In this incisive new book, P. V. Laxmiprasad addresses the great Indian queen Rani Chennamma of Kittur as a character in Indian fiction. The Queen of Kittur by Basavaraj Naikar highlights the themes of honor and glory, patriotism and freedom, betrayal and defeat of the royal family of Kittur as revealed by the life of Rani Chennamma. This novel is a precious jewel in Indian literature. Laxmiprasad's critical evaluation contextualizes female Indian royalty as a subject in historical fiction and rising force of nationalism, heroism, and solidarity.

There is growing awareness of the tremendous impact Latino writers have had on the recent literary scene, yet not all readers have the background to fully appreciate the merits and meanings of works like House on Mango Street, Line of the Sun, Bless Me Ultima, and In the Time of Butterflies. Offering analysis of their most important, popular, and frequently assigned fictional works, this book surveys the contributions of eight notable Latino writers: Julia Alvarez, Rodolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Christina Garia, Oscar Hijuelos, Ortiz Cofer, and Ernesto Quinonez. Each chapter gives biographical background on the author and clear literary analysis of the selected works, including a concise plot synopsis. Delving into the question of cultural identity, each work is carefully examined not only in terms of its literary components, but also with regard to the cultural background and historical context. This book illuminates such themes as acculturation, generational differences, immigration, assimilation, and exile. Language, religion, and gender issues are explored against the cultural backdrop, along with the social impact of such historical events as Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico, the early days of Castro's Cuba, and the Trujillo Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Students and teachers will find their reading experiences of U.S. Latino works enriched with the literary and cultural perspectives offered here. A list of additional suggested reading is included.

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."

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.

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.

Devoted wife and mother. Acclaimed novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. At a time when society expected women to concentrate on family and hearth, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) published twelve novels, four short story collections, almost two dozen stories and essays, and innumerable illustrations. In "Mary Hallock Foote, " Darlis A. Willer examines the life of this gifted and spirited woman from the East as she adapted herself and her artistic vision to the West.

Foote's images of the American West differed sharply from those offered by male artists and writers of the time. She depicted a more gentle West, a domestic West of families and settlements rather than a Wild West of soldiers, American Indians, and cowboys. Miller examines how Foote's career was molded by the East-West tensions she experienced throughout her adult life and by society's expectations of womanhood and motherhood.

This biography recounts Foote's Quaker upbringing; her education at the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union, New York; her marriage to Arthur De Wint Foote, including his alcohol problems; her life in Boise, Idaho, and later Grass Valley, California; her grief over the early death of daughter Agnes Foote; and the previously unexplored last two decades of her life.

Miller has made extensive use of every major archive of letters and documents by and about Foote. She sheds light on Foote's numerous stories, essays, and novels. And examines all pertinent sources on Foote's life and works.

Anyone interested in the American West, women's history, or life histories in general will find Miller's biography of Mary Hallock Foote fascinating,

Greece and Rome have long featured in books for children and teens, whether through the genres of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery stories or mythological compendiums. These depictions and adaptations of the Ancient World have varied at different times, however, in accordance with changes in societies and cultures. This book investigates the varying receptions and ideological manipulations of the classical world in children's literature. Its subtitle, Heroes and Eagles, reflects the two most common ways in which this reception appears, namely in the forms of the portrayal of the Greek heroic world of classical mythology on the one hand, and of the Roman imperial presence on the other. Both of these are ideologically loaded approaches intended to educate the young reader.

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 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.

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

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.

In this book Andrew Gibson argues that the aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses are responses to the colonial history of Ireland and the colonial politics of Irish culture.

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 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.

Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera's place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of "period pieces" that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera's fiction. Building on theorist Rene Girard's notion of "triangular desire," he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive-and bitterly funny-understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera's novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found "the One" at last-or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera's novels and a witty introduction to Girard's mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author.

This title explores the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels. Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics' unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, "Graven Images" explores with real insight the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels. In essays by scholars and comics creators, "Graven Images" observes the frequency with which religious material - in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts - occurs in both independent and mainstream comics. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages; analyze how comics communicate such messages; place the religious messages contained in comics books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks; and, articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics.

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.

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.

This title offers a critical introduction to the contemporary American novel focusing on contexts, key texts, and criticism. Adventurous, engaging and politically urgent, contemporary American novels have come to enjoy a particular prestige and, through university courses, film adaptations and cultural controversies, a global circulation. This book provides a critical introduction to novels produced in the United States between 1980 and the present. Compact yet wide-ranging, and written in vivid, accessible prose, it registers the diversity of contemporary American writing and carefully situates this work in historical contexts that include Reaganomics, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 'War on Terror'. Detailed attention is given throughout to how America's current novelists have responded to shifting gender politics, changes in the nation's racial configuration, the increasing dominance of a commodity culture and to adjustments in the United States' place in the world following the end of the Cold War and the increased pace of globalisation. Complete with timelines of historical and literary events, detailed lists of secondary sources both in print and on the web, and suggestions for students' own research projects, this is the ideal resource for anyone beginning study of this vibrant literature. "Texts and Contexts" is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.

Although scholars have widely acknowledged the prevalence of religious reference in the work of Cormac McCarthy, this is the first book on the most pervasive religious trope in all his works: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. Informed by postmodern theories of narrative and Christian theologies of sacrament, Matthew Potts reads the major novels of Cormac McCarthy in a new and insightful way, arguing that their dark moral significance coheres with the Christian theological tradition in difficult, demanding ways. Potts develops this account through an argument that integrates McCarthy's fiction with both postmodern theory and contemporary fundamental and sacramental theology. In McCarthy's novels, the human self is always dispossessed of itself, given over to harm, fate, and narrative. But this fundamental dispossession, this vulnerability to violence and signs, is also one uniquely expressed in and articulated by the Christian sacramental tradition. By reading McCarthy and this theology alongside postmodern accounts of action, identity, subjectivity, and narration, Potts demonstrates how McCarthy exploits Christian theology in order to locate the value of human acts and relations in a way that mimics the dispossessing movement of sacramental signs. This is not to claim McCarthy for theology, necessarily, but it is to assert that McCarthy generates his account of what human goodness might look like in the wake of metaphysical collapse through the explicit use of Christian theology.

'Tristram is the Fashion', Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called 'this Shandy-Age'.