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."

Generations of readers and movie viewers have been drawn to the spirited heroines of DEGREESUSense and Sensibility " and DEGREESUEmma." Prepared especially for students, this full-length critical study of Jane Austen covers her six most beloved works, including the two novels DEGREESUNorthanger Abbey" and DEGREESUPersuasion, "published posthumously. Young readers will enjoy the vivid biographical account of how Austen herself was just a teenager when she took up the pen and began to write in guarded secrecy. Austen scholar Debra Teachman has a historian's eye for detail as she describes Austen's homelife in the English countryside and the social environment that were so much a part of Austen's stories. Teachman examines each novel, relating how historical context influenced the characters, events and themes that Austen developed. Teachman eloquently points out, for example, that while Austen does not overtly preach feminism in any of her novels, the lack of legal protection for women is a vital societal theme in DEGREESUSense and Sensibility. "Her discussion of the economic realities at the core of Austen's novels will help readers appreciate that works like the best-selling "Pride and Prejudice" are more than just charming stories.

In addition to analyzing the literary elements in each work of fiction by Jane Austen, this Companion also gives students an overview of Austen's literary heritage. Discussing first the novel itself as a genre, this useful chapter then identifies each sub-genre that influenced Austen: epistolary writing, the adventure novel, the gothic form, and Women's Rights novels. An extensive bibliography directs readers to biographical materials, historical documents, reviews, criticism and numerous other accessible sources that will enhance their further study of Austen's writings. For students of classic fiction, this well written critical study aids in the enjoyment and understanding of the life and works of Jane Austen.

Literary scholar Michael A. Chaney examines graphic novels to illustrate that in form and function they inform readers on how they ought to be read. His arguments result in an innovative analysis of the various knowledges that comics produce and the methods artists and writers employ to convey them. Theoretically eclectic, this study attends to the lessons taught by both the form and content of today's most celebrated graphic novels. Chaney analyzes the embedded lessons in comics and graphic novels through the form's central tropes: the iconic child storyteller and the inherent childishness of comics in American culture; the use of mirrors and masks as ciphers of the unconscious; embedded puzzles and games in otherwise story-driven comic narratives; and the form's self-reflexive propensity for showing its work. Comics reveal the labor that goes into producing them, embedding lessons on how to read the ""work"" as a whole. Throughout, Chaney draws from a range of theoretical insights from psychoanalysis and semiotics to theories of reception and production from film studies, art history, and media studies. Some of the major texts examined include Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis; Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth; Joe Sacco's Palestine; David B.'s Epileptic; Kyle Baker's Nat Turner; and many more. As Chaney's examples show, graphic novels teach us even as they create meaning in their infinite relay between words and pictures.

Current scholarship on Latin American historical fiction has failed to adequately take feminism and postcolonialism into account. In this collection of essays, noted scholars use these important contemporary discourses as a starting point for a new definition of the Latin American historical novel that includes four categories: fiction about the search for national identity, magical realism, narrative with historical intertextuality, and symbolic historical fiction. These categories show how the novel evolves through a new emphasis on women and the colonial subject in key texts by Claribel Alegria, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, Cristina Peri Rossi, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Ana Teresa Torres, Tomas Eloy Martinez, Ana Maria Goncalves, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

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.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides

Doeblin's texts, which range widely across contemporary discourses, are paradigms of the encounter between literary and scientific modernity. With their use of 'Tatsachenphantasie', they explode conventional language, seeking a new connection with the world of objects and things. This volume reassesses and reevaluates the uniquely interdisciplinary quality of Doeblin's interdiscursive, factually-inspired poetics by offering challenging new perspectives on key works. The volume analyses not only some of Doeblin's best-known novels and stories, but also neglected works including his early medical essays, political journalism and autobiographical texts. Other topics addressed are Doeblin's engagement with German history; his relation to medical discourse; his topography of Berlin; his aestheticisation of his own biography and his relation to other major writers such as Heine, Benn, Brecht and Sebald. With contributions in English and in German by scholars from Germany and the United Kingdom, the volume presents insights into Doeblin that are of value to advanced researchers and to students alike.

Analyzing four best-selling novels - by both women and men - written in the feminine voice, this book traces how the creation of women-centered salons and the emergence of a feminine poetic style engendered a new type of literature in eighteenth-century France. The author argues that writing in a female voice allowed writers of both sexes to break with classical notions of literature and style, so that they could create a modern sensibility that appealed to a larger reading public, and gave them scope to innovate with style and form. Wolfgang brings to light how the 'female voice' in literature came to embody the language of sociability, but also allowed writers to explore the domain of inter-subjectivity, while creating new bonds between writers and the reading public. Through examination of Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd, and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, she shows that in France, this modern 'feminine' sensibility turned the least prestigious of literary genres - the novel - into the most compelling and innovative literary form of the eighteenth century. Emphasizing how the narratives analyzed here refashioned the French literary world through their linguistic innovation and expression of new forms of subjectivity, this study claims an important role for feminine-voice narratives in shaping the field of eighteenth-century literature.

Rose Elizabeth Cleveland was the First Lady of the United States for nearly two years assisting her brother, President Grover Cleveland. Lesser known, she was also a literary scholar, novelist, and a poet who published work that empowered women. Throughout her life, she placed herself in the center of controversies concerning the position of women; their social, political and educational rights and opportunities; and the changing attitudes regarding their sexuality. She posed crucial questions about social norms and identity formation, questioned the validity of the heterosexual norm, and challenged patriarchal expectations. This book puts Rose Cleveland in her proper place in the historical record and shows her work concerning the ways in which society perceived, invented, and articulated gender and sexuality to be relevant still today.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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'?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Combating Injustice, Jon Falsarella Dawson approaches American literary naturalism as a means of social criticism, exploring the powerful economic arguments and commentaries on labor struggles presented in novels by Frank Norris, Jack London, and John Steinbeck. Making use of extensive archival research, Dawson considers many of the original periodical sources that fueled books from McTeague to The Grapes of Wrath, as Norris, London, and Steinbeck transformed contemporary materials into illustrations of the socioeconomic forces that shape American life. By depicting the operations of powerful individuals and institutions, these naturalist writers offered audiences a greater awareness of the plight of labor so that readers might find the inspiration to become agents of change. Works such as The Octopus, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, and In Dubious Battle illuminate many of the central economic issues at play in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the rise of commodity culture, labor disputes involving industrial and agricultural workers, widespread poverty, extreme inequality, and the concentration of resources and land ownership. Norris, London, and Steinbeck highlighted the dangers of these developments by charting their impact on central characters whose fates result from the predatory tactics of corporate monopolies, wealthy individuals, and large financial establishments. Dawson's lucid analysis shows how all three writers, drawing on contemporary events, accentuated the need for reform and stressed the potential for change by human action. Each author took inspiration from notable events in California, ranging from the Mussel Slough tragedy of 1880 to the agricultural strikes in the Central Valley during the 1930s, presenting the state as a microcosm for conditions throughout the nation during a period of tremendous upheaval. Combating Injustice: The Naturalism of Frank Norris, Jack London, and John Steinbeck provides carefully contextualized readings of three major writers whose works express both the necessity for and the possibility of creating a more egalitarian society.

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.