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.

This study examines James Herriot's five major books as carefully crafted volumes of autobiography based on the building block of the short story. In each of these works Herriot explores the fundamental choice of values underlying a happy and successful life. In his vision the bonds of affection and mutual dependence between all creatures, human and animal, form an enduring theme that lies at the heart of the choices he makes in his personal and professional life. This study will help the reader to understand the relationship between Herriot's stories and each book as a whole and to appreciate Herriot's work in the context of twentieth-century anxieties about identity and meaning.

Following a biographical chapter that describes the relationship between Herriot's life and literary work, Rossi discusses the genre of autobiography, the relationship between truth and fiction in modern autobiography, and Herriot's use of the genre. A separate chapter is then devoted to each of Herriot's works in turn: "All Creatures Great and Small," "All Things Bright and Beautiful," "All Things Wise and Wonderful," "The Lord God Made Them All," and DEGREES"Every Living Thing." The discussion of each work includes sections on plot development and narrative structure, character development, thematic issues, and alternative critical approaches that may be fruitfully applied to the book. Helpful appendices contain identifications of minor characters in the works. A complete bibliography of all of James Herriot's works, critical sources, and a listing of reviews of all of his works completes the volume. Because of the popularity of Herriot's work among adults and young adults this companion will be a key purchase for school and public libraries.

Using a cognitive approach to literature, Self-Consciousness in Modern British Fiction uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. This innovative study offers new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lessing to demonstrate the emergence of a self who feels split from the world. Readings of individual novels are informed by early twentieth century British psychology and philosophy, and by contemporary scholarship in embodied cognition and narrative identity. The models of self-consciousness rendered visible by this analysis improve our understanding of modernist technical experiment with stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse.

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.

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.

In recent years, much Spanish literary criticism has been characterized by debates about collective and historical memory, stemming from a national obsession with the past that has seen an explosion of novels and films about the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. This growth of so-called memory studies in literary scholarship has focused on the representation of memory and trauma in contemporary narratives dealing with the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship. In contrast, the novel of the postwar period has received relatively little critical attention of late, despite the fact that memory and trauma also feature, in different ways and to varying degrees, in many works written during the Franco years. The essays in this study argue that such novels merit a fresh critical approach, and that contemporary scholarship relating to the representation of memory and trauma in literature can enhance our understanding of the postwar Spanish novel. The volume opens with essays that engage with aspects of contemporary theoretical approaches to memory in order to reveal the ways in which these are pertinent to Spanish novels written in the first postwar decades, with studies on novels by Camilo Jose Cela, Carmen Laforet, Arturo Barea and Ana Maria Matute. Its second section focuses on the representation of trauma in specific postwar novels, drawing on elements from trauma studies scholarship to discuss neglected works by Mercedes Salisachs, Dolores Medio and Ignacio Aldecoa. The final essays continue the focus on the theme of trauma and revisit works by women writers, namely Carmen Laforet, Rosa Chacel, Ana Maria Matute and Maria Zambrano, that foreground the experiences of female protagonists who are seeking to deal with a traumatic past. The essays in this volume thus propose a new direction for the study of Spanish literature of 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, enhancing existing approaches to the postwar Spanish novel through an engagement with contemporary scholarship on memory and trauma in literature."

This collection of essay by leading scholars in the field reveals the major contribution of puritan women to the intellectual culture of the early modern period, showing that women's roles with puritan and broader communities encompassed translating and disseminating key texts and producing an impressive body of original writing.

What do fictional representations of older women add to our understanding of a group of individuals often marginalized in our youth-oriented society? Starting from an overview of 19th-century women's fiction, this book explores this and other questions through close readings of the work of major 20th-century women novelists, considered in relation to these non-fictional perceptions.

This is a concise, readable and comprehensive introduction to Bram Stoker's classic "Dracula" (1897) for undergraduates. "Dracula" (1897) is one of the most commonly studied gothic novels and has been hugely influential through adaptations in fiction, on stage and in cinema. Offering an authoritative, up-to-date guide for students, this book introduces its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text.It is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, setting "Dracula" in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception. It also includes an introduction to its substantial history as an adapted text on stage and screen focusing on the portrayal of the vampire from "Nosferatu" to "Interview with a Vampire". It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the "Sirens" episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the "pure music" of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monae. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term "posthuman blackness" to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory - an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality - in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved. Reading neo-slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.

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.

Although the exploration of space has long preoccupied authors and filmmakers, the development of an actual space program, discoveries about the true nature of space, and critical reconsiderations of America's frontier experiences have challenged and complicated conventional portrayals of humans in space. This volume reexamines the themes of space and the frontier in science fiction in light of recent scientific and literary developments. From this new perspective, we discern previously unnoticed commentaries from older authors, while newer writers either remain within a reassuring but obsolete tradition, venture into unexplored new realities, or abandon space to focus on other frontiers.

The intriguing contributions to this volume include a previously unpublished interview with Arthur C. Clarke, the world's greatest living author of science fiction; examinations of space opera by veteran author Jack Williamson and scholar David Pringle; surveys of space in science fiction film, and writer and producer Michael Cassutt's account of his efforts to launch a film based on a Clifford D. Simak novel; and speculations about future developments from noted writers Gregory Benford, Jack Dann, James Gunn, and Howard V. Hendrix.

Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices critically examines a longstanding colonial fascination with the black female body as an object of sexual desire, envy, and anxiety. Since the 2002 repatriation of the remains of Sara Baartman to post-apartheid South Africa, the interest in the figure of Black Venus has skyrocketed, making her a key symbol for the restoration of the racialized female body in feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial terms. Edited by Jorunn Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Zeljka Svrljuga, this volume considers Black Venus as a product of art established and potentially refigured through aesthetic practices, following her travels through different periods, geographies and art forms from Baudelaire to Kara Walker, and from the Caribbean to Scandinavia. Contributors: Kjersti Aarstein, Carmen Birkle, Jorunn Svensen Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, Ulla Angkjaer Jorgensen, Ljubica Matek, Margery Vibe Skagen, Camilla Erichsen Skalle, Zeljka Svrljuga.

Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art explores the genesis, development, and religious significance of a literary and iconographic motif, involving a gang of urchins, usually male, who mock or assault a holy or eccentric person, typically an adult. Originating in the biblical tale of Elisha's mockery ( Kings 2.23-24), this motif recurs in literature, hagiography, and art, from antiquity up to our own time, strikingly defying the conventional Judeo-Christian and Romantic image of the child as a symbol of innocence.

Exam Board: AQA, Edexcel, WJEC, Eduqas & CCEA Level: AS/A-level Subject: Modern Languages First Teaching: September 2017 First Exam: June 2018 Literature analysis made easy. Build your students' confidence in their language abilities and help them develop the skills needed to critique their chosen work: putting it into context, understanding the themes and narrative technique, as well as specialist terminology. Breaking down each scene, character and theme in Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), this accessible guide will enable your students to understand the historical and social context of the novel and give them the critical and language skills needed to write a successful essay. - Strengthen language skills with relevant grammar, vocab and writing exercises throughout - Aim for top marks by building a bank of textual examples and quotes to enhance exam response - Build confidence with knowledge-check questions at the end of every chapter - Revise effectively with pages of essential vocabulary and key mind maps throughout - Feel prepared for exams with advice on how to write an essay, plus sample essay questions, two levels of model answers and examiner commentary

Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images -- characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images. J. B. Bullen explores this fascinating link between the image and the idea in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, and demonstrates how Hardy approached his work from a particular "point of view" which not only determined the lighting, composition, and structure of his literary visual effects, but which also allowed him to express emotions and ideas in the direct, "vividly visible" fashion that is the hallmark of his greatest fiction.

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 is a study of novels by Chester Himes, Malcolm Braly, and others on the experience of doing time in American prisons. The authors are all convicts or ex-convicts who were not professional writers before their incarceration. In fact, Massey notes, the confinement seems to have motivated them to put their experiences into words. Most of the prisoners were incarcerated for armed robbery, one of the most common felonies in the United States. The relationship between that crime and the American Dream has social and political implications, but these writers are neither prisoners of conscience nor prisoners of war. How these writers describe the harsh prison environment reveals patterns and themes common to most prison novels. Although an atmosphere of violence abounds, a sense of camaraderie and an extended home feeling are equally strong characteristics of the prison novels. The writers make it clear that within prisons, inmates change, for better or worse, and sometimes this change results in positive growth.

Critical Essays on William Faulkner compiles scholarship by noted Faulkner studies scholar Robert W. Hamblin. Ranging from 1980 to 2020, the twenty-one essays present a variety of approaches to Faulkner's work. While acknowledging Faulkner as the quintessential southern writer-particularly in his treatment of race-the essays examine his work in relation to American and even international contexts. The volume includes discussions of Faulkner's techniques and the psychological underpinnings of both the origin and the form of his art; explores how his writing is a means of "saying 'no' to death"; examines the intertextual linkages of his fiction with that of other writers like Shakespeare, Twain, Steinbeck, Warren, and Salinger; treats Faulkner's use of myth and his fondness for the initiation motif; and argues that Faulkner's film work in Hollywood is much better and of far greater value than most scholars have acknowledged. Taken as a whole, Hamblin's essays suggest that Faulkner's overarching themes relate to time and consequent change. The history of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stretches from the arrival of the white settlers on the Mississippi frontier in the early 1800s to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. Caught in this world of continual change that produces a great degree of uncertainty and ambivalence, the Faulkner character (and reader) must weigh the traditions of the past with the demands of the present and the future. As Faulkner acknowledges, this process of discovery and growth is a difficult and sometimes painful one; yet, as Hamblin attests, to engage in that quest is to realize the very essence of what it means to be human.

Recent politically based works on the vampire novel have been orientated towards Irish or postcolonial contexts. In this work Matthew Gibson couches the work of Merimee, Polidori, Le Fanu, Stoker and Verne in the immediate and specific context in which their works were written - namely the right response to the Balkan, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian politics. While tracing the views and opinions of the writers themselves, he also analyzes their works to reveal that the vampire acts as an allegory of the Near East through which they suggest (rather than avow) frequently unorthodox views, which are a challenge to critics who profess the 'orientalism' argument popular today.

Walking Naboth's Vineyard brings together nine prominent scholars to present new and valuable perspectives on the work of Jonathan Swift. In recent years Swift has been increasingly reconsidered and recast as a distinctly Irish writer, and there is little doubt that his artistic career was shaped by Ireland's troubled political life. Literary critics and scholars, as well as scholars of Irish literature, will find this collection unique in that it explores Swift's life and writing in a distinctively Irish context and considers how Swift was influenced as a member of a population that was divided against itself, colonized by a neighboring kingdom, and politically and culturally marginalized. These essays demonstrate how, despite Swift's ambivalence about his Irish nationality, he found Ireland's worldly position a close parallel to his own complex position in the political and cultural worlds in which he lived.