This Pivot explores the uses of the Mughal past in the historical fiction of colonial India. Through detailed reconsiderations of canonical works by Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Romesh Chunder Dutt, the author argues for a more complex and integral understanding of the part played by the Mughal imaginary in colonial and early Indian nationalist projections of sovereignty. Evoking the rich historical and transnational contexts of these literary narratives, the study demonstrates the ways in which, at successive moments of crisis and contestation in the later Raj, the British Indian state continued to be troubled by its early and profound investments in models of despotism first located by colonial administrators in the figure of the Mughal emperor. At the heart of these political fictions lay the issue of territoriality and the founding problem of a British claim to sole proprietorship of Indian land - a form of Orientalist exceptionalism that at once underpinned and could never fully be integrated with the colonial rule of law. Alongside its recovery of a wealth of popular and often overlooked colonial historiography, The Return of the Mughal emphasises the relevance of theories of political theology - from Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz to Talal Asad and Giorgio Agamben - to our understanding of the fictional and jurisprudential histories of colonialism. This study aims to show just how closely the pageantry and romance of empire in India connects to its early politics of terror and even today continues to inform the figure of the Mughal in the sectarian politics of Hindu Nationalism.

Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine. Balzac's Shorter Fictions explores this corpus, the nature of short fiction, and how Balzac's novels developed from his stories. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.

What is it about certain books that makes them bestsellers? Why do some of these books remain popular for centuries, and others fade gently into obscurity? And why is it that when scholars do turn their attention to bestsellers, they seem only to be interested in the same handful of blockbusters, when so many books that were once immensely popular remain under-examined?
Addressing those and other equally pressing questions about popular literature, "Must Read" is the first scholarly collection to offer both a survey of the evolution of American bestsellers as well as critical readings of some of the key texts that have shaped the American imagination since the nation's founding.
Focusing on a mix of enduring and forgotten bestsellers, the essays in this collection consider 18th and 19th century works, like "Charlotte Temple" or "Ben-Hur," that were once considered epochal but are now virtually ignored; 20th century favorites such as" The Sheik "and "Peyton Place"; and 21st century blockbusters including the novels of Nicholas Sparks, "The Kite Runner," and "The Da Vinci Code."

This new collection of essays, commissioned from a range of scholars across the world, takes as its theme the reception of Rome's greatest poet in a time of profound cultural change. Amid the rise of Christianity, the changing status of the city of Rome, and the emergence of new governing classes, Vergil remained a bedrock of Roman education and identity. This volume considers the different ways in which Vergil was read, understood and appropriated; by poets, commentators, Church fathers, orators and historians. The introduction outlines the cultural and historical contexts. Twelve chapters dedicated to individual writers or genres, and the contributors make use of a wide range of approaches from contemporary reception theory. An epilogue concludes the volume.

In this engaging book David Clark guides the reader through the theology of CS Lewis and illuminates the use and understanding of scripture in the works of this popular author.
Examines his life, work, world view, and the implications of his theology in relation to his other writings
Looks at Lewis' beliefs on the topics of redemption, humanity, spiritual growth, purgatory, and resurrection
Examines the different perspectives on Lewis and his work: as prophet, evangelist, and as a spiritual mentor
Explores the range and influence of Lewis' work, from the bestselling apologetic, "Mere Christianity," to the world-famous "Chronicles of Narnia"
Features specially-commissioned artwork throughout
Written in an accessible style for general readers, students, and scholars, and will introduce Lewis' theology to a wider audience.

Today's mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In "Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance "Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since. Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both "low modern" and "high modernist" British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.

This book explores how writers responded to the rise of the newspaper over the course of the nineteenth century. Taking as its subject the ceaseless intertwining of fiction and journalism at this time, it tracks the representation of newspapers and journalists in works by Honore de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Guy de Maupassant. This was an era in which novels were published in newspapers and novelists worked as journalists. In France, fiction was to prove an utterly crucial presence at the newspaper's heart, with a gilded array of predominant literary figures active in journalism. Today, few in search of a novel would turn to the pages of a daily newspaper. But what are usually cast as discrete realms - fiction and journalism - came, in the nineteenth century, to occupy the same space, a point which complicates our sense of the cultural history of French literature.

Jonathan Bowden was a paradox: on the one hand, he was an avowed elitist and aesthetic modernist, yet on the other hand, he relished such forms of popular entertainment as comics, graphic novels, pulps, and even Punch and Judy shows, which not only appeal to the masses but also offer a refuge for pre- and anti-modern aesthetic tastes and tendencies. Bowden was drawn to popular culture because it was rife with Nietzschean and Right-wing themes: heroic vitalism, Faustian adventurism, anti-egalitarianism, biological determinism, racial consciousness, biologically-based (and traditional) notions of the differences and proper relations of the sexes, etc. Pulp Fascism collects Jonathan Bowden's principal statements on Right-wing themes in popular culture drawn from his essays, lectures, and interviews. These high-brow analyses of low-brow culture reveal just how deep and serious shallow entertainment can be. About Pulp Fascism: "Jonathan Bowden said that greatness lies in the mind and in the fist. Nietzsche combined both forms in the image of the warrior poet. For Bowden it was the image of the cultured thug. I give you Jonathan Bowden: cultured thug." -Greg Johnson, from the Foreword "Jonathan Bowden was uniquely gifted as a cultural critic and revisionist, willing to explore the obscure areas of high and low culture, and apply ideas from the former to the analysis of the later, starting always from the supposition that inequality is a moral good. Bowden's texts are dense and rich with reference and insight, yet remain entertaining and replete with humor." -Alex Kurtagi "Many men give speeches; Jonathan Bowden gave orations. To experience one of Bowden's performances must have been something like hearing Maria Callas in her prime or witnessing one of Mussolini's call to arms from a Roman balcony. "As an intellectual, Jonathan was a Renaissance man, or perhaps a bundle of contradictions: his novels and paintings were of Joycean complexity, and yet, in his orations and non-fiction writings, he was able to cut to the essence of a philosophy or political development in a way that was immediately understandable and, indeed, useful for nationalists. "Pulp Fascism could be called Bowden's 'unfinished symphony'- his attempt (not quite realized) to reveal the radical, ambivalent, and, in some cases, shockingly traditionalist undercurrents in pop culture. "That which envelops our lives is taken for granted . . . and thus rarely properly analyzed and understood. Bowden brings new life to those characters and comic-book worlds we too often dismiss as child's play." -Richard Spencer About the Author Jonathan Bowden, April 12, 1962-March 29, 2012, was a British novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, actor, and orator, and a leading thinker and spokesman of the British New Right. Born in Kent and largely self-educated, Bowden was involved with a series of Right-wing groups for which he was a popular speaker, including the Monday Club, the Western Goals Institute, the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus, the Freedom Party, the Bloomsbury Forum, the British National Party, and finally the New Right (London), of which he was the Chairman. Bowden was a prolific author of fiction, philosophy, criticism, and commentary.

In his book, Murakami Haruki, Dr. Michael Seats offers an important philosophical intervention in the discussion of the relationship between Murakami's fiction and contemporary Japanese culture. Breaking through conventional analysis, Seats demonstrates how Murakami's first and later trilogies utilize the structure of the simulacrum, a second-order representation, to develop a complex critique of contemporary Japanese culture. By outlining the critical-fictional contours of the 'Murakami Phenomenon, ' the discussion confronts the vexing question of Japanese modernity and subjectivity within the contexts of the national-cultural imaginary. Seats finds mirroring comparisons between Murakami's works and practices in current media-entertainment technologies, indicating a new politics of representation.Murakami Haruki is a critical text for scholars and students of Japanese Studies and Critical Theory, and is an essential guide for those interested in modern Japanese literatur

This title establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space. There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings. However, just as monuments mark their territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries, so these discourses set a boundary between their authority as platforms on which the interpretation of monumental space occurs and, in this respect, the different authority of the novel. This study crosses this boundary by means of dynamic interdisciplinary movements between selected novels by James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Rashid al-Daif, and Orhan Pamuk, on the one hand, and various theoretical perspectives, history, and cultural geography, on the other. Through the specific choice of literary texts that represent monumental space in atypical post-imperial geopolitical contexts, "Monumental Space and the Post-Imperial Novel" brings into question many postcolonial paradigms. Sakr establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and cultural geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space.

William Weaks Morris was a writer defined in large measure by his southern roots. A seventh generation Mississippian, he grew up in Yazoo City, close enough to his mother's family to be frequently reminded of his heritage. Spending his college years at the University of Texas and Oxford University in England gave Morris a taste of the world and, perhaps, a deeper appreciation for his southern birthright. At the very least, these experiences gave him something to write home about. The product of exhaustive research, this volume is a comprehensive reference to Willie Morris' life and works. It also provides an in-depth literary biography based on hundreds of primary sources such as letters, newspaper articles and interviews. The book's principal focus, however, is Morris' literary legacy, which includes works such as North Toward Home, New York Days and My Dog Skip. Two annotated bibliographies - one for Morris' own writing and one focusing on secondary sources - comprise over 2100 entries. Each entry contains a concise, informative summary of the cited work. A chronology of Willie Morris' life and career is supplied for easy reference. Exclusive photographs, some provided by the Morris family, and an index are also included.

This book relates Cervantes's poetics of comic fiction to the Spanish Golden Age's common framework of assumptions about the comic. It studies the evolution of this collective mentality, and how this is reflected in the critical moment around 1600 when the major comic genres are re-launched, transformed, and theoretically rationalized. This was when Don Quijote and Cervantes's novelas were written.

Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics uniquely brings together feminist and queer theoretical perspectives on gender and sexuality through close analysis of works by Sarah Waters. This timely study examines topics ranging from heterosexuality, homosexuality, masculinities, femininities, sex, pornography, and the cultural effects of othering and domination across her work. The book covers each of Waters's published novels to date including Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Paying Guests and also considers her non-fiction and academic writing as well as the television adaptations of her texts. O'Callaghan situates Water's writing as an important textual space for the examination of contemporary gender and sexuality studies and locates her as an astute commentator and contributor to twenty-first century gender and sexual politics.

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, "The Master," Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view.

Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the "Dublin Times," reviews in the "New York Review of Books," and other disparate venues.

With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten.

Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

Margaret Atwood is arguably the most renowned and internationally acclaimed Canadian writer, poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and environmental activist. In this incisive interpretation of Atwood's prose, Candy D'Cunha argues that the novelist's ecosophical vision provides valuable lessons that could help in creating a greater and more responsible awareness in the modern psyche about the environment. By exploring the works of Atwood, one can understand the need for a deeper rethinking and a clearer re-orientation in this area. Select novels, namely Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), bring out the principles of ecological philosophy by describing various aspects of the current ecological crisis. Duplicity in the norms and recognition, the degradation of the environment, consequent tragic dilemmas, and the general ghastliness of life are all found in Atwood's oeuvre. A number of studies have been made on the thematic works of Atwood, such as feminism, quest for identity, power and politics, dystopian and utopian elements, but this book is the first ecosophical exploration of Atwood's themes and concerns. This volume enables readers to propagate the requisite ecological wisdom for self-realization for the harmonious and just development of society. Interpreting Atwood's works from an Indian perspective also helps to promote Indian ecological justice.

The Bildungsroman is a genre novel whose territory is well traveled, that of a young and often alienated hero on the cusp of maturity, intent on discovering who he or she is and being true to that identity. The German word "Bildung" refers to forming and shaping, and the first Bildungsromane in 18th-century Germany focused on the hero's self-formation. Modernists such as Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf adopted and reinvigorated the Bildungsroman form as a means of telling stories about longing and transition. With this first major study of the historical context of the English and Irish Bildungsroman, Gregory Castle revisits the genre with a special interest in self-development and identity, as well as the viability of the classical concept of Bildung in the modernist era. Drawing on German philosopher Theodor Adorno's theory of negative dialectics (which values the negative moment as a potentially critical force), Castle demonstrates the ongoing relevance of the Bildungsroman form and its powerful capacity for social and cultural critique. Its vitality is due in large measure to its ability to represent, in a self-consciously critical fashion, the complex and contradictory modes of self-development that have arisen in late modernity. The author contends that modernism managed to rehabilitate one of the most conventional genres in the history of literature. Examining such works as D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" and James Joyce's "A""Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Castle provides a significant scholarly contribution to literary criticism that will be of interest to students and scholars of modernism, the modernist novel, and Irish studies, as well as the problem of education and class in English and Irish literature.

Visions of post-apocalyptic worlds have proved to be irresistible for many 21st-century writers, from literary novelists to fantasy and young adult writers. Exploring a wide range of texts, from the works of Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Perrotta and Emily St. John Mandel to young adult novels such as Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games series, this is the first critical introduction to contemporary apocalyptic fiction. Exploring the cultural and political contexts of these writings and their echoes in popular media, Apocalyptic Fiction also examines how contemporary apocalyptic texts looks back to earlier writings by the likes of Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. Apocalyptic Fiction includes an annotated guide to secondary readings, making this an essential guide for students of contemporary fiction at all levels.

Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction--novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in eighteenth-century provincial England.
This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in eighteenth-century provincial England, not only about the class, profession, age, and sex of readers but also about the market of available fiction from which they made their choices--and some speculation about why they made the choices they did. Contrary to received ideas, in the provinces were the principal customers for eighteenth-century novels, including those written by women. Provincial customers preferred to buy rather than borrow fiction, and women preferred plays and novels written by women--women's works would have done better had women been the principal consumers. That is, demand for fiction (written by both men and women) was about equal for the first five years, but afterward the demand for women's works declined. Both men and women preferred novels with identifiable authors to anonymous ones, however, and both boys and men were able to cross gender lines in their reading. Goody Two-Shoes was one of the more popular children's books among Rugby schoolboys, and men read the Lady's Magazine. These and other findings will alterthe way scholars look at the fiction of the period, the questions asked, and the histories told of it.

This book explores the connections that Jose Joaquin de Mora (1783-1864) established with Britain, where he was exiled from 1823 to 1826 and was to return as diplomat in the following decades. His admiration for the British materialised in a series of cultural transfers aimed at the promotion and diffusion of British culture in Spain and Spanish America. He contributed to the popularization of Bentham's utilitarianism, the principles of British classical economy, and the philosophy of the Scottish School of Common Sense; he translated texts by Scott and Shakespeare and wrote an unfinished version of Byron's Don Juan; and, above all, he presented Britain as a model for the political, economic, and literary regeneration of the Hispanic world.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival - to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.

A major American writer at the turn of this millennium, Leslie Marmon Silko has also been one of the most powerful voices in the flowering of Native American literature since the publication of her 1977 novel Ceremony. With chapters written by leading scholars of Native American literature, this guide explores Silko's major novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes as an entryway into the full body of her work that includes poetry, essays, short fiction, film, photography, and other visual artwork. In addition to placing Silko in the broad context of American literary history, the book serves to contextualize her pivotal role in unleashing the vast flood of other Native American, aboriginal, and Indigenous writers who have entered the conversations she helped to launch. Along the way, the book examines her tackling of such historical themes as land, ethnicity, race, gender, trauma, and healing, as well as her narrative forms and her mythic lyricism.