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

This literary study is an exploration and a celebration of a writer who for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing. Since the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, Chinua Achebe has been credited with being the key progenitor of an African literary tradition and his five novels read as tracing the national narrative of Nigeria. Achebe depicts precolonial societies disturbed by British colonization, in the 1890s and the 1930s, the dog days of colonization in the 1950s, Independence in 1960 and the onset of neo-colonial problems of corruption and civil war and, in his final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the pervasive sense of postcolonial disenchantment. This study casts back over Achebe's writing career to assess his considerable contribution to postcolonial writing and criticism, including his Editorship of Heinemann's acclaimed African Writers Series which has shaped African literature for international audiences since 1962. Yousaf's examination of Achebe's fiction is carefully counterpointed with detailed discussion of the Nigerian national situation and of Achebe's essays and criticism - including his most recent and most autobiographical collection Home and Exile (2000) published in the year the writer celebrated his seventieth birthday.

A fresh account of the development and achievement of the novelist and essayist who became Britain's greatest political writer of modern times. George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the most important, admired, and controversial British writers of modern times. This new study examines his writing - the novels, journalism, essays and polemics - by looking at the context and development of his passionately held views, and at the genres, representations and narratives in which they found expression. Douglas Kerr gives an account of Orwell's whole writing career, from its awkward beginnings in Down and Out in Paris and London to the ambiguous triumphs of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, tracing its relation to four contexts - the East, England, Europe, and the nightmare police-state of Oceania. In particular he argues for the importance of Orwell's youthful service in the colonial police in Burma, and for the way his experience of the East and of what he called 'the dirty work of empire' shaped the writer's emerging understanding of oppression and freedom, inequality and justice.

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play.
Thomas Karshan argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. He traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian emigre writers who espoused those aesthetics. Karshan then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As he does so, he demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Pope, and the humanist tradition of the literary game.
Drawing in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, and on highly restricted archival material, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play provides the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for, and influence on, contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard. Through Nabokov, it addresses the literary game-playing that is one of the most distinctive elements in post-1945 literature.

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.

Most widely read today as the author of the "Heptameron," Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) was known in her lifetime as a deeply religious, mystical poet. Sister of the King of France and wife of the King of Navarre, her deeds and writings expressed and sought to promote a living faith in Christ, based on the gospels, and a vision for the renewal and reform of the Church in line with the teachings of French Evangelicals such as Lefevre d'Etaples, Guillaume Briconnet, and Gerard Roussel. In this volume, eleven eminent scholars offer new appreciations of Marguerite's extraordinary life and rich and diverse literary oeuvre, including, in addition to her short-story collection, dialogues, mirror poems, plays, songs, and an allegorical prison narrative. Contributors include, along with the editors, Philip Ford, Isabelle Garnier, Jean-Marie Le Gall, Reinier Leushuis, Jan Miernowski, Olivier Millet, Isabelle Pantin, Jonathan A. Reid, and Cynthia Skenazi.

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.

An original study of John Fowles, combining a clear overview of his work with detailed critical readings and new and challenging theoretical perspectives. This original study divides John Fowles's work into three chronological phases, making sense of his development as a novelist, essayist and thinker. As well as discussing Fowles in the light of his literary predecessors such as Hardy, Defoe and Scott, William Stephenson examines the key biographical influences on Fowles's writing, including his travels abroad and his experience of the natural world. Through an examination of Fowles's commitment to individualism and his complex fictional treatments of sexuality, Stephenson challenges current critical readings that situate his work in a canon of postmodern fiction or that question his declared feminism. The study breaks new ground by exploring the hitherto overlooked role of ethnicity in Fowles's novels, and his idiosyncratic treatment of the past in The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot. non-fiction, it combines the broad sweep of an overview with close readings and theoretical interpretations of some of the most rewarding passages in the work of this important storyteller and philosopher.

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.

Djuna Barnes once described herself as one of the most famous unknowns of the century. Revisionary accounts of female modernist writers have re-awakened interest in her work, yet she remains a unique and idiosyncratic figure, unassimilated by models of American expatriate or Sapphic modernism. In this illuminating and lucid study, Deborah Parsons examines the range of Barnes's oeuvre; her early journalism, short stories and one act dramas, poetry, the family chronicle Ryder, the Ladies Almanack, and her late play The Antiphon, as well as her modernist classic Nightwood. She explores the psychological and stylistic aspect of Barnes's work through close analysis of the texts within their social, cultural and aesthetic context, and provides an indispensable and enriching guide to Barnes's artistic identity and poetic vision. Barnes's determined inversion of generic and social norms, sexology, degeneration, ethnography and decadence, her unusual childhood, her professional friendships with T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, and her controversial lesbianism are all highlighted and discussed in this introduction to a bold and enigmatic writer.

"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.

"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

This study proposes that - rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics - Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/

Both Giorgio Agamben and Franz Kafka are best known for their gloomy political worldview. A cautious study of Agamben's references on Kafka, however, reveals another dimension right at the intersection of their works: a complex and unorthodox theory of freedom. The inspiration emerges from Agamben's claims that 'it is a very poor reading of Kafka's works that sees in them only a summation of the anguish of a guilty man before the inscrutable power'. Virtually all of Kafka's stories leave us puzzled about what really happened. Was Josef K., who is butchered like a dog, defeated? And what about the meaningless but in his own way complete creature Odradek? Agamben's work sheds new light on these questions and arrives, through Kafka, at different strategies for freedom at the point where this freedom is most blatantly violated.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. Volume 2 examines the period from1750-1820, which was a crucial period in the development of the novel in English. Not only was it the time of Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and Scott, but it also saw the establishment and definition of the novel as we know it, as well as the emergence of a number of subgenres, several of which remain to this day. Conventionally however, it has been one of the least studied areas-seen as a falling off from the heyday of Richardson and Fielding, or merely a prelude to the great Victorian novelists. This volume takes full advantage of recent major advances in scholarly bibliography, new critical assessments, and the fresh availability of long-neglected fictional works, to offer a new mapping and appraisal. The opening section, as well as some remarkable later chapters, consider historical conditions underlying the production, circulation, and reception of fiction during these seventy years, a period itself marked by a rapid growth in output and expansion in readership. Other chapters cover the principal forms, movements, and literary themes of the period, with individual contributions on the four major novelists (named above), seen in historical context, as well as others on adjacent fields such as the shorter tale, magazine fiction, children's literature, and drama. The volume also views the novel in the light of other major institutions of modern literary culture, including book reviewing and the reprint trade, all of which played a part in advancing a sense of the novel as a defining feature of the British cultural landscape. A focus on 'global' literature and imported fiction in two concluding chapters in turn reflects a broader concern for transnat onal literary studies in general.

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.

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.

An original study of John Fowles, combining a clear overview of his work with detailed critical readings and new and challenging theoretical perspectives. This original study divides John Fowles's work into three chronological phases, making sense of his development as a novelist, essayist and thinker. As well as discussing Fowles in the light of his literary predecessors such as Hardy, Defoe and Scott, William Stephenson examines the key biographical influences on Fowles's writing, including his travels abroad and his experience of the natural world. Through an examination of Fowles's commitment to individualism and his complex fictional treatments of sexuality, Stephenson challenges current critical readings that situate his work in a canon of postmodern fiction or that question his declared feminism. The study breaks new ground by exploring the hitherto overlooked role of ethnicity in Fowles's novels, and his idiosyncratic treatment of the past in The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot. non-fiction, it combines the broad sweep of an overview with close readings and theoretical interpretations of some of the most rewarding passages in the work of this important storyteller and philosopher.

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

Robert Fraser stresses the conciliating force of Ben Okri's writing and his vision of an ideal community beyond the strife-ridden present. This is the first ever full-length study of Ben Okri's life and work based on twenty years of friendship and close attention to his texts. It argues that his writing is best appreciated against the background of his early exposure to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) and his attempts since then to forge a medium of conciliation through literature. We live by stories, Okri once wrote, We also live in them. Following him from Lagos to London and from obscurity to recognition, Fraser interprets Okri's successive books as refashionings of this inner and outer narrative space by strenuous imagining and generous exhortation. Okri's fiction, essays and poems beckon us through the shabby but vibrant streets of our strife-ridden metropolis towards a potential city of justice, sincerity and peace.

One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity undertakes the first extensive analysis of the works of Dave Eggers, an author who has grown from a small-time media upstart into one of the most influential author-publishers of the twenty-first century. Eggers' rise to fame is charted in careful detail, offering analysis of the circumstances of his success and their effects on the production of his literary oeuvre. As both a memoirist and novelist Eggers has distinguished himself from his cohort of young American authors by insisting on seizing the reins of his publishing output. The nature of this independent streak is given attention in this study, particularly the cultural circumstances of a digitalised, consumer society in which books and literature are primarily commodities. Hamilton examines this spirit of independence as both a practical and figurative state in Eggers' works, and seeks to address the reasons why in a contemporary, globalised society independence is not only personally gratifying for Eggers but also a popularly successful strategy for producing books.