal analysis, Weldon's thought-provoking study offers fresh insights into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.

Many children learn from a very young age about the importance of always telling the truth. They also learn that telling lies is necessary if they are to survive in a world that paradoxically values the truth but practises deception. Secrets, Lies and Children's Fiction demonstrates how this paradox is played out in texts for children and young adults, how secrets and lies may be a necessary means for survival and adaptation, and how mendacity may have its virtues. Kerry Mallan examines a wide selection of international texts, spanning several decades, including picture books, novels, and films. By drawing on diverse fields of scholarship, Mallan makes important connections between children's literature, philosophical and moral complexities, and cultural and social tensions. Secrets, Lies and Children's Fiction provokes thinking about what passes as 'the truth', the consequences of truth telling and lying, and the sacrificial arbitrariness of scapegoating.

Matz examines the writing of such modernists as James, Conrad and Woolf, who used the word "impression" to describe what they wanted their fiction to present. Matz argues that these writers did not favor immediate subjective sense, but rather a mode that would mediate perceptual distinctions. Just as impressions fall somewhere between thought and sense, impressionist fiction occupies the middle ground between opposite ways of engaging with the world. This study addresses the problems of perception and representation that occupied writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In one volume for the first time, this revised and updated examination of how J.R.R.Tolkien came to write his original masterpiece 'The Hobbit' includes his complete unpublished draft version of the story, together with notes and illustrations by Tolkien himself. For the first time in one volume, The History of the Hobbit presents the complete unpublished text of the original manuscript of J.R.R.Tolkien's The Hobbit, accompanied by John Rateliff's lively and informative account of how the book came to be written and published. As well as recording the numerous changes made to the story both before and after publication, it examines - chapter-by-chapter - why those changes were made and how they reflect Tolkien's ever-growing concept of Middle-earth. The Hobbit was first published on 21 September 1937. Like its successor, The Lord of the Rings, it is a story that "grew in the telling", and many characters and story threads in the published text are completely different from what Tolkien first wrote to read aloud to his young sons as part of their "fireside reads". As well as reproducing the original version of one of literature's most famous stories, both on its own merits and as the foundation for The Lord of the Rings, this new book includes many little-known illustrations and previously unpublished maps for The Hobbit by Tolkien himself. Also featured are extensive annotations and commentaries on the date of composition, how Tolkien's professional and early mythological writings influenced the story, the imaginary geography he created, and how Tolkien came to revise the book years after publication to accommodate events in The Lord of the Rings. Like Christopher Tolkien's The History of The Lord of the Rings before it, this is a thoughtful yet exhaustive examination of one of the most treasured stories in English literature. Long overdue for a classic book now celebrating 75 years in print, this companion edition offers fascinating new insights for those who have grown up with this enchanting tale, and will delight those who are about to enter Bilbo's round door for the first time.

From Romeo and Juliet to Rebecca, entries treat scores of the most memorable novels and plays, providing information on authors, works, characters, and themes. Coverage is fair and square: men and women get equal time; elite and popular fiction are treated with respect; and minority voices are clearly heard. Classic Love and Romance Literature includes more than 340 A-Z entries that are are thoroughly illustrated, cross-referenced, and indexed. This work accomplishes what the best reference books always do: it sends you back to the originals. Over 340 A-Z entries are thoroughly illustrated, cross-referenced, and indexed

Since its publication in 1982, "The Color Purple" has polarized critics and generated controversy while delighting many readers around the world. Rachel Lister offers a clear, stimulating and wide-ranging exploration of the critical history of Alice Walker's best-selling novel, from contemporary reviews through to twenty-first-century readings.
This Reader's Guide:
- opens with an overview of Walker's work
- provides a detailed consideration of the conception and reception of "The Color Purple
"- examines coverage of key critical issues and debates such as Walker's use of generic conventions, linguistic and narrative strategies, race, class, gender and sexual politics
- covers the reception and cultural impact of cinematic and musical adaptations, including Steven Spielberg's 1985 film and the recent Broadway production.
Lively and insightful, this is an indispensable volume for anyone studying, or simply interested in, Alice Walker and her most famous work.

Why is detective fiction so popular? What connects such diverse characters as the 'armchair sleuth', the 'hardboiled dick', and the police detective? Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction uncovers the significance of often-neglected dime novels in revealing early examples of the subgenres of detective fiction - drawing-room mysteries, hardboiled 'tough guy' fiction, police procedurals, and postmodern detective fiction - in the genre's first mass instantiation in the dime novels (1860-1915). A study of over 100 dime novel endings shows the prevalence of subversive representations of gender, race and class, while new readings of iconic detectives like Nick Carter and Allan Pinkerton reveal the enormous influence of these figures on future developments in the detective genre. The book argues that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses - theorized as contamination and containment - explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner, whose detective writings are clearly informed by dime novels.

Katherine Mansfield had a career-long engagement with the literary marketplace from the age of eighteen. This book examines how she developed as a writer within a range of book and periodical publishing contexts, reconsidering her writing's enactment of a commercially viable modern aesthetic in her experimentation with the short story form.

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.

This study of the long and varied afterlife of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, primarily in the overlapping arenas of children's and popular culture, offers new insights into not only the continued popularity and relevance of Crusoe's story, but into how modern conceptions of childhood have been shaped by nostalgia and by ideas of 'the popular.' Because it enjoyed such tremendous success as a pedagogical work for children and as a source for children's and popular entertainments, Robinson Crusoe provides a unique case study in the development of our ideas of childhood and the points of intersection between children's and popular cultures. Drawing on a wide range of adaptations and remediations, including children's abridgements, print 'robinsonades, ' chapbooks, popular songs, pantomimes, toys, games, and various consumer items, this book offers a fresh consideration of the place Crusoe has occupied in our culture for almost three centuries.

A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining Jonathan Swift's reception and influence in Europe Jonathan Swift has had a profound impact on almost all the national literatures of continental Europe. The celebrated author of acknowledged masterpieces like A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), the Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, was courted by innumerable translators, adaptors, and retellers, admired and challenged by shoals of critics, and creatively imitated by both novelists and playwrights, not only in central Europe (Germany and Switzerland) but also in its northern (Denmark and Sweden) and southern (Italy, Spain, and Portugal) outposts, as well as its eastern (Poland and Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and western parts - from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the present day.

H. G. Wells was one of the most influential authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best remembered today as the author of classic works of science fiction, such as The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon. He was also the author of The Outline of World History, an ambitious chronicle of the world from antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century. Through essays and reviews, this volume traces the critical reception of his works. An introductory essay overviews Wells's literary career and provides a context for understanding his works. Each of the sections that follow treats one of his major works, according to the publication date of his story. Within each section are reviews, essays, or excerpts that exemplify the critical response to that particular work from the time of its appearance to the present day. A bibliography at the end of the volume lists the most important modern critical studies of Wells and indicates the tremendous contemporary interest in Wells as an author.

This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in the fiction of contemporary women writers. Sarah Sceats' lively analysis demonstrates that food and its consumption are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control. Focusing on the work of Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis, she makes powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behavior, and engages with issues as diverse as cannibalism and eating disorders.

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.

Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, A Pure Woman, infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic. It tells of Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor and dissipated villager, who learns that she may be descended from the ancient family of d'Urbeville. In her search for respectability her fortunes fluctuate wildly, and the story assumes the proportions of a Greek tragedy. It explores Tess's relationships with two very different men, her struggle against the social mores of the rural Victorian world which she inhabits and the hypocrisy of the age. In addressing the double standards of the time, Hardy's masterly evocation of a world which we have lost, provides one of the most compelling stories in the canon of English literature, whose appeal today defies the judgement of Hardy's contemporary critics.

This study of Dickens in relation to his period shows how deeply he reflected its vibrant novelty, and how his works transform the social and cultural stimuli of the time - technological enterprise, urbanization, class mobility, the sense of profound difference from the preceding age - into a new and flexible fictional form.

"Rereading B.S. Johnson" offers a thorough introduction to the innovative work of the controversial British writer acclaimed in the 1960s and early 1970s. Growing academic interest and the republication of his major works have been reinforced by Jonathan Coe's award-winning biography "Like A Fiery Elephant" (2004). With a preface by Coe, this collection, co-edited by two leading Johnson scholars, offers an annotated bibliography, a chronology and original readings of the author and his work in fourteen new essays.

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the leading figures in the development of the modernist short story and her writings were a profound influence on writers such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Presenting for the first time draft manuscripts of some of her most important stories, this book gives scholars and students alike vivid new insight into Mansfield’s creative process. With manuscripts for each text presented in facsimile and transcript, detailed notes throughout compare early drafts with later revisions and the final published work. In the final section of the book leading scholars offer vivid new critical readings exploring the manuscript history of these stories. A detailed descriptive listing of the major Mansfield archives is also included to help researchers explore the work further. The stories included are: ‘Je ne parle pas francais’; ‘Sun and Moon’; ‘Revelations’; ‘The Stranger’; ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’; ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’; ‘Marriage à la Mode’; ‘The Voyage’; ‘Six Years After’; ‘The Fly’.

This book discusses selected works by six contemporary Indian novelists writing in English - Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Arundhati Roy, Ruchir Joshi and Rupa Bajwa - all of whom have made the Indian nation a central theme in their fiction. All these writers respond, in varying ways, to the idea of India as united in diversity, a construct most readily associated with the nationalist vision of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister. In considering India's past and looking towards the future, they struggle with and attempt to extend the available language of cultural diversity.

"Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction" explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which southern novelists repeatedly imagined their white characters as fundamentally black in some sense. Beginning with William Faulkner, Duvall traces a form of figurative and rhetorical masking in twentieth-century southern fiction that derives from whiteface minstrelsy. In the fiction of such subsequent writers as Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Dorothy Allison, and Ishmael Reed, the reader sees characters who present a white face to the world, even as they unconsciously perform cultural blackness. These queer performances of race repeatedly reveal that being merely Caucasian is insufficient to claim Southern Whiteness.

Although the dramatic dimension to Joseph Conrad's fiction is frequently acknowledged, his own experiments in drama have traditionally been marginalized. However, in all of Conrad's plays we see a distinct effort to investigate seriously the dramatic form and some of his plays are startlingly ahead of their time. Furthermore, all of the plays are adaptations and comprise One Day More , based on Tomorrow , Laughing Anne , based on Because of the Dollars, Victory: A Drama and The Secret Agent . The creation of these reveals much about the history, theory and practice of this fascinating cultural process.