Ashley Crawford investigates how such figures as Ben Marcus, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch-among other artists, novelists, and film directors-utilize religious themes and images via Christianity, Judaism, and Mormonism to form essentially mutated variations of mainstream belief systems. He seeks to determine what drives contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a 'secular' context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language, and the mutations within those, have impacted American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalyptism that underwrites it.

Sixdiary notebooks kept by Samuel Beckett during his1936-7 trip through Nazi Germany were discovered in 1989. Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 is the first study to explore the relevance of these diaries to Beckett's development as a writer. Using the diaries as the central point of focus, Nixon draws on unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, reading notes from the 1930s to reflect on both Beckett's creative evolution prior to 1936 and the direction his writing took after his return to Dublin in April 1937. As well as gaining an insight into Beckett's reading of classical German literature, Nixon shows how the pared-down style of writing, the self-examination and the importance of the visual arts that govern Beckett's post-war works traces back to the pages of these notebooks. By illuminating how Beckett's writing and aesthetics underwent a far-reaching change during the 1930s, Nixon's study is crucial to our understanding of the emergence of Beckett as a radical writer in the post-war years.

A work which discusses Storm's significance and artistic stature as a champion of democratic humanitarian traditions and aspirations in 19th century Germany. It highlights his critique of Christianity, his vision of capitalism and his analysis of class relationships. The study contends that his literary form, techniques and strategies were shaped by the need to respond to specific socio-political constraints and prejudices of publishers, editors and readers. The book advocates new approaches to Storm's work and uses many unpublished primary materials.

This book offers a fundamental and comprehensive re-evaluation of one of Joyce's most pervasive themes. By showing that betrayal was central to how Joyce understood and depicted the difficulties and terrors at the heart of all relationships, this book re-conceives Joyce's approach to history, politics, and the other. Leaving behind the pathologizing discourses by which Joyce's interest in betrayal has been treated as an 'obsession,' this book offers a vision of Joyce as both dramatist and theorist of betrayal. It demonstrates that, rather than being compelled by some unconscious urge to produce and reproduce textual betrayals, Joyce had a deep and hard-won conception of the specific dramatic energies wrapped up in the language and structures of betrayal and repeatedly found ways to make use of this understanding in his work.

This is a fine edition of Jospeh Conrad's most acclaimed novel, printed on cream, acid-free paper. As the narrator Marlow journeys ever deeper into the Congo's 'heart of darkness', so he also penetrates deeper into the folly of western corruption and absurdity that characterises both the collision of European and African cultures, and the conflicts in his own inner nature. The story that tells of Marlow's mission to find the mysterious but missing Mr Kurtz, as he travels along the Congo River into the interior of the 'dark continent', tells also a second dark story of what happens when white westerners intrude into, and try to dominate, the continent of Africa without understanding either its people or their culture; but at its most penetrating level, Conrad's story reveals that the 'heart of darkness' lies at the core of human nature itself, that the journey to find Kurtz, is Marlow's journey to his own darkness that, viewed at its most bleak is the darkness that we all share.

"Examining the global dimensions of Neo-Victorianism, this book explores how the appropriation of Victorian images in contemporary literature and culture has emerged as a critical response to the crises of decolonization and Imperial collapse. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire explores the phenomenon by reading a range of popular and literary Anglophone neo-Victorian texts, including Alan Moores Graphic Novel From Hell, works by Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood, the films of Jackie Chan and contemporary Steampunk science fiction. Through these readingsElizabeth Ho explores how constructions of popular memory and fictionalisations of the past reflect political and psychological engagements with our contemporary post-Imperial circumstances. "

Schor traces the development of Ralph Ellison's fiction from the earliest experiments to the major accomplishment of his novel Invisible Man, the mature prose of the Hickman stories and other published portions of his novel-in-progress. The study considers the two-fold obligation Ellison felt in committing himself to literature: to contribute at once to the growth of literature and also to the shaping of the culture as he would like it to be. His stories, read sequentially, reflect his struggle to encompass this aim in his writing. In describing that fragment of American experience he knew best, he learned to use the rich resources of his African-American heritage; from his passionate involvement with his craft came the discovery that, in literature, values turn in their own way, not in the service of politics or ideology. The early stories mark Ellison's "mazelike" route that developed the skill, talent, and imagination and personal vision needed to transform experience into art. The novel demonstrates the flowering of his talent, and the Hickman stories add a fine patina. In her discussion of Ellison's work, Professor Schor uses his essays and interviews as well as the insights of other critics to comment directly on his fiction. The study concludes with a bibliography of Ellison's fiction and nonfiction and a selective bibliography of criticism and related sources.

This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in Dostoevsky's work. The essays cover such topics as temptation, his use of the gospels, the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment,The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree.

In this first full-length study of Emecheta's fiction, Fishburn highlights the difficulties inherent in reading across cultures. She challenges the notion that all we need to understand African texts is a willingness to be open to them, arguing that too many of the cultural and critical preconceptions we bring to these texts interfere with our ability to understand them. Directly responding to Western feminist criticism written about Emecheta, this study argues that Emecheta herself is not a feminist in the Western sense and that her novels should not be construed as reflecting this political interest. In close readings of eight of her best known works, this study reveals a complex narrative voice which is far more supportive of Emecheta's own African culture and its tradition than has been recognized previously.

Introducing The JG Ballard Book, an oversized collection of articles, ideas, interviews, insights and a travelogue... as well as uniquely featuring hi-rez reproductions of over 60 pages of handwritten and typed letters from JG Ballard himself. The JG Ballard Book is 192 (count 'em) full-colour large format pages of fun and fascinating insights into "The Seer of Shepperton" -- his life, his work and his planar intersections. The JG Ballard Book features contributions from some well-known denizens of the Ballardian universe: Toby Litt suggests Ballard's political ideology may be as inverted as his plots; David Pringle offers up his thoughtful 1984 interview, "JG Ballard: Psychoanalyst of the Electronic Age"; Michael Bonsall cuts it open with "JG Ballard in the Dissecting Room"; Michael Holliday stitches together all the disconnected Atrocity Exhibition bits in "Desperate Measures: A History of the Atrocity Exhibition"; seminal Ballard bibliographer James Goddard contributes actual Ballard documents from his extensive collection, a total of 56 pages of Ballard's handwritten text, interview corrections, lists and more from JGB's intense and experimental late 1960s and 1970s; Rick Poynor paints a picture of how Ballard has been treated by the visual media in "What Does JG Ballard Look Like?"; Sam Francis, fresh from his acclaimed study, The Psychological Fictions of JG Ballard, amuses us with an unpublished 2005 Ballard interview; Prof Peter Brigg clocks in with "JG Ballard: Time Out of Mind"; Jordi Costa, the creative force behind the JGB exhibition in Barcelona, takes a big screen look with "Ballardoscope: Some Attempts at Approaching the Writer as a Visionary"; Paul A. Green amazingly paints a pure Ballard pastiche with "The Impossibility Exhibition"; and Rick McGrath re-imagines his 2007 journey to Shanghai to visit the few remains of JG Ballard's youth in the "wicked city," with original letters, maps and drawings by Ballard. The book features original cover art by Luca del Baldo and 10 delicious photographs by Ana Barrado. The JG Ballard Book is a large format, full-colour, must-have collection for any Ballard fan

This book looks at the inception, composition, and 1907 publication of The Secret Agent, one of Joseph Conrad's most highly regarded political novels and a core text of literary modernism. David Mulry examines the development and revisions of the novel through the stages of the holograph manuscript, first as a short story, then as a serialized sensation fiction in Ridgway's Militant Weekly for the American market, before it was extensively revised and published in novel form. Presciently anticipating the climate of modern terror, Conrad's text responds to the failed Greenwich Bombing, the first anarchist atrocity to occur on English soil. This book charts its historical and cultural milieu via press and anarchist accounts of the bombing, to place Conrad foremost among the dynamite fiction of revolutionary anarchism and terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the decades after the Civil War, how did Americans see the world and their place in it? In this text, Kendall Johnson argues that Henry James appealed to his readers' sense of vision to dramatise the ambiguity of American citizenship in scenes of tense encounter with Europeans. By reviving the eighteenth-century debates over beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, James weaves into his narratives the national politics of emancipation, immigration, and Indian Removal. For James, visual experience is crucial to the American communal identity, a position that challenged prominent anthropologists as they defined concepts of race and culture in ways that continue to shape how we see the world today. To demonstrate the cultural stereotypes that James reworked, the book includes twenty illustrations from periodicals of the nineteenth century. This study reaches startling conclusions not just about James, but about the way America defined itself through the arts in the nineteenth century.

Although Smollett's obvious masculine sensibility has become a commonplace in criticism of the 18th-century novel, the basis and particularities of that sensibility have never been examined. In actuality, his treatment of women--heroines, victims, and comic or grotesque--proves far more complex than conventional commentary suggests. This study attempts to show that in each category Smollett's treatment depends on the fictional purposes that these characters serve in his novels.

Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary growth in the richness and diversity of Irish fiction, with the publication of highly original and often challenging work by both new and established writers. Contemporary Irish Fiction provides an invaluable introduction to this exciting but largely uncharted area of literary criticism by bringing together twelve accessible, stimulating essays by critics from Ireland, Britain and North America.

Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of 'exceptionality' as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.

This book assesses key works of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, including Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, to demonstrate that the major authors of this genre locate empathy and morality in eroticism. Taken together, these books delineate a subset of politically conscious speculative literature, which can be understood collectively as projected political fiction. While Thomas Horan addresses problematic aspects of this subgenre, particularly sexist and racist stereotypes, he also highlights how some of these texts locate social responsibility in queer and other non-heteronormative sexual relationships. In these novels, even when the illicit relationship itself is truncated, sexual desire fosters hope and community.

Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship shows how many young adult novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them. Jonathan Alexander examines not only young adult texts and their media ecologies but also young people's multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young people's literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.

First published in 1976, this astonishing anthology from two U.S. Poet Laureates, Charles Simic and Mark Strand, compiles a selection of the finest translated literature of the time, showcasing the then-little-known writers who had a profound influence on the current generation of poets.

In the last hundred years - between the invention of the microphone and the computer - music has undergone a profound revolution. No longer confined to specifically designed instruments, we can now make music out of anything. Why use a guitar when you can use a lawnmower? Why use a lawnmower when you can use an explosion in Libya? The Music evokes a shifting sonic landscape in precise detail: Chinese concrete slowly hardening, overlaid by a splintering cassette tape in the stereo of a car mid-crash. The noise of 73,984 insects hitting number plates followed by that of a drill striking oil deep beneath the earth's surface. Or just the silence of two unfamiliar people as they look up at the night sky. As well as being a description of an imagined album, this book is a manifesto for sound, challenging how we hear the world itself, while listening to stories about humanity and our place in that world.

This book of collected essays approaches Beckett's work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine 'modernism' in connection to concepts such as 'late modernism' or 'postmodernism'. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels, the essays use his diverse oeuvre - encompassing poetry, criticism, prose, theatre, radio and film - as a case study to investigate and reassess the concept of 'modernism after postmodernism' in all its complexity, covering a broad range of topics spanning Beckett's entire career. In addition to more thematic essays about art, history, politics, psychology and philosophy, the collection places his work in relation to that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as well as to the literary canon in general. It represents an important contribution to both Beckett studies and modernism studies.

Designed to meet the requirements for students at GCSE and A level, this accessible educational edition offers the complete text of Never Let Me Go with a comprehensive study guide. Intended for individual study as well as class use, Geoff Barton's guide: - clearly introduces the context of the novel and its author; - examines in detail its themes, characters and structure; - looks at the novel in the author's own words, and at different critical receptions; - provides glossaries and test questions to prompt deeper thinking. In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at a seemingly idyllic school, Hailsham, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

This book offers a new approach to reading the cultural memory of Africa in African American fiction from the post-Civil Rights era and in Black British fiction emerging in the wake of Thatcherism. The critical period between the decline of the Civil Rights Movement and the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a deep contrast in the distinctive narrative approaches displayed by diverse African diaspora literatures in negotiating the crisis of representing the past. Through a series of close readings of literary fiction, this work examines how the cultural memory of Africa is employed in diverse and specific negotiations of narrative time, in order to engage and shape contemporary identity and citizenship. By addressing the practice of "remembering" Africa, the book argues for the signal importance of the African diaspora's literary interventions, and locates new paradigms for cultural identity in contemporary times.

As seen in fiction, newspaper accounts, and magic shows, the presence of ghosts pervaded the Victorian period. This book examines supernatural encounters in a wide range of Victorian writers including Dickens and Kipling. Cadwallader argues that these fictional spirits reflect how Victorians were adapting to rapid scientific and religious changes.