Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, the first great English dictionary and one of the most famous books in the English language, appeared in April 1755. To commemorate the 250th anniversary, this volume brings together fourteen original essays by international scholars representing several disciplines: literature, lexicology, linguistics, textual criticism and bibliography. The essays explore familiar and unfamiliar aspects of Johnson's masterpiece, ranging from the history of patronage to the book's typographical design, from the political background to the treatment of compound words. Challenging the myths surrounding the book and offering the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of the Dictionary ever attempted, these essays present the latest scholarship on the Dictionary and open up new perspectives and directions for future research.

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.

Take Five brings together all of Kenneth McClane's poetry published since 1971, and reissues, for the first time, the privately-printed Running Before the Wind, his first collection of verse. Considered by many to be the finest Afro-American poet of his generation, McClane's works have been published in many of the nation's leading magazines. In his introduction to this volume, McClane candidly reveals some of his thoughts on what it means to be a poet, and what he feels about his own work in particular.

A collection of essays on the 1960s experimental writer B.S. Johnson, this book draws together new research on all aspects of his work, and, in tracing his connections to a wider circle of continental, British and American avant-garde writers, offers exciting new approaches to reading 1960s experimental fiction.

The short story is moving from relative neglect to a central position in the curriculum; as a teaching tool, it offers students a route into many complex areas, including critical theory, gender studies, postcolonialism and genre. This book offers a practical guide to the short story in the classroom, covering all these fields and more.

It is often thought that Jonathan Swift was vehemently opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, bringing new perspectives to his most famous works, and making a case for the intellectual importance of some of his more neglected poems and prose satires. Lynall's study traces the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considers what they can reveal about the growth of Swift's imagination. Taking us to a universe made from clothes, to a place where flowers can talk and men are only trees turned upside down, to an island that hovers high in the clouds, and to a library where a spider predicts how the world will end, the book shows how satire can be an active and unique participant in cultural debates about the methods and purposes of scientific enquiry.

This exploration of author Laurell K. Hamilton's work examines the many novels of her series and shows how her writing has been a major influence on contemporary visions of the vampire-an ideal reference text for book club leaders. Long before Twilight achieved epic levels of popularity, Laurell K. Hamilton was reshaping the image of the vampire with her own take on the vampire mythos in her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter fantasy novel series. While Hamilton's work draws on traditional vampire and fairy lore, her interpretation of these subjects brought new dimensions to the genres, influencing the direction of urban fantasy over the past two decades. Reading Laurell K. Hamilton focuses upon Hamilton's two bestselling series, the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series and the Merry Gentry series. The volume is intended as a resource for leaders of book clubs or discussion groups, containing chapters that examine Hamilton's role in the current vampire literature craze, the themes and characters in her work, and responses to Hamilton on the Internet. The book also provides a brief overview of Hamilton's life. Presents a chronology of major milestones in vampire literature and film Contains images of Hamilton's book covers Provides a bibliography of Hamilton's works, secondary sources, and websites, as well as a detailed "What Do I Read Next" listing of other writers who may be of interest to Hamilton's fans Includes a glossary of terms and major characters for each of Hamilton's two major series

Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works. Included are more than 350 alphabetically arranged entries, such as: Beale Street Belgium Black Boy Chicago Renaissance Civil Rights Movement Ralph Waldo Ellison Sigmund Freud Harlem Martin Luther King, Jr. Marxism Native Son Edgar Allan Poe Segregation Sharecropping And many more. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with an extensive bibliography. Literature students will value this work for its thorough overview of Wright's canon, while students in history and social studies classes will welcome it as a means of understanding the African American struggle for civil rights through literature.

This book is about how France's two major documentary authors of the nineteenth century - Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola - incorporate medical knowledge about the body into their works, and in so doing exploit its metaphorical potential of the body to engage in critical reflection about the accumulation and reconfiguration of knowledge.

"Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma" studies the intersections of modernism, sexuality, and subjectivity in the work of two leading women modernists. Over the course of her writing career, each came to confront those aspects of her culture and her personal history that resulted in a degraded sense of female sexuality. In particular, both explored the ways in which traumatic childhood sexual experiences informed their relationship to female corporeality and fiction writing. Their narratives about these memories--and the essays and fictions in which they recovered and worked through them--are all the more remarkable in that they appeared at a time when Freud's renunciation of the seduction theory had become the authorizing narrative of psychoanalysis.

Bosha collects major, representative criticism of John Cheever's fiction, and his posthumously published Letters and Journals, from the earliest reviews of 1943, through to the present. The volume provides a clear and comprehensive assessment of Cheever's critical reputation both during his lifetime, as each of his books was published and reviewed, and retrospectively, by academics and literary historians who have sought to place Cheever's work in a larger literary context. In addition to several new essays written specifically for this volume, this book publishes, for the first time, a long interview which John Cheever gave less than a year before his death. This interview, according to Prof. Robert G. Collins, who conducted it, is almost certainly the last to be publicly heard. The book begins with a critical introductory essay that traces the dominant themes and patterns in Cheever criticism and comments on the critical reception of his work over the last five decades. A chronology highlights the chief events in Cheever's life and career. The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, with each chapter devoted to one of Cheever's works. Within each chapter are selections of criticism. The book concludes with a bibliography and index.

This is a major English study of the novels of the Spanish Civil War. The book is based on an analysis of some eighty Spanish novels, written in Spain and abroad (in exile) during the Franco period (1936-1975), in which the Civil War is the major theme. The works are related to earlier examples of war literature, such as the French novels of World War I. Dr Thomas examines the effects of propaganda from both Left and Right in the early Civil War novels, as well as the disillusionment of later works when the sincerity of Republican and Nationalist ideals is seriously questioned. The effects of propaganda and censorship on literary style are also discussed. Major writers like Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, Ramon Sender and Camilo Jose Cela are covered in depth; and there is a comprehensive bibliography covering primary and secondary sources, together with a glossary of Civil War terms. The Novel of the Spanish Civil War offers a highly illuminating view of the perception by creative writers of the political, religious and moral issues of war throughout a troubled period.

The astounding commercial success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, not just with adolescent girls (as originally intended), but with a large and diverse audience, makes interpreting their underlying themes vital for understanding the ways that we perceive and interact with each other in contemporary society. Literary critics have interpreted vampires from Stoker's Dracula to Rice's Lestat in numerous ways-as symbols of deviant sexuality; as transgressive figures of sexual empowerment; as xenophobic representations of foreigners; as pop culture figures that reveal the attitudes of the masses better than any scholarly writing-and the Twilight saga is no exception. The essays in this collection use these interpretative lens and others to interrogate the meanings of Meyer's books, making a compelling case for the cultural relevance of Twilight and providing insights on how we can "read" popular culture to our best advantage. The volume will be of interest to academic and lay readers alike: undergraduates, graduate students, and instructors of children's and young adult literature, contemporary U.S. literature, gothic literature, and popular culture, as well as the myriad Twilight fans who seek to explore and re-explore the novels from a variety of angles.

The English novel written between 1700 and 1740 remains a comparatively neglected area. In addition to Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders" are landmarks in the history of English fiction, many other authors were at work. These included such women as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, and Eliza Haywood, who made a considerable contribution to widening the range of emotional responses in fiction. These authors, and many others, continued writing in the genres inherited from the previous century, such as criminal biographies, the Utopian novel, the science fictional voyage, and the epistolary novel. This annotated bibliography includes entries for these works and for critical materials pertinent to them.

The volume first seeks to establish the existing studies of the era, along with anthologies. It then provides entries for a wide-ranging selection of works which cover fictional, theoretical, historical, political, and cultural topics, to provide a comprehensive background to the unfolding and understanding of prose fiction in the early 18th century. This is followed by an alphabetical listing of novels, their editions, and any critical material available on each. The next section provides a chronological record of significant and enduring works of fiction composed or translated in this period. The volume concludes with extensive indexes.

Trollope is usually seen as a faithful mirror of Victorian England, both in providing details of contemporary life and in endorsing the moral attitudes and certainties of the period. His powers of empathy make his characters convincing and knowable. Yet the Victorians restricted women to the house and severely limited their rights and opportunities. This text examines the conundrum of how a great novelist could both accept the conventional values of the time and yet be able to see and sympathise with the impossible situations that Victorian women often found themselves. The author shows the individuality of Trollope's women: even conventional Angel in the House heroines, like the eponymous Rachel Ray and Mary Lowther in "The Vicar of Bullhampton", can surprise us at times. More tellingly, he cannot help giving some of his less angelic characters, such as the vivacious Lizzie Eustace in "The Eustace Diamonds" and the dauntless Mrs Hurtle in "The Way We Live Now". His range extends beyond simple romance to the realistic handling of marriages, both happy and unhappy, and to the treatment of bigamy and scandal. He shows men and women getting on together as well as fighting bitterly. Nor are Trollope's novels as devoid of sex as has often been thought. Not only are hidden jokes made about the subject, men in the novels clearly think about women's bodies - something that women reciprocate. While in his plots and in his authorial asides, Trollope usually supports conventional Victorian attitudes, in his handling of women he shows himself capable of a real understanding of their restrictions and problems: the imperative to catch a husband; women's powerlessness (as experienced by Emily Trevelyan in "He Knew He Was Right" where a marriage failed; and the double standards applied to them throughout their lives.

Decadence is a concept that designates a given historical moment as a phase of decay and valorizes the past as an irretrievable golden age. The literary theme and motif has survived through the history of literary and cultural discourses in Japan since antiquity to the present and holds a key to understand the wide range of social consciousnesses that cannot be always molded by a given social mainstream. Here, Ikuho Amano offers an innovative examination of a century of Japanese fiction through the analytical prism of decadence. Drawing on the economic issues prevalent in twentieth-century fictions, the book argues that non-productive labor plays an integral part of modern society and culture while accommodating the entropic excess of modern society. Through deviant dealings of resources, including waste, squandering, wagering, and excessive generosity, the decadent individuals negotiate with modern utilitarian ideologies of society based on labor and production, showcasing their desire and dream outside the circle of diligence and productivity.

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

Reading Late Lawrence is a study of a number of the neglected fictional works of D.H. Lawrence's late period: these include Glad Ghosts, The Lovely Lady, The Blue Moccasins, and the first two revisions of Lady Chatterly's Lover. The particular focus is on Lawrence's revisions, and the insights they offfer into the complexity of his writing processes and the depth of his commitment to renewal and reimagining. The study draws extensively upon the manuscript and variant material recently made available in the new scholarly editions of his work.

The metaphor of life as prison obsessed Edith Wharton, and, consequently, the theme of imprisonment appears in most of her 86 short stories. In the last several decades, critical studies of Wharton's fiction have focused on this theme of imprisonment, but invariably it is related to biographical considerations. This study, however, is not concerned with such insights and influences; rather, it concentrates on Wharton's skill as a craftsman in consciously and carefully fitting her narrative techniques to the imprisonment theme. Representative tales from Wharton's early period (1891-1904), her major phase (1905-1919), and her later years (1926-1937) have been examined and divided into four categories: individuals trapped by love and marriage, men and women imprisoned by the dictates of society, human beings victimized by the demands of art and morality, and persons paralyzed by fear of the supernatural.

This book explores Chinese novelists' distinctive contributions to the China debate in terms of the key issues of Chinese language, power dynamics and Confucian tradition. As China is rising, Chinese scholars and policymakers are debating heatedly over China's past, present and future. Who are the major debaters? How do they analyze China's problems and figure out solutions? What are the main achievements and weaknesses of the Chinese intellectual debate and discourse? Chinese novelists also get involved in the China debate. However, their voices are rarely heard. This book argues that, by dramatizing the diversities of ordinary social actors' everyday languages, active discursive practices and enchanted local traditions, Chinese novelists do not merely illustrate the dominant liberal, the New Left and the New Confucian ideologies, but enrich the China debate and provide a "novel" approach to our understanding of modern China.

Reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" with an eye to the cultural references embedded within it, R. Brandon Kershner interrogates modernism's relationship to popular culture and literature. Addressing newspapers and "light weeklies" in Ireland, this book argues that "Ulysses "reflects their formal innovations and relationship to the reader. Ultimately, Kershner offers a corrective to formal approaches to popular literary genres, broadening the spectrum of methodologies to incorporate social and political dimensions.

Abandoning the Black Hero is the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel-novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby. John C. Charles argues that these fictions have been overlooked because they deviate from two critical suppositions: that black literature is always about black life and that when it represents whiteness, it must attack white supremacy. The authors are, however, quite sympathetic in the treatment of their white protagonists, which Charles contends should be read not as a failure of racial pride but instead as a strategy for claiming creative freedom, expansive moral authority, and critical agency. In an era when "Negro writers" were expected to protest, their sympathetic treatment of white suffering grants these authors a degree of racial privacy previously unavailable to them. White writers, after all, have the privilege of racial privacy because they are never pressured to write only about white life. Charles reveals that the freedom to abandon the "Negro problem" encouraged these authors to explore a range of new genres and themes, generating a strikingly diverse body of novels that significantly revise our understanding of mid-twentieth-century black writing.

Centering on the British kitchen sink realism movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically its documentation of the built environment's influence on class consciousness, this book highlights the settings of a variety of novels, plays, and films, turning to archival research to offer new ways of thinking about how spatial representation in cultural production sustains or intervenes in the process of social stratification. As a movement that used gritty, documentary-style depictions of space to highlight the complexities of working-class life, the period's texts chronicled shifts in the social and topographic landscape while advancing new articulations of citizenship in response to the failures of post-war reconstruction. By exploring the impact of space on class, this book addresses the contention that critical discourse has overlooked the way the built environment informs class identity.

The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel investigates the role of genre in the contemporary novel: taking its departure from the observation that numerous contemporary novelists make use of popular genre influences in what are still widely considered to be literary novels, it sketches the uses, the work, and the value of genre. It suggests the value of a critical look at texts' genre use for an analysis of the contemporary moment. From this, it develops a broader perspective, suggesting the value of genre criticism and taking into view traditional genres such as the bildungsroman and the metafictional novel as well as the kinds of amalgamated forms which have recently come to prominence. In essays discussing a wide range of authors from Steven Hall to Bret Easton Ellis to Colson Whitehead, the contributors to the volume develop their own readings of genre's work and valence in the contemporary novel.

Bruce Kellner worked directly from the collection of often-overlooked novelist Donald Windham to produce this reference work. Entries on books, pamphlets, articles and criticism provided a comprehensive record of Windham's literary development, critical reception, failures, and achievements. According to Kellner, the public has yet to fully embrace the quiet eloquence of Windham's work; like authors Herman Melville and Gertrude Stein, he may be vindicated by time. Kellner introduces the bio-bibliography with a discussion of Donald Windham's background, writing style, and reception by publishers and readers. He likens Windham's subtle style to E.M. Forster, and he suggests that America's action-oriented culture lacks patience for Windham's offerings, which are homosexual but not erotic, Southern but not gothic. The book, which includes an addendum to the introduction by Windham himself, is divided into five parts: Books and Pamphlets, Books and Pamphlets with Contributions, Contributions to Periodicals, Ephemera, and Criticism and Biography. This book is valuable to students, scholars, and general audiences of literature.