This 1992 book traces the ways in which Mark Twain was formed by, and sought to manipulate, the ideology of gender. Feminine and masculine values exist via their opposition to and interplay with each other, and Twain, a representative masculine figure, provides a useful focal point for an exploration of the subject. Not only did Twain address himself directly to the conflicting and complementary aspects of gendered culture, but his models of history are strongly marked by the same issue: his exploitation of North/male - South/female associations is investigated, as well as the significance of individual figures such as Joan of Arc. Stoneley considers the range of Twain's writing, including classic works such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, genteel fiction such as The Prince and the Pauper and embittered autobiographical fragments. Stoneley goes beyond generalizations to provide a detailed analysis; his book will be of interest to scholars and students of American literature, cultural history and gender studies.

The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature explores and analyses political conflicts between individuals and authority figures, as those conflicts are depicted in thirteen Egyptian novels written from 1957 to the last years of Mubarak's presidency. The book discusses the various reasons that lead an individual or a group of people from all strata of society (common people, intellectuals, and public figures) to confront policemen, senior security officials, and even the heads of the state. It further examines how the conflicts develop and what their outcomes are in the short term as well as in the long term, for both the individuals and the authority figures. In this context, the volume also examines the possibility of standing against an oppressive regime and even overcoming it. This text argues that while the authority figure initially subdues individuals who confront them, their victory is short term. In the long term, their cruelties bring about sown deaths, either by the individuals themselves or by their relatives. Furthermore, large assemblies of people can confront the regime with success. These discoveries, along with other findings presented in the book, remain relevant to the reality in the Middle East and the events leading to the Arab Spring.

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.

Graceful Reading is a study of the writings of the seventeeth-century preacher John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress. It reassesses the relationship between Bunyan's theology and his narrative style, redefining them both according to a more specific understanding of seventeenth-century 'Calvinism', and a more 'postmodernist' understanding of narrative.

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.

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.

Drawing on many aspects of contemporary feminist theory, this lively collection of essays assesses Angela Carter's polemical fictions of desire. Carter, renowned for her irreverent wit, was one of the most gifted, subversive, and stylish British writers to emerge in the 1960s.

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.

This is the first study to argue that Jewish Mysticism influenced not only her Jewish novel, Daniel Deronda, but all of George Eliot's novels. The reader is left with a very different George Eliot from that assumed by most previous criticism. Though previous studies have attempted to qualify the still-dominant view that Eliot is firmly a part of the realistic tradition, this study goes further by demonstrating that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable in her fiction.

Part Blood, Part Ketchup analyzes novels by 20th century authors Edith Wharton, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Irving, and Jamaica Kincaid, uncovering trends that obliterate cultural divides. With unrestrained American voices, the collective pitch of their complaints soars, revealing an unmistakable formula of heightened self-exposure and fury. As in the case of protagonists on the page and the screen, it becomes difficult to distinguish authentic suffering from performance-or in the words of one reviewer-the ratio of blood to ketchup. Breathtaking in scope,Part Blood, Part Ketchup situates over one hundred years of literature and film within national, historical, and global contexts, tracing 19th century European allegations of a troubling narrowness in the American character to contemporary insights about the global superpower. Ultimately, Karen Tolchin finds that subtle evolution of the American coming-of-age narrative has performed significant cultural work in the construction of our national mythology.

This new collection of essays by major scholars in the field looks at the ways in which cross-fertilization has taken place in Gothic writing from France, Germany, Britain and America over the last 200 years, and argues that Gothic writing reflects international exchanges in theme and form.

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

The use of the spatial metaphor of a left vs. right opposition originated in the tendency of 19th century European legislatures to seat more radical members to the left of the presiding official. For nearly five decades, the left has come to be identified with totalitarianism and with Marxism and Communism, the most successful leftist movements of the 20th century. Many 20th century British novels reflect values antithetical to capitalism, explore the plight of the working class, and challenge the traditional socioeconomic and political views of the right. The British novel of the left represents a long and rich cultural tradition that includes a large number of important works. These novels are best understood as part of a cultural phenomenon that reacts against the mainstream tradition of British literature but also establishes and draws upon traditions of its own. British leftist novels have been produced in a number of modes and subgenres, including realism, modernism, historical novels, detective novels, and science fiction. This reference book provides students and scholars interested in pursuing research into modern British leftist and working-class culture with a convenient starting place that provides extensive coverage of British leftist and working-class novels of the past century. Through an introductory essay, the volume provides a brief historical survey of the development of this important cultural phenomenon from the Chartist period of the early 19th century to recent working class novels by such contemporary authors as Pat Barker and James Kelman. This survey is followed by an introductory discussion of Marxist literary theory, which is used throughout the book to illuminate individual novels within a theoretical framework consistent with that of most of the novels themselves. The second major part of the book is a guide to selected critical and historical works that presents brief descriptions of a variety of studies useful as background to any study of the British novel of the left. The bulk of the book consists of discussions of more than 130 individual novels of the left in a variety of modes and subgenres. This section includes late 19th century works by authors such as Margaret Harkness and George Bernard Shaw, important early 20th century works such as Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a wide variety of works from the 1930s, when leftist cultural production was at its peak, and post World War II novels by writers such as Alan Sillitoe and John Berger. The book then ends with a discussion of a number of postcolonial novels of the left that help to illuminate issues relevant to British leftist culture as well.

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.

Katharine Mansfield's arrival in London in 1908 marked the start of her professional career as a writer and this study marks a revival of her reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. The international line-up of contributors attests to Mansfield's global appeal. By discussing her fiction in relation to her life, the contributors to this critical work present reinterpretations and readings. Enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to her diaries and letters, these readings combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class and gender, biography/autobiography. The historical and aesthetic studies of Mansfield's work all take place within a framework of modernist literature, criticism and theory, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be a Modernist while allocating Mansfield a firm place in any current study of Modernism.

This work deals with the fundamentals of novel writing and the execution of such. Though it engages specific notions of literary and cultural theory, it privileges the architectonics of the texts themselves as it crosses boundaries of both time and culture. The novels include: Austen's "Northanger Abbey", Beckett's "Company", Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", Hamsun's "Hunger", Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", Lispector's "Hour of the Star" and Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept".

The writers of Gothic literature reflect in their works the concerns and fears of the times in which they were created. These fears, in turn, destabilize the reader; that is, they create within the reader a sense of uneasiness characteristic of the Gothic genre, an uneasiness that comes from the challenging of social and cultural conventions or cherished beliefs. In doing so, these works are also cultural artifacts, for they reflect issues central to society at a given point in time. This book examines the process of destabilization in the modern American Gothic. The volume focuses on the works of three popular 20th-century Gothic writers: H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. It argues that science and technology are central to the destabilization process in works by these authors, and it demonstrates how, as cultural artifacts, their writings reflect the fears and concerns of contemporary society. Thus the volume demonstrates how the works of these authors remain within the Gothic literary tradition, while they simultaneously adapt that tradition for a modern audience.

Chance, and its representation in literature, has a long and problematic history. It is a vital aspect of the way we experience the world, and yet its function is frequently marginalised and downplayed. Offering a new reading of the development of the novel during the mid-twentieth century, Jordan argues that this simple novelistic paradox became more pressing during a period in which chance became a cultural, scientific and literary preoccupation - through scientific developments such as quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, the influence of existential philosophy, the growth of gambling, and the uncertainty provoked by the Second World War. In tracing the novel's representation of chance during this crucial period, we see both the development of the novel, and draw wider conclusions about the relationship between narrative and the contingent, the arbitrary and the uncertain. While the novel had historically rejected, marginalised or undermined chance, during this period it becomes a creative and welcome co-contributor to the novel's development, as writers such as Samuel Beckett, B.S. Johnson, Henry Green and Iris Murdoch show.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1963 and 1990, draw together research by leading academics on Virginia Woolf, and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The volumes include literary criticism on Virginia Woolf's novels, poetry, plays and essays, through the lens of linguistics, narrative theory, psychoanalysis and textual analysis, whilst also exploring the literary modernist movement. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature, history and linguistics respectively.

This edited volume is a wide ranging collection of essays on Ernest Hemingway and his work by some of the world's leading scholars and critics in the field of Hemingway studies. The collection offers the latest views--and some of the most challenging--of many of the best scholars in the field. The conclusions drawn are as various as the sixteen contributors; many of which challenge generally accepted views in the field. This study will be of interest and use to Hemingway "buffs," to scholars of modern American literature, and to academic libraries.

Bonner . . . provides a compendium of information, helpful to the undergraduate as well as to the scholar; a chronology of Chopin's life; nine translations by Chopin herself of French short stories, eight of which are by Guy de Maupassant, a major literary influence (five of these published here for the first time); period maps of Missouri, Louisiana, and New Orleans, and a 13-page bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources, which is thorough and organized for easy reference. The bulk of the book is devoted to a Dictionary of Characters, Places, Titles, Terms, and People from the Life and Works of Kate Chopin.' The Dictionary' will be especially helpful to those readers . . . who are unfamiliar with the Cajun and Creole terms--e.g., lagniappe, jambalaya--appearing in Chopin's fiction, or with the many references to French Catholicism made by her characters. . . . Overall, this volume is a valuable tool for both the novice and experienced Chopin reader, and is highly recommended. "Choice"

Recent years have witnessed a major rebirth of interest in the works of Kate Chopin, author of two novels and nearly 100 short stories. The current volume makes an important contribution to the study of Chopin's work by providing a dictionary of characters, places, plot briefs, poem briefs, biographical items, and selected terms; period maps of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Missouri; and a bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources. Also featured are Chopin's translations of eight Guy de Maupassant stories, five of which appear here in print for the first time, and one story by Adrien Vely.

The dictionary delineates the characters and places in Chopin's fiction, many of which reappear as major and minor elements throughout her work. Of particular significance are the many unnamed characters who contribute to the development of recurring social themes. The maps of relevant areas in Louisiana and Missouri will help make the connections between character and place, story, and setting more concrete. The bibliographic essay covers editions, manuscripts, and letters in the primary sources section. Biography and criticism, including general appraisals and those addressed to special topics or particular works, are included in the secondary sources section. The aim throughout is to resolve basic questions and confusions that persist regarding Chopin's work so that the reader can concentrate more productively--and more enjoyably--on the issues of form, theme, and influence that dominate her fiction.

A fresh set of concerns face the twenty-first century British novelist. In this study of the four key novelists Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell, the the changes in narrative approaches and critical directions of a new post-1989 fiction are explored. Close readings of the writers are informed by a range of contemporary theorists, critics and commentators to reveal the emphases of twenty-first century fiction. Terror, fear, consumerism, multinationalism, and corporatism: the terms circulating in culture and social networks are evident in Smith's faith in ethical living, Aslam's consideration of multiculturalism, the novels Kunzru builds around the politics of identity and in the importance Mitchell places on the interconnectedness of human life. By putting the emergence of a new British literary dynamic in the context of ethical as well as global contexts, this study analyzes the transformed fictional perceptions of a world no longer defined by the stand off of super powers.

The fin de siecle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siecle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society.