This literary biographical study examines the life and works of the mid-Victorian woman novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose popularity is now well established. It places her writing in the context of her attitudes towards creative production, her relationship with publishers, and her literary friendships, as well as examining those events of her life which fed into her work. It pays particular attention to the ways in which she sought to reconcile the conflicting demands made upon her, as woman and as artist.

Taking its cue from Baudelaire's important essay "The Painter of Modern Life," in which Baudelaire imagines the modern artist as a "man of the world," this collection of essays presents Oscar Wilde as a "man of the world" who eschewed provincial concerns, cultural conventions, and narrow national interests in favor of the wider world and other worlds-both real and imaginary, geographical and historical, physical and intellectual-which provided alternative sites for exploration and experience, often including alternative gender expression or sexual alterity. Wilde had an unlimited curiosity and a cosmopolitan spirit of inquiry that traveled widely across borders, ranging freely over space and time. He entered easily and wholly into other countries, other cultures, other national literatures, other periods, other mythologies, other religions, other disciplines, and other modes of representation, and was able to fully inhabit and navigate them, quickly apprehending the conventions by which they operate. The fourteen essays in this volume offer fresh critical-theoretical and historical perspectives not just on key connections and aspects of Wilde's oeuvre itself, but on the development of Wilde's remarkable worldliness in dialogue with many other worlds: contemporary developments in art, science and culture, as well as with other national literatures and cultures. Perhaps as a direct result of this cosmopolitan spirit, Wilde and Wilde's works have been taken up across the globe, as the essays on Wilde's reception in India, Japan and Hollywood illustrate. Many of the essays gathered here are based on groundbreaking archival research, including some never-seen-before illustrations. Together, they have the potential to open up important new comparative, transnational, and historical perspectives on Wilde that can shape and sharpen our future understanding of his work and impact.

When Tom Wolfe declared that 'new' journalism had surpassed the novel as the most vital form of literature, he set off a rivalry that Norman Mailer, the novelist and 'new' journalist, labeled an 'undeclared war' between journalism and fiction. Many of the important twentieth century journalist-literary figures in the United States and the United Kingdom rejected so-called non-fictional methods as their favored way to convey social truths. Despite their own careers in jorunalism, they came to believe that the writing formulas that grew out of industrialized journalism could be an impediment to expressing an authentic view of the world. In this volume, Doug Underwood asks whether much of what is now called literary journalism is, in fact, 'literary, ' and whether it should rank with the great novels by such journalists-turned-novelists such as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, who believed - as Mailer did - that fiction provided a more expansive way for the realistic writer to express the important 'truths' of life.

"Americans have cherished and magnified versions of an idealized Mark Twain. We admire and are amused by the celebrity, who sold his pseudonym and his carefully composed face to advertise pipe tobacco, cigarettes, whiskey, and postcards. The extent to which the received images are authentic or inauthentic is, however, in doubt. Common images must be modified when we examine the thoughts and emotions important to the mind and heart of Samuel L. Clemens, the private man."-from the Introduction No writer has been more frequently identified with America than Mark Twain, an emblematic figure often supposed to represent the essential qualities that make America most admirably American. In a fresh appraisal, supported by evidence from both the life and the writings, Guy Cardwell convincingly revises our images of this cultural icon. He portrays an exceptionally complex man who experienced debilitating tensions and neuroses. Caldwell finds that even before the comedian from the West met and married Olivia Langdon, the heiress from Elmira, New York, he was ambitious to join and conquer the world of Eastern affluence and gentility. Yet Clemens's jokes (in his private notebooks) aggressing against women and blacks suggest that his acculturation to gentility was never complete. This book throws new light on Clemens's relations with his wife and her family and on his attitudes toward business, money, art, sex, and the little girls whose company he sought compulsively during his later years. It argues persuasively that in the end Twain was hardly the robust and genial representative of America's mythic frontier past. Alienated from society and from his own writings, he was much more the prototype of the overstrung, exploitatively individualistic modern American.

Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. This book is concerned with children who are not so easily recognized or remembered, the peripheral or overlooked children to be read in works by Dickens, Bronte, Austen and Rossetti.

These are pathbreaking works which draws out Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. "Goethe's Modernisms" demonstrates Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. It also reveals him to be one of modernity's profoundest critics. His influence has not only shaped aesthetic issues, but a myriad of cultural and intellectual ones as well. By studying his works, we can thus gain insights into the foundational principles of modern society and its shortcomings. Tantillo explores Goethe's role within the culture wars that have been with us for some time, his role as a both a progenitor and a critic of modernity, and suggests how we might rethink aspects of our current policies, whether educational or fiscal. Each chapter presents an interpretation of literary texts and then demonstrates their relationship to a contemporary issue: the ascendancy of science and technology and their close connection to new economic theories (Faust); the cultural success of religious evangelicalism and its consequences (The Sorrows of Young Werther); and, the ramifications of progressive, student-centered education (the Wilhelm Meisternovels). Each chapter further places these issues within the context of conservative and liberal philosophies.

Comics Studies Here and Now marks the arrival of comics studies scholarship that no longer feels the need to justify itself within or against other fields of study. The essays herein move us forward, some in their re-diggings into comics history and others by analyzing comics-and all its transmedial and fan-fictional offshoots-on its own terms. Comics Studies stakes the flag of our arrival-the arrival of comics studies as a full-fledged discipline that today and tomorrow excavates, examines, discusses, and analyzes all aspects that make up the resplendent planetary republic of comics. This collection of scholarly essays is a testament to the fact that comic book studies have come into their own as an academic discipline; simply and powerfully moving comic studies forward with their critical excavations and theoretical formulas based on the common sense understanding that comics add to the world as unique, transformative cultural phenomena.

"Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England" addresses the late Victorian cultural crisis and aesthetic revolt in urban life, politics, literature and art, by special reference to the experience of the shocks of the new urban environment, and literary and artistic responses. It does so through interdisciplinary discussion of the novels of George Gissing, whose work is particularly linked to 'the city' and the crisis of urban experience, especially in the archetypal modern imperial city.

TransLatin Joyce explores the circulation of James Joyce's work in the Ibero-American literary system. The essays address Joycean literary engagements in Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba, using concepts from postcolonial translation studies, antimodernism, game theory, sound studies, deconstruction, and post-Euclidean physics.

This new critique of contemporary African-American fiction explores its intersections with and critiques of the Gothic genre. Wester reveals the myriad ways writers manipulate the genre to critique the gothic's traditional racial ideologies and the mechanisms that were appropriated and re-articulated as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America. Re-reading major African American literary texts-such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora-African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon.

This study of the Native American in the western, romance, detective, horror, and science fiction genres examines how even historically accurate representations distort and bias the Native American figure to fit European-based traditions and modern agendas. The authors provide critical approaches for evaluating the literature. They argue that while popular fiction conventions determine and limit authentic portraits of Native American cultures, successful popular fiction writers approach literary quality by fusing authentic Native American culture with the standard genre conventions. Approximately 200 books are discussed and evaluated, and true Native American stories and writings are contrasted with mainstream versions of Indian culture.

While the exploitation of Native Americans has long been recognized, little has been written about the manipulation of Native American figures in recent popular fiction. This study will appeal to students of Native American culture, literature, and popular culture. An appendix of special terms is provided along with a comprehensive bibliography.

"This new study analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in the fiction and critical writings of Virginia Woolf, and draws parallels between Woolf's historiographical imagination and the thought of Walter Benjamin, German philosopher of history and key theorist of modernity"--Provided by publisher.

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change. Antonia Mehnert turns to a set of contemporary American works of fiction, reading them as a unique response to the challenges of representing climate change. She draws on "climate change fiction"- texts dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change-and explores how these works convey climate change, deal with its challenging characteristics, and with what narrative techniques they ultimately participate in its communication. Indeed, a number of challenging traits make climate change a difficult issue to engage with including its slow and long temporal dimension, global scale, scientific controversy, and its disconnect between cause and effect. Considering such complexity and uncertainty at the source of climate change fictions, this book moves beyond a solely ecocritical analysis and shows how these climate change fictions constitute an insightful cultural repertoire valuable for discussion in the environmental humanities in general.

Theology through mythology J. R. R. Tolkien was many things: English Catholic, father and husband, survivor of two world wars, Oxford professor, and author. But he was also a theologian. Tolkien's writings exhibit a coherent theology of God and his works, but Tolkien did not present his views with systematic arguments. Rather, he expressed theology through story. In Tolkien Dogmatics, Austin M. Freeman inspects Tolkien's entire corpus--The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and beyond--as a window into his theology. In his stories, lectures, and letters, Tolkien creatively and carefully engaged with his Christian faith. Tolkien Dogmatics is a comprehensive manual of Tolkien's theological thought arranged in traditional systematic theology categories, with sections on God, revelation, creation, evil, Christ and salvation, the church, and last things. Through Tolkien's imagination, we reencounter our faith.

As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one ofthe most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community offers new readings of fictional and nonfictional works by such figures as Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed, Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Jane Smiley.

Fictional depictions of Native American concepts of justice, crime, and the investigation of crime are explored in this original work. "Shaman or Sherlock" explores depictions created by Native American authors themselves, as well as those created by outsiders with mainstream agendas. The most successful of these writers fuse authentic Native American culture with standard genre conventions, thus providing an appealing, empathetic view of little-understood or underappreciated groups, as well as insight into issues of cross-cultural communication. Dealing with such significant concepts as acculturation, regional diversity, and assimilation, this unique study evaluates over 200 detective stories.

Though the crime novel began in Europe as a manifestation of Enlightenment rationality and scientific methodology, the Native American detective story moves into the realm of the spiritual and intuitive, often incorporating depictions of non-material phenomena. "Shaman or Sherlock?" explores how geographical and tribal differences, degrees of assimilation, and the evolution of age-old cultural patterns shape the Native American detective story.

Sherlock Holmes is an iconic figure within cultural narratives. More recently, Conan Doyle has also appeared as a fictional figure in contemporary novels and films, confusing the boundaries between fiction and reality. This collection investigates how Holmes and Doyle have gripped the public imagination to become central figures of modernity.

From 1809 until just before her death, Jane Austen lived in a small, all-female household at Chawton, where reading aloud was the evening's entertainment and a crucial factor in the way Austen formed and modified her writing. This book looks in detail at Jane Austen's style. It discusses her characteristic abstract vocabulary, her adaptations of Johnsonian syntax and how she came to make her most important contribution to the technique of fiction, free indirect discourse. The book draws extensively on historical sources, especially the work of writers like Johnson, Hugh Blair and Thomas Sheridan, and analyses how Austen negotiated her path between the fundamentally masculine concerns of eighteenth-century prescriptivists and her own situation of a female writer reading her work aloud to a female audience.

When it comes to James Joyce's landmark work, Ulysses , the influence of three literary giants, Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante, cannot be overlooked. Examining Joyce in terms of Homeric narrative, Dantesque structure, and Shakespearean plot, Weir rediscovers Joyce's novel through the lens of his renowned predecessors.

Travel Writing and the Transnational Author explores the travel writing and transnational literature of four authors from the 'postcolonial canon': Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie.

The Postfeminist Biopic explores the influence of postfeminist culture on cinematic representations of female biographies. While earlier research has described the subgenres of the classical female biopic and the feminist biopic, Polaschek proposes a third subgenre, the postfeminist biopic, which has appeared as part of a broader trend of reviving and reconfiguring classical genre forms aimed at women. The book explores the conventions of the postfeminist biopic through a close analysis of four films that represent the lives of women who are established members of the second-wave feminist canon: Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003), which depicts the life of the American poet Sylvia Plath; Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002), about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), which includes a biographical narrative about the English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf; and Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2006), a fictionalized interpretation of the coming of age of the English novelist Jane Austen.

Does Thoreau belong to the past or to the future? Instead of canonizing him as a celebrant of "pure" nature apart from the corruption of civilization, the essays in "Thoreauvian Modernities" reveal edgier facets of his work--how Thoreau is able to unsettle as well as inspire and how he is able to focus on both the timeless and the timely. Contributors from the United States and Europe explore Thoreau's modernity and give a much-needed reassessment of his work in a global context.
The first of three sections, "Thoreau and (Non)Modernity," views Thoreau as a social thinker who set himself against the "modern" currents of his day even while contributing to the emergence of a new era. By questioning the place of humans in the social, economic, natural, and metaphysical order, he ushered in a rethinking of humanity's role in the natural world that nurtured the environmental movement. The second section, "Thoreau and Philosophy," examines Thoreau's writings in light of the philosophy of his time as well as current philosophical debates. Section three, "Thoreau, Language, and the Wild," centers on his relationship to wild nature in its philosophical, scientific, linguistic, and literary dimensions. Together, these sixteen essays reveal Thoreau's relevance to a number of fields, including science, philosophy, aesthetics, environmental ethics, political science, and animal studies.
"Thoreauvian Modernities" posits that it is the germinating power of Thoreau's thought--the challenge it poses to our own thinking and its capacity to address pressing issues in a new way--that defines his enduring relevance and his modernity.
Contributors: Kristen Case, Randall Conrad, David Dowling, Michel Granger, Michel Imbert, Michael Jonik, Christian Maul, Bruno Monfort, Henrik Otterberg, Tom Pughe, David M. Robinson, William Rossi, Dieter Schulz, Francois Specq, Joseph Urbas, Laura Dassow Walls.

Meredith is a novelist whom many readers have discovered with excitement, drawn to his radical portrayal of social and personal relations, especially of gender. Neil Robert's book is the first full-length study for ten years, and is the first to examine the novels in the light of modern literary theory, especially the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, showing that Meredith is a writer who engages profoundly with the ideological discourses of his time and is a still not fully discovered precursor of the modernist novel.

This book provides students with an introduction to the work of Irvine Welsh that places his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores Welsh's biography, his impact on contemporary Scottish fiction and the cultural relevance of the "Irvine Welsh phenomenon." Including a timeline of key dates, it offers an accessible reading of Welsh's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has provoked.

More than 100 years after the death of Queen Victoria, contemporary culture remains fascinated by the Victorians. This fascination is most marked in fiction, where an entirely new genre of neo-Victorian fiction has emerged. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative argues that while neo-Victorian fiction emerges within a wider cultural appropriation of the Victorians, it is characterized by its commitment to the historical specificity of the Victorian era. Neo-Victorian fiction is historical fiction and as such involves a dual approach to the present and the past: these novels are determined by both the contemporary moment of writing and the Victorian moment in which they are set. This book mimics that dual approach by analyzing neo-Victorian fiction in relation to both contemporary debates about history and Victorian historical narratives. It combines broad discussion of the genre with detailed analysis of a range of neo-Victorian texts from the last 20 years.