Making History New explores how several British modernists applied the experimental methods of literary modernism to the writing of narrative history and historical novels. The historical novel is usually assumed to be only a concern of either nineteenth century realism or postmodernism, but the historical works of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West evidence a modernist obsession with historical narrative. Works like Nostromo, Parade's End and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon utilized literary techniques we have come to associate with modernism-fragmentation, subjectivity, nonlinearity-in their effort to narrate the past, but unlike many of their contemporaries they never jettisoned narrative as the primary means for textual engagements with the historical past. Such a divisioning between narrative and non-narrative modes of writing history also mark the field of historiography in the wake of the Holocaust, with poststructural challenges to narrative history compelling many historians to deprioritize the role of narrative. By contrast, many historians have experimented in "creative history," works of history that acknowledge the possible limitations of narrative but that attempt to ingest such problems into the very form of historical recreation. The modernist historians can provide models for such an enterprise, as they were aware of the pitfalls of narrative, but were also driven by an ethical imperative to relate the past in the forms of stories, and so employed modernist techniques to both signal the past but also stage the difficulties of the recreation of history in language.

Uniquely placed to explore the worldwide phenomenon of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the book offers the first full-length study of Larsson's work in both its written and filmed forms.

From the claustrophobic environment of Haworth Parsonage emerged an astonishing range and diversity of character and talent. Between them the two youngest Bronte sisters wrote three novels, each sharply individual in style, purpose and subject-matter. The title, first published in 1968, discusses and illustrates the similarities and differences in the writings of Emily and Anne Bronte, paying particular attention to their place in the development of the Victorian novel. He stresses the complexities of structure and characterisation in Wuthering Heights, introducing the reader first to the background of the novel. This book will be of interest to students of English Literature.

David Mitchell has emerged as one of the leading figures of the current "under-50" generation of contemporary British writers and is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of scholars, students, and readers of contemporary literature, " A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell" explores Mitchell's primary concerns--including those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, ethnicity--across the six novels published thus far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, Ishiguro, and Rushdie--writers whose work explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. O'Donnell traces the through-lines of Mitchell's work from "Ghostwritten "to "The Bone Clocks "and, with a chapter on each of the six novels, tracks the evolution of Mitchell's fictional project. The concluding chapter addresses Mitchell as a writer of the future.

'Meticulously researched and lucidly written, this volume will likely become and remain the definitive study of the history of works Hardy adapted for the stage and of the Hardy Players who, in the main, performed them.' - John J. Conlon, English Literature in Transition;'Much new research informs this first full-length study of Hardy's involvement in stage productions based on his own works. The result is a closely reasoned account of the conflict between his desire to see his plots and characters brought to the stage, and his awareness of the attending difficulties.' - M.S. Vogeler, Choice;Despite Hardy's lifelong interest in the theatre, this is the first comprehensive study of all aspects of his involvement with the stage, the only area of his literary activities left substantially unexplored. It discusses his own experiments at crafting scenarios and plays, all productions, both amateur and professional, with which he had any involvement, and his troubled negotiations with adapters, producers, and actors. It is fascinating for what it reveals about both the artist and the man, and offers particular insight into the paradoxical connections between the retiring Dorchester celebr

Old Norse texts offer many different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women who occupy diverse social and economic positions or who have varying racial origins. Covering a much wider range of texts than have previous studies, this book presents a comprehensive and ground-breaking analysis of women in Old Norse literature. Raising new, probing questions, generated by theoretical insights from comparative studies, and from feminist, queer, monster and speech act theory, Johanna Katrin Frioriksdottir explores the many ways in which medieval Icelandic sagas construct the relationship between women and power. Illuminating the preoccupations, desires, and anxieties of the sagas' authors and audiences, this book offers excitingly fresh perspectives on how Icelandic prose genres mediate medieval attitudes to women, power, social organization, and ideal human behavior.

This new book on the Brontes concentrates on the way in which the literary interests and expressions of Charlotte and Emily were built up. It makes use of recent research into background and reading matter to investigate the development of the authors' poetry and novels.

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.

"Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics" combines the fields of queer and diasporic writing. It opens up an entire new domain where social and cultural meanings of sexuality within Caribbean space become objects of historical, colonial and literary investigations. By juxtaposing queerness, nation and belonging, this book unlocks both disciplines, making them permeable to other contexts and perspectives. Exploring the works of writers such as Shani Mootoo, Jamaica Kincaid and Lawrence Scott, this book investigates the Western notions of sexual identity and belongingness alongside postcolonial deployments of nation, diaspora and sexuality. The book adds to the abundant fields of queer and diaspora studies by intersecting them, in order not only to render their ability to work together but also to expose their weaknesses and highly contested underpinnings.

"Investigating modern art, literature, theory and the law, this book illustrates the different ways in which sex, gender and time intersect. It demonstrates that time offers new critical perspectives on sex and gender and makes problematic reductive understandings of sexual identity as well as straight and queer time"--

Sterne's work has been received, translated and imitated in most European countries with great success. Interest in his life and work grew into a literary cult at an early stage and led to the vogue of sentimentalism: Sterne became a legendary English writer, second only to Shakespeare. Among the topics discussed in this volume are: questions arising from the serial nature of much of Sterne's writings; the various ways in which translators all across Europe coped with the specific problems which the witty and ingenious Sternean text poses; the extent to which especially "A sentimental Journey" was regarded as a provocative political text and was therefore used as a weapon in nationalist movements; how "Tristram Shandy" became a test case for theories of humour and sentiment; how Sterne's texts and the "Letters" were used as didactic tools; how the history of the reception of Sterne mirrors the continental shift from a French cultural paradigm to a German and English one; and how the cult of Maria materialized in prints, paintings and ceramics. Trans-national patterns are emphasized, as are the impact of Sterne on European sentimentalism and modernist narrative theory.

The author of such works as "A Brighter Sun" (1952), "The Lonely Londoners" (1956), and "The Plains of Caroni" (1970), West Indian novelist Samuel Selvon is attracting growing amounts of scholarly attention. Nonetheless, criticism of his works has largely been imbalanced, with most scholarship focusing primarily on his language. This book corrects that imbalance by placing Selvon's novels within historical, sociological, and ideological contexts. A new interpretation of Selvon's achievement as a novelist, the volume looks, for the first time, at his works in terms of categories of novels--peasant, middle-class, and immigrant.

The book demonstrates that each category is different from the others, and that novels within categories are similar. Thus it provides a coherent vision of Selvon's canon. It illustrates, as well, the development of Selvon's philosophy of West Indians as peasant, bourgeois, and immigrant. In doing so, it explores the significance of ethnicity in his works and discusses Selvon's imaginative apotheosis of the Indo-Trinidadian peasant and the diminution of the Afro-Trinidadian immigrant. The volume also studies Selvon's fictional and rhetorical techniques and argues that his works range from Bildungsroman to picaresque to epic to satire.

Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction traces the preoccupation in Murdoch's fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it. This argument was given an extra resonance by the death of Murdoch after Alzheimer's disease in 1999, when the book was first published - a curious blurring of life and work typical of the posthumous reassessment of Murdoch. This new edition includes detailed readings of novels not discussed in the original ( The Bell, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine , and The Philosopher's Pupil ) and includes a new preface, an updated bibliography and three new chapters covering Murdoch's most important and popular novels, considering in more depth her relationship with the dominant literary and intellectual currents of her time.

The first extensive study of gay and lesbian historical fiction, this book demonstrates how the highly popular genre helps us understand gay and lesbian history. It shows not only why the genre should be taken more seriously by historians but also how it implicitly works to ameliorate divisions between Christianity and homosexuality. The book contends that gay and lesbian historical fictions model ways of approaching sexual and historical mystery not as a threat to understanding but as its ground. These fictions thus implicitly undermine the supposed dichotomy between secular and sacred ways of knowing, thereby expanding the resources for ethical debate about homosexuality.

Charlotte Bronte: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Bronte's life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Bronte's first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Bronte's legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author's diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers. -- .

There have been several biographies of George Eliot but this is the first study to focus on her intellectual development. The book provides an analysis of the biographical and intellectual factors which encouraged George Eliot to decide upon fiction as her chosen mode of expression, and demonstrates how that decision was influenced by, and an echoing of, J.S.Mill's and Carlyle's critiques of philosophy.

New essays providing an up-to-date picture of the engagement of artists, philosophers, and critics with Kafka's work. The topic of "Kafka after Kafka" is a fascinating one: the engagement of artists, philosophers, and critics in dialogical exchange with Kafka's works. The present collection of new essays highlights the engagement of lesser knownartists and commentators with Kafka, and represents those who are well known, such as Arendt, Blanchot, Nabokov, and Coetzee, from new perspectives. The eleven essays contained here represent the most recent scholarly engagements with this topic. An essay on major trends in current Kafka criticism provides background for several essays on novelists, philosophers, and critics whose relationship to Kafka is not very well known. A section devoted to Kafka from an Israeli perspective includes artists not commonly known in the US or Europe (Ya'acov Shteinberg, Hezi Leskly, Sayed Kashua), as well as an essay on the recent trial in Israel regarding the fate of Kafka's literary legacy. A final section addresses important contemporary approaches to Kafka in film studies, animal studies, the graphic novel, and in postmodern culture and counterculture. Contributors: Iris Bruce, Stanley Corngold, AmirEngel, Mark H. Gelber, Sander L. Gilman, Caroline Jessen, Tali Latowicki, Michael G. Levine, Ido Lewit, Vivian Liska, Alana Sobelman. Iris Bruce is Associate Professor of German at McMaster University. Mark H. Gelber is Senior Professor and Director of the Center for Austrian and German Studies at Ben-Gurion University.

Women and the Word examines why, in today's secular society, so many of the finest British and American women novelists seem preoccupied with Biblical themes and stories. It offers informed and challenging analysis of individual novels and stories. By analyzing those texts in the context of myth and religion, it makes an important and groundbreaking contribution to a number of the inter-disciplinary debates taking place within women's studies.

Fimi explores the evolution of Tolkien's mythology throughout his lifetime by examining how it changed as a result of his life story and contemporary cultural and intellectual history. This new approach and scope brings to light neglected aspects of Tolkien's imaginative vision and contextualizes his fiction.

An anarchist by temperament, the beautiful and talented Ding Ling attempted to find her way in the world alone. She had a few female friends and a few significant male others, but she rebelled against her family. Most importantly, she rebelled against the Chinese Communist Party to which she desperately hoped to belong. The first part of a comprehensive biography of the major 20th century Chinese author, Ding Ling, this work draws not only on her memoirs, but on numerous secondary sources, many of which have become available only in the last two decades.

Though born into a wealthy family, Jiang Bingzi was raised by her mother after the untimely death of her father. She went to school in the May 4 era, when protest was in the air, the radical ideas of Mao were already in print, and her idol, Lu Xun, was making his literary mark. In her late teens she renounced her engagement, changed her name, and fled to Shanghai where she embraced the anarchist movement. The loss of her brother and lifelong friend, Wang Jianhong, and the loss of her significant other, Hu Yepin, all threw her into various states of depression, not to mention her own abduction by the Guomindang.

Nevertheless, Ding Ling wrote her way out of despair and into the public limelight. Her first collection of short stories, "In the Darkness, " made her famous because of its profound grasp of feminine psychology and its daring treatment of human sexuality. But when Ding Ling attempted to dispel the darkness in Yan'an, she, like everyone else, was told by Mao in his famous "Talks" to focus on the light. Ding Ling made all the necessary adjustments, literary and political. She survived the rectification campaign and mastered proletarian fiction. Mao loved her novel "The Sun Shines on the Sanggan" so much that he ranked her third among contemporaries. Soon, she was traveling to Eastern Europe and to Moscow where she consulted with Soviet notables. With the founding of the People's Republic, it appeared her star was on the rise. This study of Ding Ling and China's literary environment in the first half of the 20th century will be useful to scholars and students of contemporary Chinese history, literature, and women's studies.

This ground-breaking study argues that literature and criminology share a common concern to understand modernity and that this project is often focused upon gender-specific criminality. Central to this concern is duplicity masquerade and performance. These subjects are explored for the first time in relation to criminality with reference to a range of literary and popular texts, from Dickens and Poe through to Toni Morrison and Easton Ellis, in which the traditional boundaries between different genders and sexualities are made more fluid and complex than in traditional criminal narratives.

Using close readings and thematic studies of contemporary science fiction and postcolonial theory, ranging from discussions of Japanese and Canadian science fiction to a deconstruction of race and (post)colonialism in World of Warcraft, This book is the first comprehensive study of the complex and developing relationship between the two areas.

"Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode" provides the first full-length study of sensationalist and melodramatic elements in Hardy's novels. Through a discussion of six of Hardy's texts, this book demonstrates the ways in which he uses the melodramatic mode to advance his critique of established Victorian cultural beliefs through the employment of non-realistic plot devices and sensational "excess."