Throughout George Eliot's fiction, not only do a remarkable number of her characters act under the influence of unwise consumption of alcohol and opium, but drugs also recur often as metaphors and allusions. Together, they create an extensive pattern of drug/disease references that represent socio-political problems as diseases in a social body and solutions to those problems (especially solutions that depend on some kind of written language) as volatile remedies that retain the potential to either kill or cure.

Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse contains analysis of sexual perversion and narrative creativity in fictions from the Latin American boom and post-boom. O'Connor's main argument is that orthodox criticism of Latin American literature has neglected the eccentric singularities of other fictive trends in the corpus (especially in the second half of the twentieth-century). At the same time, by examining these eccentric singularities in their relationship to mainstream trends in the Latin American corpus, O'Connor forces his readers to view these master narratives and major trends (such as modernismo or magical realism) from surprisingly new angles. Five of the authors discussed (Puig, Lezama, Lima, Cortazar and Sarduy) have an established place in the Latin American literary canon. A fifth one, Rosario Ferre, may have come close to achieving that status with her earlier fictions. Others (Felisberto Hernandez, Alicia Borinsky, Cristina Peri Rossi and Silvia Molloy) are less well known, but they are certainly highly significant authors for scholars and students of contemporary Latin American fiction.

A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.

In Modernism and Market Fantasy, Carey Mickalites explores British modernist fiction's critical designs on the changing economic culture in which it took shape. Examining work that ranges from pre-war impressionism through the late modernism of the 1930s, he shows how modernist innovation engages directly with the transitions that mark early twentieth-century capitalism. Mickalites places modernist texts in relationship to particular economic structures: an investment and finance economy that imagines endlessly inflated returns through speculative trading; the anxieties of selfhood produced by capitalist exchange and private property; advertising and fashion culture's dream worlds of perpetual self-renewal; and commercial spectacle's capacity to generate new public affects. Demonstrating that prominent modernists viewed the market as an abstract space organized around irrational fantasies and anxieties, Mickalites argues that modernism reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions in an effort to blast an increasingly reified economic culture into a new historical consciousness of itself.

Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalisation in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.

Far from being a conservative writer endorsing women's domestic role, Agatha Christie's book depicts women as adventurous, independent women who renegotiate sexual relationships along more equal lines. Women are also allowed the dangerous competency to disrupt society and yet the texts refuse to see them as double deviant because of their femininity. This detailed textual analysis of her oeuvre demonstrates exactly how quietly innovatory Christie was in relation to gender, beginning in nineteen twenty and concluding in the early seventies.

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern is a wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings of authors from Edmund Spenser to Olga Tokarczuk, and through considered discussions of the ideologies of walking and mapping, in performance art and cultural representation, assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds. Together, the essays demonstrate convincingly the close relationship between text, map and culture.

Long before Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Roddenberry, and Chris Carter, the names of David Lasser, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Hugo Gernsback, and Sam Moskowitz were well known by the first fans of a new kind of fiction. These pioneers were among the visionary individuals who launched the science fiction genre, which today enjoys such wide appeal.

Through exclusive interviews, Eric Leif Davin takes readers back to the late 1920s, when Gernsback, "the father of science fiction," founded the world's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. Lasser, one of Gernsback's editors, recalls his own amazing book The Conquest of Space-the first work in English to seriously probe the possibility of space flight. Other highlights include a discussion with the widow of Stanley G. Weinbaum ("A Martian Odyssey"), the first author to write about an alien in sympathetic terms; talks with the giants of early sci-fi Frank K. Kelly and Raymond Z. Gallun; Wolf Man creator and science fiction script writer Curt Siodmak; pioneer book publisher and writer Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; plus commentary on popular sci-fi magazines.

The lives, experiences, memories, and insights provided in Pioneers of Wonder are a treasure for all fans of this dynamic literary phenomenon.

During the past 10 years, the situation of women writers in Latin America has dramatically changed as has the interest the reading public has shown in their work. In the United States, the rise of women's studies programs has fostered a heightened awareness of literature written by women. Publishers have noted the growing significance of Latin American women writers and have responded by increasing the availability of the work of these women. Thus many anthologies now include English translations of Latin American short fiction written by women. The inclusion of Latin American short fiction in anthologies has made the work of these women more available to students, but the collections in which particular works appear are sometimes difficult to locate. This reference provides a full listing of these anthologies and the works contained in them.

The first part of the volume contains entries for 165 anthologies published between 1938 and 1996. The entries are arranged alphabetically by editor or author and each provides full bibliographic information and a list of all short stories and novel excerpts by Latin American women authors contained in the work. The nationality of each author is cited parenthetically. These entries are assigned alphanumeric codes, which are cross-referenced in the volume's other indexes. The additional indexes allow the user to locate short fiction by author, country, and title. The volume concludes with a list of bibliographies of Latin American literature in translation.

Pearl S. Buck's portrayal of Chinese peasants was the first literary representation, in China as well as in America, of the majority of the Chinese population. Her work changed the image of the Chinese people in the American mind--ultimately facilitating the 1943 repeal of the 61-year-old Chinese Exclusion Act and arousing Americans' support of the Chinese resistance against the Japanese aggression in World War II. From a multicultural point of view, Chinese scholar Kang Liao analyzes Buck's phenomenal success and the ensuing neglect of her works by American critics. Liao's insights into Buck's function as one of the few writers from an age of Eurocentrism who shed light on a new age of multiculturalism will be of interest to both students and scholars interested in race, class, and gender issues.

This scholarly edition presents for the first time all of the known surviving letters of British novelist Sarah Harriet Burney (1772-1884). The overwhelming majority of these letters--more than ninety percent--have never before been published. Burney's accomplishments, says Lorna J. Clark, have been unjustly overlooked. She published five works of fiction between 1796 and 1839, all of which met with reasonable success, including "Traits of Nature" (1812), which sold out within three months. These letters position Burney among her fellow women writers and shed light on her relations with her publisher and her ambivalence toward her own work and her readership. Her lively observation of the literary scene evinces the range and scope of her reading, as well as her awareness of literary trends and developments. Burney was, for example, remarkably prescient in recognizing, and praising from the first, the talent of Jane Austen, and met several of the authors of her day. A challenging new perspective on family matters also emerges in the letters. The youngest child of the second marriage of Charles Burney, and the only daughter to remain unmarried, Sarah Harriet had the unenviable task of caring for her father in his later years. Her letters reveal a darker side of Dr. Burney, and also help to round out our image of a more favored daughter, Sarah Harriet's half-sister (and fellow novelist), Frances Burney. As literature, Clark observes, Burney's letters are, arguably, her best work. Thoroughly versed in the epistolary arts, she sought always to amuse and entertain her correspondents. Burney ultimately emerges as a quiet but heroic single woman, relegated to the margins of society where she struggled for independence and self-respect. Displaying literary qualities and a lively sense of humor, the letters provide a fascinating insight into the literary, political, and social life of the day.

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the beautiful child offers partisans of 'art for art's sake' an emblem for the ecstatic and erotic, even the queer possibilities of art. Aestheticism's erotic child is thus in stark contrast to the innocent child of today's ideology, who secures the claims of identity against the very disorientations celebrated by aestheticism. Articulating aesthetic transport through the desiring and desired child, aestheticism interrogates the ideology underpinning sexual oppression.

This is a collection of original essays on Philip Roth offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of recent texts. Philip Roth has without doubt been one of the most important writers of fiction in the United States during the latter part of the twentieth century. "Philip Roth" collects new essays by noted Roth scholars on three essential novels appearing in recent years, "American Pastoral" (1997), "The Human Stain" (2000), and "The Plot Against America" (2004). The volume illuminates Roth's multilayered perceptions of twentieth-century America as a place, a culture, and an idea that shapes its inhabitants in profound ways. Focusing on such topics as ethnicity, gender, race, the family, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Roth's penetrating explorations of American selfhood. The contributors probe this American Jewish writer's insights into the paradoxes of freedom and self-determination, the politics of identity, especially as defined by racial or ethnic affiliation, and the possibilities available for self-definition and transformation within the context of American history and culture. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.

Ford Madox Ford is a major modernist writer, yet many of his works do not conform to our assumptions about modernism. Examining ways in which he, alongside other 'misfit moderns', undermines 'stabilities' we expect from novels and memoirs, this book poses questions about the nature of narrative and the distinction between modernism and modernity.

As industrialization transformed American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, increasing numbers of women sought employment outside the home and many were drawn into the labor movement. This collection of twenty-five stories published in union journals offers a portrait both of women's experiences as wage-earners and of the conflicts, values, and aspirations that touched their lives in this period of massive social upheaval. Written by reformers, union officials, and popular fiction writers, the stories present an uneasy synthesis of labor movement virtues with domestic ideals of femininity, females assertiveness with female subordination, and moralizing with romantic fantasy.

"Random Destinations" examines how novels and short stories portray those who managed to escape from Central Europe in the 1930s following the rise of Nazism. They faced many concrete and psychological problems at their random destinations: language acquisition, adjustment to different mores, fitting into the community, coming to terms with having been rejected by their homeland, the conflict between the desire to remember and/or forget their past, and, above all, the need to reshape their identities. Their personal struggles are contextualized within their historical situation, both global and specific to their new locale. The book argues that fiction, by taking ordinary escapees' difficulties into account, paradoxically offers a subtler and more truer picture that sociological studies that have tended to foreground the successes of a few outstanding individuals.

This meticulous biography traces Tolkien's life from his boyhood in South Africa to his formative school years in England, his college years at Oxford, and his career as an influential scholar and revolutionary writer. His immensely popular books are discussed in great detail, from their inception as ideas through their publication and remarkable legacy. This biography will appeal to students who are fans of Tolkien's books, as well as those who are new to the world of Middle Earth. Included are an extensive bibliography of poems, fiction, and scholarly work written by Tolkien, and a further reading section listing important biographies, letter collections, and critical studies of Tolkien's works. A timeline provides the reader with a comprehensive list of the events of his life and career.

Tolkien's outer life was relatively calm, yet his scholarship and stories are remembered as one of the 20th century's most astonishing achievements. First as a student at Oxford University, then as a professor, Tolkien was fascinated with languages and philology and used the worlds he studied to shape the one he was creating. After years of nominal success, "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the RingS" erupted into popularity, bringing fantasy fiction to the forefront of popular culture in America, and ultimately the world.

"The short story remains a crucial if neglected - part of British literary heritage. This accessible and up-to-date critical overview maps out the main strands and figures that shaped the British short story and novella from the 1850s to the present. It offers new readings of both classic and forgotten texts in a clear, jargon-free way"--Provided by publisher.

Romantic Indians considers the views that Britons, colonists, and North American Indians took of each other during a period in which these people were in a closer and more fateful relationship than ever before or since. It is, therefore, also a book about exploration, empire, and the forms of representation that exploration and empire gave rise to-in particular the form we have come to call Romanticism, in which 'Indians' appear everywhere. It is not too much to say that Romanticism would not have taken the form it did without the complex and ambiguous image of Indians that so intrigued both the writers and their readers. Most of the poets of the Romantic canon wrote about them-not least Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; so did many whom we have only recently brought back to attention-including Bowles, Hemans, and Barbauld. Yet Indians' formative role in the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism has rarely been considered. Tim Fulford aims to bring that formative role to our attention, to show that the images of native peoples that Romantic writers received from colonial administrators, politicians, explorers, and soldiers helped shape not only these writers' idealizations of 'savages' and tribal life, but also their depictions of nature, religion, and rural society. The romanticization of Indians soon affected the way that real native peoples were treated and described by generations of travellers who had already, before reaching the Canadian forest or the mid-western plains, encountered the literary Indians produced back in Britain. Moreover, in some cases Native Americans, writing in English, turned the romanticization of Indians to their own ends. This book highlights their achievement in doing so-featuring fascinating discussions of several little-known but brilliant Native American writers.

This collection of essays explores some new possibilities for understanding postcolonial traumas. It examines representations of both personal and collective traumas around the globe from Palestinian, Caribbean, African American, South African, Maltese, Algerian, Indian, Australian and British writers, directors and artists.

In British Women Writers of World War II , Phyllis Lassner offers a challenging analysis of politicized literature in which such British women writers as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson debated the `justness' of World War II. Lassner questions prevailing approaches to women's war writing by exploring the complex range of pacifist and activist literary forms of women who redefined such pieties as patriotism and duty and heroism and victimization.