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.

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.

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.

One of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics since the 1970s, Howard Chaykin (b. 1950) has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller whose comics offer both pulp-adventure thrills and thoughtful engagement with real-world politics and culture. His body of work is defined by the belief that comics can be a vehicle for sophisticated adult entertainment and for narratives that utilize the medium's unique properties to explore serious themes with intelligence and wit.

Beginning with early interviews in fanzines and concluding with a new interview conducted in 2010 with the volume's editor, "Howard Chaykin: Conversations" collects widely ranging discussions from Chaykin's earliest days as an assistant for such legends as Gil Kane and Wallace Wood to his recent work on titles including "Dominic Fortune," "Challengers of the Unknown," and "American Century." The book includes 35 line illustrations selected from Chaykin, as well. As a writer/artist for outlets such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and "Heavy Metal," he has participated in and influenced many of the major developments in mainstream comics over the past four decades. He was an early pioneer in the graphic novel format in the 1970s, and his groundbreaking sci-fi satire "American Flagg " was an essential contribution to the maturation of the comic book as a vehicle for social commentary in the 1980s.

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.

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.

Isiah Lavender III's Dis-Orienting Planets amplifies critical issues surrounding the racial and ethnic dimensions of science fiction. This edited volume explores depictions of Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular regard to China, Japan, India, and Korea. Dis-Orienting Planets highlights so-called yellow and brown peoples from the constellation of a historically white genre. The collection launches into political representations of Asian identityin science fiction's imagination, from fear of the yellow peril and its racist stereotypes to techno-orientalism and the remains of a post-colonial heritage. Thus the essays, by contributors such as Takayuki Tatsumi, Veronica Hollinger, Uppinder Mehan, and Stephen Hong Sohn, reconfigure the very study of race in science fiction. A follow-up to Lavender's Black and Brown Planets, this new collection expands the racial politics governing the renewed visibility of Asia in science fiction. One of the few on this subject, the volume probes Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story, the acclaimed film Cloud Atlas, and Guillermo del Toro's monsterfilm Pacific Rim, among others. Dis-Orienting Planets embarks on a wide-ranging assessment of Asian representations in science fiction, upon the determination that our visions of the future must include all people of color. With contributions by: Suparno Banerjee, Cait Coker, Jeshua Enriquez, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Malisa Kurtz, Stephanie Li, Bradford Lyau, Uppinder Mehan, Graham J. Murphy, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Amy J. Ransom, Robin Anne Reid, Haerin Shin, Stephen Hong Sohn, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Timothy J. Yamamura.

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.

Marian Eide argues that the central concern of James Joyce's writing was the creation of a literary ethic. Eide examines Joyce's ethical preoccupations throughout his work, particularly the tension between his commitment as an artist and his social obligations as a father and citizen during a tumultuous period of European history. This is the first study devoted to Joyce's ethical philosophy as it emerges in his writing.

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.

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) gained national attention upon release of "The Business of Fancydancing," his first collection of poems, in 1992, when a critic for the "New York Times Book Review" called him "one of the major lyric voices of our time." More recently, in 2007, Alexie won a National Book Award for "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," a young-adult novel based on his own high school experiences.

In "Conversations with Sherman Alexie," the writer displays the same passion, dynamic sense of humor, and sharp observational skills that characterize his work. The interviews ranging from 1993 to 2007 feature Alexie speaking candidly about the ideas and themes behind poetry collections ("I Would Steal Horses, First Indian on the Moon"), short story collections ("The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Ten Little Indians"), novels ("Indian Killer, Reservation Blues"), and screenplays ("Smoke Signals").

Coeur d'Alene through his father and Spokane through his mother, Alexie grew up in Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. Reservation life is a central concern in his work, as are politics, love, contemporary literature, city living (he now lives in Seattle), and his beloved sport of basketball. Alexie's wit, polemical engagement, and willingness to confront received notions have made him one of the most popular American Indian writers today.

"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.

The hands of colonized subjects - South Asian craftsmen, Egyptian mummies, harem women, and Congolese children - were at the crux of Victorian discussions of the body that tried to come to terms with the limits of racial identification. While religious, scientific, and literary discourses privileged hands as sites of physiognomic information, none of these found plausible explanations for what these body parts could convey about ethnicity. As compensation for this absence, which might betray the fact that race was not actually inscribed on the body, fin-de-siecle narratives sought to generate models for how non-white hands might offer crucial means of identifying and theorizing racial identity. They removed hands from a holistic corporeal context and allowed them to circulate independently from the body to which they originally belonged. Severed hands consequently served as 'human tools' that could be put to use in a number of political, aesthetic, and ideological contexts.

This succinct, yet comprehensive account of William Faulkner's literary career, novels, and key short stories offers an imaginative topography of his efforts to reckon with his Southern past, to acknowledge its modernization, and to develop his own modernist method. Drawing on various critical approaches, it provides a coherent interpretation of the author's career, emphasizing Faulkner's receptivity to change, not just his critical resistance to it. Now available in paperback, "William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South" places Faulkner's art in context while concentrating on textual detail, technique, and thematic preoccupations across his career.

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.

This book investigates a new form of fiction that is currently emerging in contemporary literature across the globe. 'Novels of the extreme' - from North and South America, from Europe, the Middle East and Asia - are set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper-real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction. While their writing is commonly classified as 'hip' or 'underground' literature, authors of contemporary extreme novels have often been the center of public controversy and scandal; they, and their work, become international bestsellers. This collection of essays indentifies and describes this international phenomenon, investigating the appeal of these novels' styles and themes, the reason behind their success, and the fierce debates they provoked. Alain-Philippe Durand is Associate Professor of French, Film Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Rhode Island. Naomi Mandel is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Rhode Island.

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.