Insofar as literary theory has addressed the issue of literature as a means of communication and the function of literary fiction, opinions have been sharply divided, indicating that the elementary foundations of literary theory and criticism still need clarifying. Many of the "classical" problems that literary theory has been grappling with from Aristotle to our time are still waiting for a satisfactory solution. Based on a new cognitive model of the literature as communication, Farner systematically explains how literary fiction works, providing new solutions to a wide range of literary issues, like intention, function, evaluation, delimitation of the literary work as such, fictionality, suspense, and the roles of author and narrator, along with such narratological problems such as voice, point of view and duration. Covering a wide range of literary issues central to literary theory, offering new theories while also summarising the field as it stands, Literary Fiction will be a valuable guide and resource for students and scholars of the theory of literature.

British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcala argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcala offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.

George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning, but most of her critics relate her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book seeks to demonstrate that more thany any of her Victorian contemporaries she anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty-first century in regard to both art and philosophy. Although rightly associated with "realism" her concept of the real is philosophically informed and her writing is also highly allusive.

This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring Eliot's credentials as a radical thinker and her engagement with political and ethical issues. Opening with her relationship to the Romantic tradition and Byron in particular, he goes on to discuss her reading of Darwinism, her radical critique of Victorian values and her affiliation with modernists such as Joyce. The final essays discuss her work in relation to Derridean themes and to the philosopher Bernard Williams' concept of moral luck. What emerges is a very different Eliot from the rather conservative figure portrayed in much of the critical literature, who might justly be thought of as the most significant Victorian writer for twenty-first century readers and critics.

"All-Electric" Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the "all-electric" home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to "give back" time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or "return" them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

The idea of the "outside" as a space of freedom has always been central in the literature of the United States. This concept still remains active in contemporary American fiction; however, its function is being significantly changed. Outside, America argues that, among contemporary American novelists, a shift of focus to the temporal dimension is taking place. No longer a spatial movement, the quest for the outside now seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference, a la Deleuze, by which the current subjectivity is transformed. In other words, the concept is taking a "temporal turn." Discussing eight novelists, including Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Paul Theroux, and Annie Proulx, each of whose works describe forces of given identities-masculine identity, historical temporality, and power, etc.-which block quests for the outside, Fujii shows how the outside in these texts ceases to be a spatial idea. With due attention to critical and social contexts, the book aims to reveal a profound shift in contemporary American fiction.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

"Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is a student-guide to Thomas Hardy's most enduring novel. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is one of the great classics of the British novel tradition and one of the most beloved works of the nineteenth century. This lively, informed, and insightful guide explores the style, structure, themes, critical reception, and literary influence of Thomas Hardy's celebrated novel and also discusses its film and TV adaptations. This is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, offering guidance on literary and historical context, language, style and form, and reading the text. It covers the novel's critical reception and publishing history, adaptations and interpretations and provides a guide to further reading. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

For anyone who loved St Trinian's - old or new - or read Malory Towers as a kid. St Brides is the perfect read for you. When Gemma Lamb takes a job at a quirky English girls' boarding school, she believes she's found the perfect escape route from her controlling boyfriend - until she discovers the rest of the staff are hiding sinister secrets: Hairnet, the eccentric headmistress who doesn't hold with academic qualifications Oriana Bliss, Head of Maths and master of disguise Joscelyn Spryke, the suspiciously rugged Head of PE Geography teacher Mavis Brook, surreptitiously selling off the library books creepy night watchman Max Security, with his network of hidden tunnels Even McPhee, the school cat, is leading a double life. Tucked away in the school's beautiful private estate in the Cotswolds, can Gemma stay safe and build a new independent future, or will past secrets catch up with her and the rest of the staff? With a little help from her new friends, including some wise pupils, she's going to give it her best shot... Previously published by Debbie Young as Secrets at St Bride's.

This book offers new insights on socially and culturally engaged Gothic ghost stories by twentieth century and contemporary female writers; including Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Susan Hill, Catherine Lim, Kate Mosse, Daphne du Maurier, Helen Dunmore, Michele Roberts, and Zheng Cho. Through the ghostly body, possessions and visitations, women's ghost stories expose links between the political and personal, genocides and domestic tyrannies, providing unceasing reminders of violence and violations. Women, like ghosts, have historically lurked in the background, incarcerated in domestic spaces and roles by familial and hereditary norms. They have been disenfranchised legally and politically, sold on dreams of romance and domesticity. Like unquiet spirits that cannot be silenced, women's ghost stories speak the unspeakable, revealing these contradictions and oppressions. Wisker's book demonstrates that in terms of women's ghost stories, there is much to point the spectral finger at and much to speak out about.

Elizabeth Bennet is Austen's most liberated and appealing heroine, and Pride and Prejudice has remained over most of the past two centuries Austen's most popular novel. The story turns on the marriage prospects of the five daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, and especially on Elizabeth's prejudice against the proud and distant Fitzwilliam Darcy. Pride and Prejudice is a romantic comedy that has been read as conservative and feminist, reactionary and revolutionary, rooted in the time of its composition and deliberately timeless. Robert Irvine's introduction sets the novel in the context of the literary and intellectual history of the period, dealing with such crucial background issues as class relations in Britain, female exclusion from property and power, and the impact of the French Revolution. The introduction and annotations have been expanded and updated for the new edition, and a new appendix of Austen's juvenilia has been added.

American Fiction in Transition is a study of the observer-hero narrative, a highly significant but critically neglected genre of the American novel. Through the lens of this transitional genre, the book explores the 1990s in relation to debates about the end of postmodernism, and connects the decade to other transitional periods in US literature. Novels by four major contemporary writers are examined: Philip Roth, Paul Auster, E. L. Doctorow and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each novel has a similar structure: an observer-narrator tells the story of an important person in his life who has died. But each story is equally about the struggle to tell the story, to find adequate means to narrate the transitional quality of the hero's life. In playing out this narrative struggle, each novel thereby addresses the broader problem of historical transition, a problem that marks the legacy of the postmodern era in American literature and culture.

This comprehensive overview of Julia Alvarez's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry offers biographical information and parses the author's important works and the intentions behind them. Reading Julia Alvarez reviews the author's acclaimed body of writing, exploring both the works and the woman behind them. The guide opens with a brief biography that includes the saga of the Alvarez family's flight from the Dominican Republic when Julia was ten, and carries her story through the philanthropic organic coffee farm that she and her husband now operate in that nation. The heart of the book is a broad overview of Alvarez's literary achievements, followed by chapters that discuss individual works and a chapter on her poetry. The book also looks at how the author's writings grapple with and illuminate contemporary issues, and at Alvarez's place in pop culture, including an examination of film adaptations of her books. Through this guide, readers will better understand the relevance of Alvarez's works to their own lives and to new ways of thinking about current events. Chapters on individual works to help the user understand the author's plots, themes, settings, characters, and style Discussion questions in each chapter to foster student research and facilitate book-club discussion Sidebars of interesting information An up-to-date guide to Internet and print resources for further study

Half a dozen young men find themselves at the end of their university years facing the awful prospect that they must now support themselves. They decide to found an Ideal Commonwealth, in the Navigator Islands - Samoa (where, by a wonderful coincidence, a decade later, Stevenson himself eventually settled and where he died and is buried). Here - they reason - work and money, dreary offices and dreary jobs, will not be known or needed. But capital is required to start even an Ideal Commonwealth. One of their number knows of "a real, glowing, gaudy, old-high treasure" - gold and jewels in a trunk in a family castle in the Scottish Highlands, theirs for the stealing, and ...Robert Louis Stevenson began writing this comic novel in April or May 1877, when he was twenty-six, and left it unfinished - after 30,000 words, in nine chapters - two years later. It shows a side of him whom most readers have never known existed: a satirical Stevenson making great fun, in a manner worthy of his contemporaries Gilbert and Sullivan, of the events and passions, the personalities and the predicaments, of his day. Previously published only in a French translation, it now takes its rightful place among his memorable early works of fiction. Transcribed, introduced, and annotated by the noted scholar Roger G. Swearingen from Stevenson's unpublished manuscript (now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California), this edition reveals glimpses of the author's developing literary skills and of his complex and often madcap personal temperament. The extensive and illustrated annotations are fascinating in themselves, not least for the references to the contemporary late-Victorian scene.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is undoubtedly one of the defining voices of our age. Since the Second World War, his work has had an enormous impact on generations of writers, philosophers and literary theorists. This clear and accessibly written guide offers a close reading of ten of Borges' greatest short stories, seeking to bring out the logic that has made his work so influential. The main section of the guide offers an analysis of such key terms in Borges' work as "labyrinth" and the "infinite" and analyses Borges' particular narrative strategies. This guide also sets Borges' work within its wider literary, cultural and intellectual contexts and provides an annotated guide to both scholarly and popular responses to his work to assist further reading.

This book introduces students to the Victorian novel and its contexts, teaching strategies for reading and researching nineteenth-century literature. Combining close reading with background information and analysis it considers the Victorian novel as a product of the industrial age by focusing on popular texts including Dickens's Oliver Twist, Gaskell's North and South and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Victorian Novel in Context examines the changing readership resulting from the growth of mass literacy and the effect that this had on the form of the novel. Taking texts from the early, mid and late Victorian period it encourages students to consider how serialization shaped the nineteenth-century novel. It highlights the importance of politics, religion and the evolutionary debate in 'classic' Victorian texts. Addressing key concerns including realist writing, literature and imperialism, urbanization and women's writing, it introduces students to a variety of the most important critical approaches to the novels. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying the Victorian novel.

Besides being one of America's most celebrated living authors, George Saunders (b. 1958) is also an excellent interview subject. In the fourteen interviews included in Conversations with George Saunders, covering nearly twenty years of his career, the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December provides detailed insight into his own writing process and craft, alongside nuanced interpretations of his own work. He also delves into aspects of his biography, including anecdotes from his childhood and his experiences as both a student and teacher in MFA programs, as well as reflections on how parenthood affected his writing, the role of religious belief and practice in his work, and how he has dealt with his growing popularity and fame. Throughout this collection, we see him in conversation with former students, fellow writers, mainstream critics, and literary scholars. In each instance, Saunders is eager to engage in meaningful dialogue about what he calls the "big questions of our age." In a number of interviews, he reflects on the moral and ethical responsibility of fiction, as well as how his work engages with issues of social and political commentary. But at the same time, these interviews, like all of Saunders's best work, are funny, warm, surprising, and wise. Saunders says he has "always enjoyed doing interviews" in part because he views "intense, respectful conversation [as], really, an artform-an exploration of sorts." Readers of this volume will have the pleasure of joining him in this process of exploration.

This is a fine edition of Jospeh Conrad's most acclaimed novel, printed on cream, acid-free paper. As the narrator Marlow journeys ever deeper into the Congo's 'heart of darkness', so he also penetrates deeper into the folly of western corruption and absurdity that characterises both the collision of European and African cultures, and the conflicts in his own inner nature. The story that tells of Marlow's mission to find the mysterious but missing Mr Kurtz, as he travels along the Congo River into the interior of the 'dark continent', tells also a second dark story of what happens when white westerners intrude into, and try to dominate, the continent of Africa without understanding either its people or their culture; but at its most penetrating level, Conrad's story reveals that the 'heart of darkness' lies at the core of human nature itself, that the journey to find Kurtz, is Marlow's journey to his own darkness that, viewed at its most bleak is the darkness that we all share.

Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of "natural" disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as "natural" disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a "natural" disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?