One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County--based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi--he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including "A Rose For Emily" and "Barn Burning," and the longer stories "The Bear," "Spotted Horses," and "The Old Man" that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.

• The Unvanquished
• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
• Absalom, Absalom!
• Selected short stories

A socio-cultural analysis of the relationship between modernism and science fiction, from the 1870s to the 1970s, with examples drawn from literature and other media in Britain, Europe and the Americas. The book challenges how high and low culture has been mapped in the twentieth century.

This book examines three examples of late nineteenth-century Japanese adaptations of Western literature: a biography of Ulysses S. Grant recasting him as a Japanese warrior, a Victorian novel reset as oral performance, and an American melodrama redone as a serialized novel promoting the reform of Japanese theater. Miller argues that adaptation (hon’an ) was a valid form of contemporary Japanese translation that fostered creative appropriation across genres and among a diverse group of writers and artists.

Anne Tyler is one of America's most significant contemporary writers. This book is a solid introduction to her life and work. It includes the first biography of Tyler, along with a record of her writings and the response to her work. It incorporates source materials from the Anne Tyler Papers at Duke University and letters from Tyler to the author. The volume lists all of Tyler's novels, short stories, articles, and book reviews and provides an annotated bibliography of critical studies. The first half of the book is a biography of Tyler. The author describes her childhood in a North Carolina commune, her high school years in Raleigh, her college years at Duke, and her earliest writing efforts. The biography charts the development of her life and career through her marriage, motherhood, early novels and stories, her life in Baltimore and career as a book reviewer, her rise to fame, and the themes of her major works. The bibliography that follows lists her novels, short stories, nonfiction articles and essays, poetry, children's books, book reviews, and the manuscripts in her papers at Duke University, along with an annotated secondary bibliography.

This new volume in the "Author Chronology "series illuminates the writing of Edith Wharton by detailing her experiences and placing her in her social context. Edith Wharton was a prolific as well as a many-sided writer, who created not only novels, novellas, short stories, and poems, but also a notable series of travel writings, and did translations, pieces for the theatre, and essays on other writers and their works, as well as on the creation and criticism of fiction.This account of Wharton's personal and professional life provides an invaluable insight into an important American woman writer of the twentieth century.

John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy have brought together for the first time a book-length collection of critical and theoretical writings about Sterling A. Brown that recovers and reasserts his continuing importance for a contemporary audience. Exploring new directions in the study of Brown's life and work, After Winter is structured around the following three features: (1) new and previously published essays that sum up contemporary approaches to the multifaceted works that Brown created in a variety of genres; (2) interviews with Brown's acquaitances and contemporaries that articulate his unique aesthetic vision and communicate his importance as a scholar, creative writer, and teacher; and (3) a discography of source material that innovatively extends the study and teaching of Brown's acclaimed poetry, especially his Southern Road, focusing on recordings of folk materials relevant to the subject matter, style, and meaning of individual poems from his oeuvre.

J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism draws on postcolonial and gender studies as well as affect theory to interrogate cosmopolitan philosophies. Through analysis of J.M. Coetzee's later fiction, Katherine Hallemeier invites the re-imagining of cosmopolitanism, particularly as it is performed through the reading of literature. The book foregrounds a question as central both to Coetzee's later fiction and to contemporary cosmopolitan thought: is it possible to apprehend 'humankind' without eliding the distinctiveness of 'other lives'?

David Mikics has been hailed by Harold Bloom as one of our finest literary critics. In this fresh and revealing book, he examines Saul Bellow's work through the real-life relationships and friendships that Bellow transmuted into the genius of his art. The book is divided into eight chapters on some of the extraordinary people who mattered most to Bellow-family members like his irascible brother Morrie; friends like the novelists and critics Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom; and wives and lovers. Bellow's People is a perfect introduction to Bellow's life and work and an incisive study of the art of literature. As Mikics argues, "Bellow is our novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings. Only through personality, he tells us, can we know the world."

In a constantly changing world, individuals are forever growing to meet the challenges and developments that emerge around them. In contemporary society, technology is at the heart of change. Literature, too, reflects the evolution of culture and increasingly represents and considers technology. And as children become young adults, their reading helps shape their understanding of the world. This book examines representative works of science fiction, children's literature, and popular culture to show how these works reflect the process of growing up in a technological world. The volume looks at the simple picture books and comic books that appeal to small children; the formulaic adventures that fascinate older children; the films and television programs that are watched by children and young adolescents; the music videos and programming that appeal to young adults; and the popular novels that interest older readers. Included are discussions of Superman, the Hardy Boys, Star Trek, science fiction films, and music videos. The book points to similarities among popular culture, science fiction, and children's literature and demonstrates the relevance of these works to contemporary society.

Providing an access to the main facts of Edgar Allan Poe's life and career, this work should be of service to the student, scholar or general reader who wishes to check a point quickly without referring to the detailed narratives offered by the standard biographies. The chronology includes details of Poe's works, both of those published in his lifetime and those which appeared posthumously. There is a full index of persons, places and works referred to. In this work, the author offers a chronology of Poe which takes into account the latest research into his life and times, and provides an insight into the background, life and work of this literary figure.

As one of the most creative intellectuals of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis transcended all literary, philosophical, and religious boundaries. A world-renowned scholar of medieval literature at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, he wrote and lectured in such clear, direct language that ordinary people were able to fully comprehend the truths he extolled. The prolific author of many classic masterpieces - including "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe", soon to be released as a feature movie and one of several volumes in "The Chronicles of Narnia" - he also lived a life that was as compelling as his work. This book offers a clear view of the character of this extraordinarily gifted man. Lewis believed that his sharp mind and rich imagination were to be accompanied by a sense of responsibility to the wider world. Thus this volume demonstrates why, two generations after his death, Lewis continues to be numbered among our best-selling authors and most influential thinkers.

Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical and theoretical debates about the body, desire, gender, print and manuscript culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia, Wroth's Urania, Lyly's Euphues; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, Johnson, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about early modern sexualities, the gendering of labor, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.

Defining narrativity as the enabling force of narrative, this is the first full-length exploration of the concept in fiction in English. It develops the notion of a "logic of narrativity," and by this means tries to contribute a new critical strategy to the field of narrative theory. The book also takes issue with a number of critical approaches that have in recent years acquired near-orthodox status in the matter of textual interpretation. Most prominent among these approaches are deconstruction and a particular form of Marxist criticism. The author's own theoretical claims are substantiated by readings of major twentieth-century novels by Conrad, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Arthur Koestler, and the book concludes with an analysis of an earlier narrative, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, which illustrates the wider premises of the theory and its applications.

Pearl Buck made important contributions as a humanitarian and an advocate of racial equality and women's rights. She did much to change American attitudes toward persons with mental retardation and toward mixed-race children. She was a major force in shaping American views of Asia, particularly China, during the 1930s and 1940s. Until 1993, she was first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 13 essays in this book, the first such collection on Buck to be published in the United States, view her from historical, humanitarian, and literary perspectives.

Charles Bukowski was a product of the small press movement, an unparalleled phenomenon in the so-called little magazines that proliferated in the United States during the 60s. His long journey through the 'littles' and the small presses was finally rewarded after bitter battles in the back alleys of the American literary scene. This critical study offers a comprehensive picture of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career. Abel Debritto draws on archives, privately held, unpublished work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.

Working at the intersections of feminist literary criticism, new historicism, and narratology, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing, 1792-1897 revises current understandings of 19th Century representations of prostitution, female sexuality, and the "rights of women" debate. Eberle's project explores the connections and disjunctures between women writing during the Romantic period and those working throughout the Victorian era. Roxanne Eberle considers a wide range of authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Grand.

Oscar Wilde's wit is foundational to his works, from his plays and novels to his self-defense at his trials. This book is a comprehensive account of Oscar Wilde's wit that focuses on discovering reasons for his critical success and ongoing legacy.

In 16th and 17th century England conversation was an embodied act that held the capacity to negotiate, manipulate and transform social relationships. Early Modern Women in Conversation illuminates the extent to which gender shaped conversational interaction and demonstrates the significance of conversation as a rhetorical practice for women.

To better understand and contextualise the twilight of the Gothic genre during the 1920s and 1830s, "The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade" examines the disreputable aspects of the Gothic trade from its horrid bluebooks to the desperate hack writers who created the short tales of terror. From the Gothic publishers to the circulating libraries, this study explores the conflict between the canon and the twilight, and between the disreputable and the moral.

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), winner of the prestigious Cervantes prize, is one of the most important Latin American writers of the twentieth century. This commemorative collection consists of articles by nine scholars reflecting upon the postmodern nature of the Paraguayan author's literary production and his place in world literature. The volume includes articles on the author's screenplays, his masterpiece, the dictator novel "I The Supreme," his short stories, feminist approaches to Roa Bastos's novels, reflections on the writer's Guarani poetry, and a study of the complex, intertextual relationships between his novel "El fiscal" and his other texts.

This book fills a gap in both literary and feminist scholarship by offering the first major study of femme fatales in hardboiled crime fiction. Maysaa Jaber shows that the criminal literary figures in the genre open up powerful spaces for imagining female agency in direct opposition to the constraining forces of patriarchy and misogyny.

Mobility in the Victorian Novel explores mobility in Victorian novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. With focus on representations of bodies on the move, it reveals how journeys create the place of the nation within a changing global landscape.

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.

J.R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy, yet did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. These essays examine that paradox and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern. The approach helps to explain the popularity of his works, the way in which they continue to be brought into dialogue with twenty-first century issues, and their contested literary significance in the academy.