'It's not a fair world I'm afraid. Beauty or fortune carries the day. You have the beauty and I the fortune, so there's every chance we'll succeed'In Regency England, marriage is everything. For young widow Sybella Lovatt, the time has come to find a suitable husband for her sister and ward Lucie. Male suitors are scarce near their Wiltshire estate, so the sisters resolve to head to London in time for the Season to begin. Once ensconced at the Mayfair home of Lady Godley, Lucie's godmother, the whirl of balls, parties and promenades can begin. But the job of finding a husband is fraught with rules and tradition. Jostling for attention are the two lords - the charming and irresistible Freddie Lynwood and the preternaturally handsome Valentine Ravenell, their enigmatic neighbour from Shotten Hall, Mr Brabazon, and the dangerous libertine Lord Rockliffe, with whom the brooding Brabazon is locked in deadly rivalry. Against the backdrop of glamorous Regency England, Sybella must settle Lucie's future, protect her own reputation, and resist the disreputable rakes determined to seduce the beautiful widow. As the Season ends, will the sisters have found the rarest of things - a suitable marriage with a love story to match? Sunday Times bestselling author Jane Dunn brings the Regency period irresistibly to life in a page-turning novel packed with surprising revelations, which all comes wittily, gloriously, good in the end. Perfect for fans of Gill Hornby, Janice Hadlow, Jane Austen, and anyone with a Bridgerton-shaped hole in their lives. Praise for Jane Dunn: 'Outstanding, perceptive and delightfully readable.' Sunday Times Books of the Year 'Jane Dunn has written a splendid piece of popular history with the ready-pen of a highly skilled writer, endowed with remarkable insight.' Roy Strong, Daily Mail 'Jane Dunn is one of our best biographers.' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times What readers say about Jane Dunn: 'Absolutely brilliant book. Easy, interesting and certainly a page-turner. Enjoyed reading this book so much.' 'I loved this book, Jane Dunn writes with an insight into Elizabeths and Marys psyches that is mesmerising. I couldn't put it down and was gutted when I finally finished it, at a loss of what to read next.' 'One of the best books I have ever read. I have always been interested in this period of history and felt that this book and the way Dunn writes helps to bring history alive. Once I started reading I could not stop.'

James Joyce's 1916 novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is about the early manhood of Stephen Dedalus, later one of the leading characters in Ulysses. Stephen's growing self-awareness as an artist forces him to reject the whole narrow world in which he has been brought up, including family ties, nationalism, and the Catholic religion.

Mark Twain is America's-perhaps the world's-best known humorous writer. Yet many commentators in his time and our own have thought of humor as merely an attractive surface feature rather than a crucial part of both the meaning and the structure of Twain's writings. This book begins with a discussion of humor, and then demonstrates how Twain's artistic strategies, his remarkable achievements, and even his philosophy were bound together in his conception of humor, and how this conception developed across a forty-five year career. Kolb shows that Twain is a writer whose lifelong mode of perception is essentially humorous, a writer who sees the world in the sharp clash of contrast, whose native language is exaggeration, and whose vision unravels and reorganizes our perceptions. Humor, in all its mercurial complexity, is at the center of Mark Twain's talent, his successes, and his limitations. It is as a humorist-amiably comic, sharply satiric, grimly ironic, simultaneously humorous and serious-that he is best understood.

This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen's analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the political situation in both the United States and abroad has often been described as a "state of exception": an emergency situation in which the normal rule of law is suspended. In such a situation, the need for good decisions is felt ever more strongly. This book investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of various decisions represented in novels published around 9/11: Martel's Life of Pi, Eugenides' Middlesex, Coetzee's Disgrace, and Sebald's Austerlitz. De Boever's readings of the novels revolve around what he calls the aesthetic decision.' Which aesthetics do the characters and narrators in the novels adopt in a situation of crisis? How do these aesthetic decisions relate to the ethical and political decisions represented in the novels? What can they reveal about real-life ethical and political decisions? This book uncovers the politics of allegory, autobiography, focalization, and montage in today's planetary state of exception.

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolano. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

The Jewish presence in Latin America is a recent chapter in Jewish history that has produced a remarkable body of literature that gives voice to the fascinating experience of Jews in Latin American lands. This book explores the complexity of Jewish identity in Latin America through the fictional Jewish characters of five novels written by Jewish authors from the Southern Cone: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. It examines how trauma and memory have profound effects on shaping the identity of these Jewish characters who have to forge a new identity as they begin to interact with the Latin American societies of their newly adopted homes. The first three novels present stories narrated by the first generation of immigrants who arrived in Latin American lands escaping pogroms in Russia, and the increasing persecution and anti-Semitism in Europe, in the decades prior to World War II. The fourth novel analyses the identity conflicts experienced by a second generation Latin American born Jew who questions his Jewish, questions of assimilation and integration in to his society. The last novel closes this study with the existential crisis experienced by a perfectly assimilated non-religious Jew, who enquires about his Jewishness and compares himself to other Jews around him.

The author of such works as "Lamb, Cal, " and "Grace Notes," Bernard MacLaverty is one of Northern Ireland's leading--and most prolific--contemporary writers. Bringing together leading scholars from a full range of critical perspectives, this is a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on MacLaverty. Covering all of his novels and many of his short stories, the book explores the ways in which the author has grappled with such themes as The Troubles, the Holocaust, Catholicism, and music. "Bernard MacLaverty: Critical Readings" also includes coverage of the film adaptations of his work.

This book explores significant problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe. Maximillian E. Novak investigates a number of elements in Defoe's work by probing his interest in rendering of reality (what Defoe called "the Thing itself"). Novak examines Defoe's interest in the relationship between prose fiction and painting, as well as the various ways in which Defoe's woks were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. In this book, Novak attempts to consider the uniqueness and imaginativeness of various aspects of Defoe's writings including his way of evoking the seeming inability of language to describe a vivid scene or moments of overwhelming emotion, his attraction to the fiction of islands and utopias, his gradual development of the concepts surrounding Crusoe's cave, his fascination with the horrors of cannibalism, and some of the ways he attempted to defend his work and serious fiction in general. Most of all, Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives establishes the complexity and originality of Defoe as a writer of fiction.

Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 explores the intersections of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in America as it is depicted in the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth. Maggie McKinley reconsiders the longstanding association between masculinity and violence, locating a problematic paradox within works by these writers: as each author figures violence as central to the establishment of a liberated masculine identity, the use of this violence often reaffirms many constricting and emasculating cultural myths and power structures that the authors and their protagonists are seeking to overturn.

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo. By examining implicit and explicit allusion to these events in their work, it becomes apparent that both consider 9/11 a crucial event, and that it has profoundly impacted their work. From this important point, the volume focuses on the major change identifiable in both authors' work; a change in the perception, and conception, of time. This is not, however, a simple change after 2001. It allows, at the same time, a re-examination of both authors work, and the acknowledgment of time as a crucial concept to both authors throughout their careers. Engaging with several theories of time, and their reiteration and examination in both authors' work, this volume contributes both to the understanding of literary time, and to the work of Pynchon and DeLillo.

Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece. Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors. Approaching Silence promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endo, within and beyond the West. Includes an Afterword by Martin Scorsese on adapting Silence for the screen as well as the full text of Steven Dietz's play adaptation of Endo's novel.

The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction attempts to descry the historical and cultural contours of SF in the wake of technoculture studies. Rather than treating the genre as an isolated aesthetic formation, it examines SF's many lines of cross-pollination with technocultural realities since its inception in the nineteenth century, showing how SF's unique history and subcultural identity has been constructed in ongoing dialogue with popular discourses of science and technology. The volume consists of four broadly themed sections, each divided into eleven chapters. Section I, "Science Fiction as Genre," considers the internal history of SF literature, examining its characteristic aesthetic and ideological modalities, its animating social and commercial institutions, and its relationship to other fantastic genres. Section II, "Science Fiction as Medium," presents a more diverse and ramified understanding of what constitutes the field as a mode of artistic and pop-cultural expression, canvassing extra-literary manifestations of SF ranging from film and television to videogames and hypertext to music and theme parks. Section III, "Science Fiction as Culture," examines the genre in relation to cultural issues and contexts that have influenced it and been influenced by it in turn, the goal being to see how SF has helped to constitute and define important (sub)cultural groupings, social movements, and historical developments during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Finally, Section IV, "Science Fiction as Worldview," explores SF as a mode of thought and its intersection with other philosophies and large-scale perspectives on the world, from the Enlightenment to the present day.

The time period of 1990-2010 marks a significant moment in Spanish literary publishing that emphasized a new focus on Africa and African voices and signaled the beginning of a publishing boom of Hispano-African authors and themes. Africa in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, 1990-2010 analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary Spanish novel. Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, Mahan L. Ellison analyzes the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions at the turn of the twenty-first century. He examines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by novelists such as Lorenzo Silva, Concha Lopez Sarasua, Ramon Mayrata, and others. Throughout, Ellison also places the novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later.

Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday offers a critical prism through which Green's fiction-from his earliest published short stories, as an Eton schoolboy, through to his last dialogic novels of the 1950s-can be seen as a coherent, subtle, and humorous critique of the tension between class, style, and realism in the first half of the twentieth century. The study extends on-going critical recognition that Green's work is central to the development of the novel from the twenties to the fifties, acting as a vital bridge between late modernist, inter-war, post-war, and postmodernist fiction. The overarching contention is that the shifting and destabilizing nature of Green's oeuvre sets up a predicament similar to that confronted by theorists of the everyday. Consequently, each chapter acknowledges the indeterminacy of the writing, whether it be: the non-singular functioning (or malfunctioning) of the name; the open-ended, purposefully ambiguous nature of its symbols; the shifting, cinematic nature of Green's prose style; the sensitive, but resolutely unsentimental depictions of the working-classes and the aristocracy in the inter-war period; the impact of war and its inconsistent irruptions into daily life; or the ways in which moments or events are rapidly subsumed back into the flux of the everyday, their impact left uncertain. Critics have, historically, offered up singular readings of Green's work, or focused on the poetic or recreative qualities of certain works, particularly those of the 1940s. Green's writing is, undoubtedly, poetic and extraordinary, but this book also pays attention to the cliched, meta-textual, and uneventful aspects of his fiction.

In Melchior Wankowicz: Poland's Master of the Written Word, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm examines the life and writing of famous Polish writer Melchior Wankowicz, author of legendary work "The Battle of Monte Cassino". Acclaimed by his readers and critics alike, Melchior Wankowicz was famous for creating his theory of reportage, i.e. the "mosaic method" where the events of many people were implanted into the life of one person. Melchior Wankowicz put into words the beautiful, tragic and heroic events of Polish history that provided a form of sustenance for a people that thrive on patriotism and love of their country. Wankowicz's books shaped national consciousness, glorified the heroism of the Polish soldier. Later in his life, Wankowicz personally set an example by standing up to the Communist party that brought him to trail for his work. In this book, Ziolkowska-Boehm offers a critical examination of Wankowicz's work informed by her experiences as his private secretary. Her access to the author's personal archives shed new light on the life and work of the man considered by many to be "the father of Polish reportage."

Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright is an edited collection that brings together philosophers, literary theorists, and theologians on the intersection of Richard Wright s corpus novels, critical essays, travel writings, and poetry and philosophical method. This collection is a unique contribution to the academic discipline of philosophy as the first sustained philosophical engagement of an African American literary figure. Utilizing various philosophical methods existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics this collection provides new perspectives on Wright s work as well as on the discipline of philosophy, engaging emergent theories of black existentialism, rethinking ontology and facticity and the meaning of race and the phenomena blackness in the United States, in the West, and the world at large. Moreover, this collection allows us to realign Wright s work and challenges us to rethink our contemporary situation and issues, by tracing in his work the historical trajectory and many significant moments in the modernization of the world: the legacies of segregation in South and the anonymity and alienation of the urban North in the United States, the politicization of nationality and race in Europe, and the paradoxical relationship between the West in general, and in particular, black Americans to the continent of Africa and the African Diaspora."

J. G. Ballard self-professedly devoured the work of Freud as a teenager, and entertained early thoughts of becoming a psychiatrist; he opened his novel-writing career with a manifesto declaring his wish to write a science fiction exploring n

"Carrying ahead the project of cultural criminology, Phillips and Strobl dare to take seriously that which amuses and entertains us--and to find in it the most significant of themes. Audiences, images, ideologies of justice and injustice--all populate the pages of Comic Book Crime. The result is an analysis as colorful as a good comic, and as sharp as the point on a superhero's sword."--Jeff Ferrell, author of Empire of Scrounge Superman, Batman, Daredevil, and Wonder Woman are iconic cultural figures that embody values of order, fairness, justice, and retribution. Comic Book Crime digs deep into these and other celebrated characters, providing a comprehensive understanding of crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. This is a world where justice is delivered, where heroes save ordinary citizens from certain doom, where evil is easily identified and thwarted by powers far greater than mere mortals could possess. Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl explore these representations and show that comic books, as a historically important American cultural medium, participate in both reflecting and shaping an American ideological identity that is often focused on ideas of the apocalypse, utopia, retribution, and nationalism. Through an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010, as well as several years of immersion in comic book fan culture, Phillips and Strobl reveal the kinds of themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-9/11 context. They discuss heroes' calculations of "deathworthiness," or who should be killed in meting out justice, and how these judgments have as much to do with the hero's character as they do with the actions of the villains. This fascinating volume also analyzes how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to construct difference for both the heroes and the villains in ways that are both conservative and progressive. Engaging, sharp, and insightful, Comic Book Crime is a fresh take on the very meaning of truth, justice, and the American way.Nickie D. Phillipsis Associate Professor in the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY.Staci Stroblis Associate Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.In theAlternative Criminologyseries