Amidst a revival of interest in the novels of the abbe Prevost, this study addresses some of the interpretive issues that are being raised concerning his work, namely what intellectual, moral and aesthetic meaning should we seek in works that were designed as entertainments, and should we persist in rating Manon Lescaut more highly than the rest of Prevost's output? The narrative strategies and types of distortion inherent in each of Prevost's narrators are examined. More general observations are made on the mechanics of Prevost's narration such as the deceptive rhetorical devices of juxtaposing different accounts of the same event by two or more narrators and the use of the double registre or separation of narrator from protagonist. Other aspects of Prevost's fictional technique are considered - for example, the extent to which he drew upon contemporary traditions in the novel. Another important theme is the relationship between Prevost's fictional world and the real world in which topics such as other-portrayal and the handing of time reflect the degree of unreliability of the narrator's vision. Parallel episodes and interpolations are also used to illuminate subtly the work's central themes. The latter part of this study is dedicated to the moral dilemmas raised in Prevost's work in which the world - and the author's heroes - appear to be governed by three complex and often conflicting codes of behaviour - those of religion, honour, and 'love' or 'sensibility'. In particular, the problems of women are represented as well as the failure of the heroic ideal amongst the aristocracy. In religious matters, Prevost is revealed as a man of tolerance, ultimately concerned with human nature. The Prevost who emerges from this study combines a high degree of technical mastery with a serious moral interest in the human heart. His demystification of the ideal of heroism and his fragmented vision of the human personality are likely to appeal to the modern reader. The powerful dramatisation of moral conflict, familiar in Manon Lescaut, is indeed to be found throughout his work.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read,writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas toletters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.

"A highly intelligent and successful study exploring the uncanny features of Conrad's art that respond, and lend depth, to the concerns of theorists such as Bakhtin and Lyotard." -- Suresh Raval, University of Arizona

The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how-and to what end-U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel. Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.

This title provides an insight into the original context, qualities and influence of George Orwell's essays and provides the first extended examination of his genius as an essayist. George Orwell ranked his essays among his greatest literary achievements. In modern English literature they are praised as the finest accomplishments of the form. More than half a century after his death, Peter Marks gives them the scholarly attention they merit. We gain a better understanding of Orwell by properly understanding his essays. Mark's sophisticated account of the essay form explains why its flexible properties are the ideal tool for Orwell's critical and political thinking. Situating the essays in their original periodical contexts we see how Orwell manipulates his approach across a range of journals so as to entertain, convince or provoke his expected readers. We are privy to the rhetorical tactics a master uses to convince his audience. Exploring the popularity of the essay's beyond his death, we realize how the essays have influenced Orwell's posthumous reputation. A major contribution to our interpretation of Orwell, this critical study unravels the variety, complexity and, occasional inconsistency, of essays by one of the greatest writers of the form.

Over the last decade, Samuel Beckett's popularity has rocketed around the world and he is increasingly recognised as one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century but there has been very little scholarly work on Beckett's reception outside Europe. This comprehensive volume brings together essays from leading critics on Beckett's international critical reception. Due to Beckett's linguistic and artistic abilities, he was intimately involved in the translation and production of his writings in German, French, English and Spanish; and consequently countries using these languages have sophisticated critical traditions. However, many other countries have adopted Beckett as their own, from places where he lived for lengthy periods of his life (England, France, Ireland and Germany), to those finding directly applicable political messages in his work (such as ex-Soviet states including the Czech Republic and Romania), and those countries whose national literary traditions bear heavily upon his work (e.g. Norway and Italy). This fascinating volume reveals Beckett's evolving critical reception from contemporary reviews to the present.

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." "David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining "Infinite Jest." These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, "The Pale King," which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.

The essays in this collection reflect two of Marti's key observations during his time in the United States: first, how did he, an exile living in New York, view and read his North American neighbors from a sociocultural, political and literary perspective? Second, how did his perception of the modern nation impact his own concepts of race, capital punishment, poetics, and nation building for Cuba? The overarching endeavor of this project is to view and read Marti with the same critical or modern eye with which he viewed and read Spain, Cuba, Latin America and the United States. This volume, combining many of the most relevant experts in the field of Marti studies, attempts to answer those questions. It hopes to broaden the understanding and extend the influence of one of Americas' (speaking of the collective Americas) most prolific and important writers, particularly within the very nation where his chronicles, poetry, and journalism were written. In spite of the political differences still separating Cuba and the United States, understanding Marti's relevancy is crucial to bridging the gap between these nations.

The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain's Golden Age not only helped that country become a modern state but also affected its great literature. In this fascinating book, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria explores the works of Cervantes, showing how his representations of love were inspired by examples of human deviance and desire culled from legal discourse. Gonzalez Echevarria describes Spain's new legal policies, legislation, and institutions and explains how, at the same time, its literature became filled with love stories derived from classical and medieval sources. Examining the ways that these legal and literary developments interacted in Cervantes's work, he sheds new light on "Don Quixote "and other writings.

Winner of the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan, Ellen Gilchrist has entertained audiences with her vivid fictional portraits of strong women, eccentric lives, and the difficulties of love and life. Known both for her short fiction and her novels, Gilchrist has been awarded several honors throughout her career, and her work continues to receive both critical and popular acclaim. This book examines her fiction, book by book, and offers an appreciation of her craft through a careful analysis of the stories themselves, their critical reception, and their lasting effect on the reader. Hooper offers the first complete evaluation of Gilchrist's entire fiction oeuvre. Author of such works as In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, The Annunciation, Go Hunting with My Daddy, and several other novels and collections of short stories, Ellen Gilchrist has transcended the bounds of Southern writing, appealing to audiences in all corners of the nation. Here, Hooper celebrates her fiction, focusing on the strong, feisty female characters that populate her works, exerting their will and independence regardless of traditional restraints on their activities. In addition, he pays special attention to her strengths and weaknesses as both a short fiction writer and a novelist, arguing that while her novels may entertain, her lasting contribution to American letters can more easily be found in her short fiction.

Stephen King is Richard Bachman by Michael R. Collings. This is the whole story of how Stephen King s Richard Bachman came to life, and when King finally had to give up the ghost and come forth with the truth that he was writing under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. This of course came about when the fifth novel, Thinner, was released and a reader discovered King s pseudonym. Now Michael Collings takes us from the beginnings of this unusual fiction side-show of Stephen King s body of work, to what we thought would be the last Bachman release, The Regulators. Updated and completely revised with new information and Richard Bachman releases since it s original publication almost twenty-five years ago. Chapters Featured: A History for Richard Bachman. Genre, Theme, and Image in Richard Bachman. Rage. The Long Walk. Roadwork. The Running Man. Thinner. Regulators... and Desperation. Pipe-Dreams and Possibilities. Original cover art commisioned by Erik Wilson. Profusely illustrated with covers of Bachman books from around the world.

Maurice Ebileeni explores the thematic and stylistic problems in the major novels of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner through Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories. Against the background of the cultural, scientific, and historic changes that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, describing the landscape of ruins bequeathed to humanists by the forefathers of the Counter-Enlightenment movement (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Baudelaire), Ebileeni proposes that Conrad and Faulkner wrote against impossible odds, metaphorically standing at the edge of a chaotic abyss that initially would spill over into the challenges of literary production. Both authors discovered that underneath, behind, or within the intuitively comprehensible narrative layers there exists a nonsensical dimension, constantly threatening to dissolve any attempt at producing intelligible meaning. Ebileeni argues that in Conrad's and Faulkner's major novels, the quest for meaning in confronting the prospects of nonsense becomes a necessary symptom of human experience to both avoid and engage the entropy of modern life.

How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.

Literature in a Time of Migration offers a profound rethinking of British fiction in light of the new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Examining works by Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and George Eliot, as well as popular contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, this volume demonstrates how literary texts overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration that they also helped to shape. Debates about assisted emigration, 'forced' and 'free' migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in fictions in complex ways. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts for colonization, fictional texts reveal a powerful and sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city's dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area's marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury's trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual "fraction" known as the 'Bloomsbury Group' at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

"Joyce and Company" is a comparative study which encourages a way of thinking about Joyce not as an isolated figure but as someone who is best understood in the company of others whether from the past, the present or, indeed, the imagined future. Throughout, Pierce places Joyce and his time in dialogue with other figures or different historical periods or languages other than English. In this way, Joyce is seen anew in relation to other writers and contexts. The book is organised in four parts: Joyce and History, Joyce and Language, Joyce and the City, and Joyce and the Contemporary World. Pierce emphasises Joyce's position as both an Irish and a European writer and shows Joyce's continuing relevance to the twenty-first century, not least in his commitment to language, culture and a discourse on freedom.

Providing easy access to information on nearly 450 short stories, this unique guide surveys a wide spectrum of world literature, canonical works, and contemporary fiction. Librarians and teachers will find multiple purposes for this expertly-compiled resource, which can be employed in much the same way as a standard bibliography. Educators will appreciate the concise annotations, arranged alphabetically by author, that form the core of this work. Insightful critical statements synthesize plot summaries and identify the thematic content of each short story.

A theme guide utilizes the nearly 100 theme headings matching those at the start of each entry, allowing the user to quickly locate story titles on related themes and construct reading lists based on individual interests and needs. Another component designed to aid librarians offers one bibliography that lists the anthologies from which the stories are drawn (Works Cited) and one comprised of a number of recent anthologies that can be adapted for the classroom (Further Reading). In addition to the theme index, the general subject and author indexes make this a user-friendly and invaluable resource.

This book, the first single-authored book-length study of Buck's fiction for over twenty years, shows how Buck's thought developed through the medium of her fiction - from her early turbulent years in China to her last lonely days in the United States, with chapters examining her loss of faith in Christianity, her reflections on Chinese life during and after the breakdown of Old China, her voluminous reading, her confrontation with the horrors of American racism and sexism after her return to the United States, and her final metaphorical search for home as she approached death. The book argues that Buck, the first American woman to win both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for literature, was a heroic forerunner of those who, while occupying a place in the world, never feel fully at home there; in Buck's case because her Chinese identity throughout her life struggled with her American. For this reason Pearl S. Buck's fiction deserves to be considered alongside that of writers such as Anchee Min, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. The book's central claim is that Buck is a major novelist, capable of speaking to the distress of our times, richly deserving the honor she has received in China, and deserving greater recognition in the United States.

In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts - ghostliness, institutionality, reflection - to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

Samuel Eliot Bassett's classic work The Poetry of Homer investigates the rhetorical techniques that have made the Iliad and the Odyssey speak to audiences throughout the ages. Combining a sublime poetic sensitivity with thorough scholarship this work offers original analyses of many topics, including the Homeric narrator's presentation of his story, his evocation of character through direct speech, the organization of speeches and descriptions into vivd dramatic situations, the pacing and emotional weight of similes and narratorial interventions, and the expressive variation in rhythms and word-groupings. A prolific and insightful contributor to Homeric scholarship, Bassett was invited to deliver the Sather Classical Lecture at Berkeley, but he died with the manuscript unpublished. This work, published posthumously in 1938 as The Poetry of Homer, has left its mark on a generation of classicists. Lexington is proud to bring such an important and influential book back into print in this new edition, edited and introduced by Bruce Heiden with a foreword by Greg Nagy.