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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Novels, other prose & writers
Winner of the DHLSNA Biennial Award for a Book by a Newly Published
Scholar Exploring draft manuscripts, alternative texts and
publishers' typescripts, The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence reveals
new insights into the writings and writing practices of one of the
most important writers of the 20th century. Focusing on the most
productive years of Lawrence's writing life, between 1909 and 1926
- a time that saw the writing of major novels such as Women in Love
and the controversial The Plumed Serpent, as well as his first
major short story collection - this book is the first to apply
analytical methods from the field of genetic criticism to the
archives of this canonical modernist author. The book unearths and
re-evaluates a variety of themes including the body, death, love,
trauma, depression, memory, the sublime, selfhood, and endings, and
includes original transcriptions as well as reproductions from the
manuscripts themselves. By charting Lawrence's writing processes,
the book also highlights how the very distinction between 'process'
and 'product' became a central theme in his work.
This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human
extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without
interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary
travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for
rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the
potentiality of human species extinction, following instead
traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist
communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the
consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth
great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no
opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final
end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human
exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and
post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of
the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest
apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In
these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and
disintegrations of difference and othering render human
self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations
with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first
in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the
imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species
extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter
Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of
human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go
extinct.
Plants are silent, still, or move slowly; we do not have the sense
that they accompany us, or even perceive us. But is there something
that plants are telling us? Is there something about how they live
and connect, how they relate to the world and other plants that can
teach us about ecological thinking, about ethics and politics?
Grounded in Thoreau's ecology and in contemporary plant studies,
Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought offers answers to those
questions by pondering such concepts as co-dependence, the
continuity of life forms, relationality, cohabitation, porousness,
fragility, the openness of beings to incessant modification by
other beings and phenomena, patience, waiting, slowness and
receptivity.
Designed to meet the requirements for students at GCSE and A level,
this accessible educational edition offers the complete text of
Never Let Me Go with a comprehensive study guide. Intended for
individual study as well as class use, Geoff Barton's guide: -
clearly introduces the context of the novel and its author; -
examines in detail its themes, characters and structure; - looks at
the novel in the author's own words, and at different critical
receptions; - provides glossaries and test questions to prompt
deeper thinking. In one of the most memorable novels of recent
years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students
growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England.
Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly
dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at a
seemingly idyllic school, Hailsham, and with the fate that has
always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A
story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged
throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat is one of the most
recognized writers today. Her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory,
was an Oprah Book Club selection, and works such as Krik? Krak! and
Brother, I'm Dying have earned her a MacArthur ""genius"" grant and
National Book Award nominations. Yet despite international acclaim
and the relevance of her writings to postcolonial, feminist,
Caribbean, African diaspora, Haitian, literary, and global studies,
Danticat's work has not been the subject of a full-length
interpretive literary analysis until now. In Edwidge Danticat: The
Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadege T. Clitandre offers a
comprehensive analysis of Danticat's exploration of the dialogic
relationship between nation and diaspora. Clitandre argues that
Danticat-moving between novels, short stories, and
essays-articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a form of
social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and
global level. Using the echo trope to approach Danticat's
narratives and subjects, Clitandre effectively navigates between
the reality of diaspora and imaginative opportunities that
diasporas produce. Ultimately, Clitandre calls for a reconstitution
of nation through a diasporic imaginary that informs the way people
who have experienced displacement view the world and imagine a more
diverse, interconnected, and just future.
Author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude,
Jonathan Lethem is one of the most celebrated and significant
American writers working today. This new scholarly study draws on a
deep knowledge of all Lethem's work to explore the range of his
writing, from his award-winning fiction to his work in comics and
criticism. Reading Lethem in relation to five themes crucial to his
work, Joseph Brooker considers influence and intertextuality; the
role of genres such as crime, science fiction and the Western; the
imaginative production of worlds; superheroes and comic book
traditions; and the representation of New York City. Close readings
of Lethem's fiction are contextualized by reference to broader
conceptual and comparative frames, as well as to Lethem's own
voluminous non-fictional writing and his adaptation of precursors
from Franz Kafka to Raymond Chandler. Rich in critical insight,
Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing demonstrates how an
understanding of this author illuminates contemporary literature
and culture at large.
A brand new gangland series by bestselling author Kerry Kaya!Meet
the Tempest family - and get ready for the storm. Tracey Tempest
adores her husband, Terry. But when on his 50th birthday, tragedy
strikes, Tracey must face the terrifying prospect of a future
without him. Desperate for answers and boiling with rage, Tracey
wants revenge... Together with her beloved sons, Ricky and Jamie,
the Tempest family dig deeper into Terry's past - who would want to
kill him, and why? But what they discover changes everything they
knew about the man they loved and risks tearing their own family
apart. Can the Tempests weather the storm or will the past destroy
them all? Perfect for fans of Kimberley Chambers and Martina Cole.
What people are saying about Kerry Kaya! 'Crime writing at its
best! Believable characters - a must read!' Bestselling author
Gillian Godden
The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated
intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her
literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic
works of the group. With chapters written by leading international
scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores
this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and
critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships -
personal and literary - with such major Modernist figures as
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as
well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against
Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of
Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.
Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep
interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and
Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with
key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly
developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental
imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later
dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his
aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology
through the 20th century. Covering important later works including
Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology
sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings
of the embodied mind.
Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New
Man traces efforts within contemporary American feminist utopias to
imagine healthier conceptions of manhood. As this analysis
illuminates, feminist works envisioning the improved society and
its attending masculinities make up an overlooked site for mining
new masculinities. During the years in which such utopias moved
from the margins to the mainstream, the early 1970s to the
mid-2010s, these novels grew more complex, challenging essentialist
conceptions of masculinity and female experience. As this analysis
demonstrates, these texts vary in their focus, but are united by an
interest in transforming patriarchal masculinities and replacing
them with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional
feminism. This book analyzes the centrality of such alternative
masculinities to these ideal societies and the ways feminist
writers present in their fiction new conceptions of manhood pivotal
to discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis of American
masculinity.
Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews
with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994
literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a new and
unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent
the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests.
The number and length of the later conversations attest to his
star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book
Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most
recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic
yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the
1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and
Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord
inNorthern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cecile Maudet
is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote
Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysisof
McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his
work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing,
what he hopes to achieve, as well the challenge of writing each
novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers
will note how many of his responses include stories in which
hehimself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks
reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness
of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of
ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.
The German Romantics were fascinated by the Orient and its
potential to inspire poetic creation. E.T.A. Hoffmann was no
exception: across the wide range of his work as an author,
composer, and music critic, the Orient is a persistent topic. In
particular, Hoffmann creatively absorbed the influence of the
imagined Orient - its popular European reception - on German
literature, music, and scholarship. Joanna Neilly's study considers
for the first time the breadth and nuance of Hoffmann's particular
brand of orientalism, examining the significance of his oriental
characters and themes for a new understanding of nineteenth-century
cultural production. A self-reflexive writer who kept a keen eye on
contemporary trends, Hoffmann is at the forefront of discussions
about cultural transfer and its implications for the modern artist.
The German Romantics were fascinated by the Orient and its
potential to inspire poetic creation. E.T.A. Hoffmann was no
exception: across the wide range of his work as an author,
composer, and music critic, the Orient is a persistent topic. In
particular, Hoffmann creatively absorbed the influence of the
imagined Orient - its popular European reception - on German
literature, music, and scholarship. Joanna Neilly's study considers
for the first time the breadth and nuance of Hoffmann's particular
brand of orientalism, examining the significance of his oriental
characters and themes for a new understanding of nineteenth-century
cultural production. A self-reflexive writer who kept a keen eye on
contemporary trends, Hoffmann is at the forefront of discussions
about cultural transfer and its implications for the modern artist.
As a writer and forward-thinking social critic, Lillian Smith
(1897-1966) was an astute chronicler of the twentieth-century
American South and an early proponent of the civil rights movement.
From her home on Old Screamer Mountain overlooking Clayton,
Georgia, Smith wrote and spoke openly against racism, segregation,
and Jim Crow laws long before the civil rights era. Bringing
together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews,
and excerpts from her longer fiction and non fiction, A Lillian
Smith Reader offers the first comprehensive collection of her work
and a compelling introduction to one of the South's most important
writers. A conservatory-trained music teacher who left the
profession to assume charge of her family's girls' camp in Rabun
County, Georgia, Smith began her literary career writing for a
journal that she coedited with her lifelong companion, Paula
Snelling, successively titled Pseudopodia (1936), the North Georgia
Review (1937-41), and South Today (1942-45). Known today for her
controversial, best-selling novel, Strange Fruit (1944); her
collection of autobiographical essays, Killers of the Dream (1949);
and her lyrical documentary, Now Is the Time (1955), Smith was
acclaimed and derided in equal measures as a southern white liberal
who critiqued her culture's economic, political, and religious
institutions as dehumanising for all: white and black, male and
female, rich and poor. She was also a frequent and eloquent
contributor to periodicals such as the Saturday Review, LIFE, the
New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times. The influence of
Smith's oeuvre extends far beyond these publications. Her legacy
rests on her sense of social justice, her articulation of racial
and social inequities, and her challenges to the status quo. In
their totality, her works propose a vision of justice and human
understanding that we have yet to achieve.
Thomas Mann arrived in Princeton in 1938, in exile from Nazi
Germany, and feted in his new country as "the greatest living man
of letters." This beautiful new book from literary critic Stanley
Corngold tells the little known story of Mann's early years in
America and his encounters with a group of highly gifted emigres in
Princeton, which came to be called the Kahler Circle, with Mann at
its center. The Circle included immensely creative, mostly
German-speaking exiles from Nazism, foremost Mann, Erich Kahler,
Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein, all of whom, during the
Circle's nascent years in Princeton, were "stupendously"
productive. In clear, engaging prose, Corngold explores the traces
the Circle left behind during Mann's stay in Princeton, treating
literary works and political statements, anecdotes, contemporary
history, and the Circle's afterlife. Weimar in Princeton portrays a
fascinating scene of cultural production, at a critical juncture in
the 20th century, and the experiences of an extraordinary group of
writers and thinkers who gathered together to mourn a lost culture
and to reckon with the new world in which they had arrived.
This volume brings together candid, revealing interviews with one
of the twentieth century's master prose writers. Vladimir Nabokov
(1899-1977) was a Russian American scientist, poet, translator, and
professor of literature. Critics throughout the world celebrated
him for developing the luminous and enigmatic style which advanced
the boundaries of modern literature more than any author since
James Joyce. In a career that spanned over six decades, he produced
dozens of iconic works, including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and his
classic autobiography, Speak, Memory. The twenty-eight interviews
and profiles in this collection weredrawn from Nabokov's numerous
print and broadcast appearances over a period of nineteen years.
Beginning with the controversy surrounding the American publication
of Lolita in 1958, he offers trenchant, witty views on society,
literature, education, the role of the author, and a range of other
topics. He discusses the numerousliterary and symbolic allusions in
his work, his use of parody and satire, as well as analyses of his
own literary influences. Nabokov also provided a detailed portrait
of his life-from his aristocratic childhood in pre-revolutionary
Russia, education at Cambridge, apprenticeship as an emigre writer
in the capitals of Europe, to his decision in 1940 to immigrate to
the United States, where he achieved renown and garnered an
international readership. The interviews in this collection are
essential for seeking aclearer understanding of the life and work
of an author who was pivotal in shaping the landscape of
contemporary fiction.
Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has
usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's
fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours. Rando
explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is
oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and
invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the
prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope
to contemplate it from all sides. Casting fresh light on the ways
in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce's approach to literary
content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative
critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks
agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.
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