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.

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.

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.

This book builds on a critical and scholarly revival of interest in Collins. Baker draws upon biographical revelations and the recent publication of Collins's letters to provide a unique insight into both the man and the writer. The volume will appeal to all students of Collins and those with an interest in the life of Nineteenth-century England.

British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a strong sense of decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle examines the ways in which perceptions of loss were cast into archetypal stories that sought to account for the culture's troubles and assuage its anxieties. By examining the work of a wide range of writers--from Kipling to Wilde, from Stevenson to Stoker--Stephen Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period.

Riven by world wars and cold wars, atrocities and genocides, the twentieth-century was also one of sexual, cultural and ideological revolutions, each inscribed across the fictions it produced. This fascinating new volume re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere. Discussing ten groundbreaking texts against the challenges of their milieux, it considers twentieth century fiction as a tradition of transgression, perennially caught between license and licentiousness, erudition and sedition.

The locked room mystery is one of the iconic creations of popular fiction. Michael Cook's critical study reveals how this archetypal form of the puzzle story has had a significant effect in shaping the immensely popular genre of detective fiction. The book includes analysis of texts from Poe to the present day.

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.

Rooms of Their Own travels around the world examining the unique spaces, habits and rituals in which famous writers created their most notable works. The perennial question asked of all authors is, 'How do you write?'. What do they require of their room or desk? Do they have favourite pens, paper or typewriters? And have they found the perfect daily routine to channel their creativity? Crossing centuries, continents and genres, Alex Johnson has pooled 50 of the best writers and transports you to the heart of their writing rooms - from attics and studies to billiard rooms and bathtubs. Discover the ins and outs of how each great writer penned their famous texts, and the routines and habits they perfected. Meet authors who rely on silence and seclusion and those who need people, music and whisky. Meet novelists who travel half-way across the world to a luxury writing retreat, and others who just need an empty shed at the bottom of the garden. Some are particular about pencils, inks, paper and typewriters, and some will scribble on anything - including the furniture. But whether they write in the library or in cars, under trees, private islands, hotel rooms or towers - each of these stories confirms that there is no 'best way' to write. From James Baldwin, writing in the small hours of the morning in his Paris apartment, to DH Lawrence writing at the foot of a towering Ponderosa pine tree, to the Bronte sisters managing in a crowded co-working space, this book takes us into the lives of some of history's greatest ever writers, with each writing space illustrated in evocative watercolour by James Oses. In looking at the working lives of our favourite authors, bibliophiles will be transported to other worlds, aspiring writers will find inspiration and literature fans will gain deeper insight into their most-loved authors.

This study innovatively explores how Malory’s Morte Darthur responds to available literary vernacular Arthurian traditions—the French defined as theoretical in impulse, the English as performative and experimental. Negotiating these influences, Malory transforms constructions of masculine heroism, especially in the presentation of Launcelot, and exposes the tensions and disillusions of the Arthurian project. The Morte poignantly conveys a desire for integrity in narrative and subject-matter, but at the same time tests literary conceptualizations of history, nationalism, gender and selfhood, and considers the failures of social and legal institutionalizations of violence, in a critique of literary form and of social order.

James A. Michener is one of the most widely read American authors of the 20th century. He worked as a social studies teacher and as an editor, and went on to write such memorable works as Tales of the South Pacific and Centennial. He also wrote numerous scattered short pieces. Though a popular writer, Michener's importance to the American literary, educational, social, and political scene is now slowly being recognized, and his writings are being used as guides and touchstones for study in American schools. This volume contains a checklist of Michener's major novels and his scattered minor writings, along with an extensive annotated bibliography of works about him. The first part is a checklist of his works, while the second is an annotated listing of books and articles published on Michener from the 1920s to the 1990s. The volume also contains a selected list of reviews of Michener's major works. Two reviews for each work have been selected at random, and they provide an overview of the critical response to Michener's writings over the years.

"Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing "explores a recurring theme in writing by women: the dream of finding or creating a private and secluded retreat from the world of men. These imagined "women's worlds" may be very small, a single room even, or may be more ambitious, such as the dream of an entire country created for and inhabited exclusively by women. Sharon L. Jansen places these texts in conversation with one another, pairing them in ways that reveal the writers' distinctive voices even while they speak of the dream they share.

Despite the devastation of combat in WWII, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, the fiction produced in America in the decade following resolutely avoided the events and their implications. "Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature" challenges popular notions regarding the ability of fantasy genres to force a confrontation with repressed horror by exploring the ways realist literature became a subversive site of reified taboo in America following World War II.

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American hard-boiled crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and true crime , crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of senseless murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the study of one of the most important Victorian novelists. Its editors, Robert L. Patten and John Bowen, are leading authorities on Dickens and the international team of contributors they have assembled contains some of the most exciting critics of nineteenth-century fiction writing today. The book covers the whole range of Dickens's writing and criticism about it, including biographical, theoretical and historical approaches. It is based on up-to-the-minute research and written in a lively and engaging way, and will be essential reading for all students and scholars of this canonical writer.

This title introduces the work of James Joyce, the literary, historical and political contexts in which he wrote and his critical reception up to the present day. James Joyce stands at the forefront of modernism - a writer whose work has gained a unique status in modern Western culture. This book offers an introduction to reading and studying Joycean texts and surveys the key contexts - literary, historical, political, philosophical and compositional - which shaped and determined them. By identifying and engaging with Joyce's writing methods and style, the book opens up strategies and approaches for reading his complex texts. It also introduces the critical reception of Joyce and his work, from the early structuralist and 'myth' critics, through deconstruction, to recent developments including historical criticism and genetic criticism.

This compelling study explores the inextricable links between the Nobel laureate s aesthetic practice and her political vision, through an analysis of the key texts as well as her lesser-studied works, books for children, and most recent novels. * Offers provocative new insights and a refreshingly original contribution to the scholarship of one of the most important contemporary American writers * Analyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to her critical writing about the process of reading and writing literature, the relationship between readers and writers, and the cultural contributions of African-American literature * Features extended analyses of Morrison s lesser-known works, most recent novels, and books for children as well as the key texts

In the early nineteenth century there was a sudden vogue for novels centering on the glamour of aristocratic social and political life. Such novels, attractive as they were to middle-class readers, were condemned by contemporary critics as dangerously seductive, crassly commercial, designed for the 'masses' and utterly unworthy of regard. Until recently, silver-fork novels have eluded serious consideration and been overshadowed by authors such as Jane Austen. They were influenced by Austen at their very deepest levels, but were paradoxically drummed out of history by the very canon-makers who were using Austen's name to establish their own legitimacy. This first modern full-length study of the silver-fork novel argues that these novels were in fact tools of persuasion, novels deliberately aimed at bringing the British middle classes into an alliance with an aristocratic program of political reform.

This book conveys Thackeray's development as a novelist, lecturer in Great Britain and the United States, familiar essayist, and shaper of cultural awareness as editor of a major new journal - a development especially growing out of the achievement of Vanity Fair , where he has so powerfully articulated the comical and absurd system of forces defining the human existence that he and his readers shared. Articulating the connections among Thackeray's varied work and activities, Harden reveals the broadening imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely insightful perceiver and critic of human life.

This fascinating study explores the pleasures and torments of love and sexuality as depicted in the works of six important French women writers: Rachilde, Colette, Leduc, Wittig, Cixous and Duras. Historically, erotic literature has been dominated by male writers. Feminist critics have argued that its central motifs of voyeurism, sadomasochism, incest and violence to women's bodies are governed by the unconscious fantasies and prejudices of a patriarchal sociocultural order.
The contributors question how this sociocultural order has affected the erotic writing of the women writers studied. They explore the opportunities for, and constraints on, women's erotic writing in the early to mid-twentieth century through the works of Rachilde, Colette and Leduc. This is contrasted with the writing of prominent contemporary authors -- Wittig, Cixous and Duras -- to reveal new developments and diversification within the genre. The focus throughout is on how these writers deal with erotic language and rhetoric, their treatment of traditional themes of eroticism, and -- most vital to recent feminist criticism and theory -- their vision of the female body and women's sexual pleasure. The book provides key insights into the development of women's erotic discourse throughout this century and the diversity that characterizes it.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of the "Home Tour," with travelers drawn to Scotland, the less explored regions of England and North Wales, and, increasingly, to Ireland. Although an integral part of the United Kingdom from 1800, Ireland represented for many travellers a worryingly unknown entity, politically intractable and unstable, devoutly Catholic, and economically deprived. This book examines British responses to the "Sister Isle" throughout a period of significant cultural and historical change, and examines the varied means through which Ireland was represented for a predominantly British audience.