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.

This open access book explores literary works and practices - always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations - in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures. These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions - including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific - are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

How did Jane Austen come to write six novels that are still widely regarded as some of the highest achievements of the genre? The answer lies in understanding what Austen read, and how she read it. Jane Austen the Reader shows how the books Austen read - and the critical way in which she read them - influenced her writing, and her artistic innovations. Austen's steadfast belief in the possibilities of fiction sustained her through early rejection and disappointment, and led to the creation of some of literature's masterpieces. Austen devoured drama, history, poetry and novels, but it was not just as a passive consumer looking for entertainment, nor as a writer searching for ideas that Austen engaged with literature. Rather, she was a critical reader - investigating and evaluating literature, and articulating in her own works her vision of what the novel could be.

Four renowned sagas about Icelandic poets (or skalds) - "Bjarnar Saga", "Gunnlaugs Saga", "Hallfredar Saga", and "Korm ks Saga" - provide the focus for this book. Discussion centers on the verses included in these sagas; the special characteristics of skalds; medieval and modern interpretations of the sagas; their affiliation with other Scandinavian and European literature; and their place in evolving social constructions of gender and love relationships. The constituent chapters combine to form an integral monograph, with introduction, bibliography and index.

What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much praise and critical disdain simultaneously. This Guide returns to the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, to explore and analyse the full range of contradictory responses that the Gothic evoked. Angela Wright appraises the key criticism surrounding the Gothic fiction of this period, from eighteenth-century accounts to present-day commentaries. Adopting an easy-to-follow thematic approach, the Guide examines: - contemporary criticism of the Gothic - the aesthetics of terror and horror - the influence of the French Revolution - religion, nationalism and the Gothic - the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic - the relationship between gender and the Gothic. Concise and authoritative, this indispensable Guide provides an overview of Gothic criticism and covers the work of a variety of well-known Gothic writers, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and many others.

Lady Caroline Lamb was described by her lover, Lord Byron, as having a heart like a "little volcano" and as "the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago." She wrote witty and revealing letters to fellow writers like Lady Morgan, William Godwin, Robert Malthus, and Amelia Opie, and to her publishers John Murray and Henry Colburn, to her cousins Hart, Georgiana, and Harrio, as well as to her mother, husband, son, and lovers. In those letters, she told her correspondents "the whole disgraceful truth" of her drug and alcohol addictions, her affairs with Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster, Lord Byron, and Michael Bruce, and her jealousy of her cousin Georgiana (whom William Lamb had "adored" before proposing to Caroline). She also revealed her efforts to make a happy life for her mentally retarded, epileptic son, Augustus, and her determination to become a respected writer of fiction and poetry.

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.

Showalter's thoughtful, detailed introductory essay is a comprehensive analysis between Rosetti's novella and Craik's essays...the biographical portrait of Christina Rossetti's conflicts makes her a vivid example of the psychological and social barriers to the development of the female poets...her description of Dinah Mulock Craik stressed this woman's common-sense approach to ameliorating the position of the working-class woman in society...useful to students of feminist theory and of Victorian literature.
--"Academic Library Book Review"

Cristina Rossetti was nineteen years old when she wrote Maude: Prose and Verse in 1850. Clearly autobiographical, the novel examines the heroine's endeavor to resist the notion that modesty, virtue and domesticity constitute the sole duties of womanhood.

For the precocious young poet, the work was only one of several projects of her teens. Growing up in London as the youngest child in a gifted and unusual family of artists and writers, Rossetti had early developed a poetic vocation. But by the time she wrote "Maude," the lively, passionate, and adventurous little girl who had hated needlework, delighted in fiercely competitive games of chess, and explored the country with her brothers became a painfully constrained, sickly, and over-scrupulous teenager. "Maude" makes clear that at least some of Rossetti's affliction came from anxieties about poetic achievement, her wishes both to be admired for her genius and to renounce it as unfeminine. Often overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina struggled to express her own independent authorial voice, and to resist a life bound by the constraints and demands of the traditional female role.

Other late Victorian attitudes towards Anglican women's communities are brought out in "On Sisterhoods" by Dinah Mulock Craik which appeared in Longman's magazine in 1883. Craik herself worked on the literary border between feminine gentility and feminist rebellion. In 1850, when Christina Rossetti was writing "Maude" within the confines of her family, Dinah Mulock was supporting herself and her two younger brothers by her pen. "On Sisterhoods" confronts head-on the woman question.' Asserting that women's role is to find beauty in their lives through altruism and good works--to be more or less good women'--Craik provides a radical solution to the woman question' by advocating the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods, effectively women's co-operatives. For her, the strongest argument for such a sisterhood is the alternative life it offers to single women, with no outlets for their maternal emotions.

The third text presented here, Craik's "A Woman's Thoughts About Women," was a widely circulated manual of advice on female self-sufficiency for unmarried women, based on her own experience in a family left destitute by an eccentric father when she was nineteen. It addressed a pressing contemporary problem: the large number of urban single women who were well educated and qualified but for whom traditional employment offered no place. Craik understood that independence would come hard to middle-class women, yet she was optimistic about the ways women might re-educate themselves, abandoning false pride and learning to manage small businesses or conduct trades.

Throughout her career, Craik masked her private feminist views with disdain for women's rights and criticism of women's public activism. Unmarried and self-supporting until the age of forty, she wrote about the problems of single and working women in over fifty popular novels, children's stories and collections of essays.

Arguing that metaphor and the figurative are central to constructions and narrations of adolescence in America, this book uses a wide array of fictional and critical work, including texts by important authors such as Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides, to provide original and provocative new readings of adolescence.

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.

"The Gothic and the Rule of Law" is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power. It represents a highly significant contribution to Gothic criticism and to law and literature scholarship.

Re-reading Harry Potter is the first extended analysis of the social and political implications of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Arguments are primarily based on close readings of the first four Harry Potter books and the first two films, and a "text-to-world" method is followed. This study does not assume that the phenomenon concerns children alone, or should be lightly dismissed as a matter of pure entertainment as the amount of money, media coverage, and ideological unease involved indicates otherwise. The first part of the study provides a survey of responses (both of general readers and critics) to the Harry Potter books. The second part examines the presentation of certain themes, including gender, race, and desire, with a view to understanding how these may impinge on social and political concerns of our world.

This is the first work of criticism to reappraise all of this leading transnational author's film, television, short fiction and novel writing following his award of the Nobel Prize in 2017. Comprising contributions from world-leading Ishiguro scholars as well as new voices, the collection offers chapters devoted to each of the major works, each of which draws out thematic and stylistic connections with his body of work, both literary and filmic. This timely study, following the critical and popular success of his most recent fiction and his recognition by the Nobel committee, is the only comprehensive study of an author at the forefront of world literature. -- .

Bryan Giemza challenges the myth of the solitary genius, both in scientific and humanistic endeavors, and demonstrates how Cormac McCarthy is the exceptional figure whose work allows and encourages us to interrogate the marriage of the sciences and humanities. Drawing from previously unsurfaced archival connections as well as a range of primary sources and interview subjects, including those close to McCarthy, Giemza places McCarthy's work within contemporary scientific discourse and literary criticism. Timely and innovative in both content and structure, the volume includes a biographical examination of the writer's love of science and the path that led him to the Santa Fe Institute and offers a rare look behind its closed doors. The book probes the STEM subjects - with chapters focused on technology, engineering, and math - within and throughout McCarthy's fictional universe and biography. The final chapter explores McCarthy's friendship with Guy Davenport and their shared interest in creating a unified aesthetic theory alongside McCarthy's essays and most recent literary projects, The Passenger and Stella Maris. In arguing that science and art are connected by aesthetics, Giemza confirms the profound truth of McCarthy's unwavering belief that "There's a beauty to science" and a language of human understanding that transcends words.

Waugh's life and his literary life exist in fascinating, dynamic relationship. Virtually all of his fiction was autobiographical, yet he maintained that his novels were 'objects', unrelated to the life of their author. This study traces the shifting relationship of ascertainable fact and imaginative fiction throughout Waugh's career, focusing on the endless negotiation he conducted between life and art, and on why, from being author of the anarchic, hilarious Decline and Fall , he transformed himself into the author of the romantic, eschatological Brideshead Revisited .

Featuring an internationally distinguished list of contributors, "Kipling and Beyond" reassesses Kiplings texts and their reception in order to explore new approaches in postcolonial studies. The collection asks why Kipling continues to be a significant cultural icon, and what this legacy means in the context of todays Anglo-American globalisation.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) is today chiefly remembered for his Great War poetry. His celebrated Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a classic of autobiography in fictional form, yet the rest of Sassoon's long literary career and his place within the Georgian movement have not yet received sustained critical attention. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory is the first survey of the poet's published work since his death and the first to draw on the edited diaries and letters. Taking his lead from Sassoon's declaration that his poetry was his 'real biography', Paul Moeyes traces Sassoon's literary development within the context of his autobiographical writings. We learn how Sassoon's family background and Jewish inheritance, his troubled sexuality, his experience of war - in particular his public opposition to it - his relationship to the Georgian poets and other writers, and his eventual withdrawal to country life shaped his creativity. Throughout his career Sassoon experimented with poetic form, with varying degrees of success, but it was in the Sherston trilogy and his autobiographies that he found his true voice, evoking a bygone age of pastoral contentment and social order rooted in class. Sassoon's status as a war poet has overshadowed his wider achievements and the complex personality behind them. This critical evaluation of Sassoon's work is long overdue and will provide a valuable starting-point for future reappraisals of a writer for whom life and art were fused.

A celebratory history and appreciation of the varied, wildly experimental nature of fiction in eighteenth-century England In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans a clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history-by no means inexorable-might have taken quite a different course.

Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike.

The subject of divided critical opinion because of the experimental nature of his writings and his use of radical subject matter, Jerzy Kosinski, author of such novels as The Painted Bird and Being There, nevertheless ranks among the most celebrated of contemporary American authors. By the time of his death in May 1991, 70 million copies of his novels were in circulation. He received various academic posts, awards, and fellowships during his lifetime--these and the immense popularity of his writings confirm Kosinski as a major figure in modern American literature. The range of critical response is in evidence in this carefully annotated bibliography. It comprises listings of both primary and secondary sources on Kosinski through 1990. The primary sources provide editions of his novels, recordings, nonfiction books, miscellaneous writings, and interviews. Secondary sources include reference materials, books and monographs, biographical sources, dissertations, and criticism and reviews specific to particular works. Access is facilitated by author and subject indexes. The work will be of special value to those interested in Holocaust and expatriate fiction as well as to students of twentieth-century American and American-Jewish literature in general.

Now in paperback, this book considers crime fighting from the perspective of the civilian city-goer, from the mid-Victorian garotting panics to 1914. It charts the shift from the use of body armour to the adoption of exotic martial arts through the works of popular playwrights and novelists, examining changing ideals of urban, middle-class heroism.

This title concerns itself with dress in the novels of Samuel Richardson, and how attire confirms, contributes to, or challenges the characters' fashioning of self, and the self as others (characters or readers) perceive it.

Winner of the President's Faculty Book Award at Texas Tech University
Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction.Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities by finding their personal voices within a culturally diverse and gender conscious environment.