Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The contributors to this collection explore literary urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents and numerous cities.

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

The late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a period commonly referred to as the post-Mao cultural thaw, was a key transitional phase in the evolution of Chinese science fiction. This period served as a bridge between science-popularization science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and New Wave Chinese science fiction from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw surveys the field of Chinese science fiction and its multimedia practice, analysing and assessing science fiction works by well-known writers such as Ye Yonglie, Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, and Xiao Jianheng, as well as the often-overlooked tech-science fiction writers of the post-Mao thaw. Exploring the socio-political and cultural dynamics of science-related Chinese literature during this period, Hua Li combines close readings of original Chinese literary texts with literary analysis informed by scholarship on science fiction as a genre, Chinese literary history, and media studies. Li argues that this science fiction of the post-Mao thaw began its rise as a type of government-backed literature, yet it often stirred up controversy and received pushback as a contentious and boundary-breaking genre. Topically structured and interdisciplinary in scope, Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw will appeal to both scholars and fans of science fiction.

This is a monograph analysing a number of modern British women writers and the way in which the canon of post-war British writing has been formed. With the increasing number of books on contemporary fiction, there is a need for a work that examines whom we value, and why. These questions lie at the heart of this book which, by focusing on four novelists, literary and popular, interrogates the canon over the last fifty years. The argument unfolds to demonstrate that academic trends increasingly control canonicity, as do the demands of genre, the increasing commercialisation of literature, and the power of the literary prize. Turner argues that literary excellence, demonstrated by style and imaginative power, is often missing in many works that have become modern classics and makes a case for the value of the 'universal' in literature. Written in a jargon-free style, with reference to many supporting writers, the book raises a number of significant cultural questions about the arts, fashions and literary reputations, of interest to readers in contemporary literary studies.

In A Sense of the City, Gala Maria Follaco examines Nagai Kafu's (1879-1959) literary construction of urban spatialities from late Meiji through the early Showa period. She argues that Kafu's urban critique was based on his awareness of the cultural sedimentation of the cityscape and of the complex relationship that it bore with the historical framework of modern Japan. With the overall aim to define Kafu's position within pre-war Japanese literature, Follaco touches upon key issues such as memory, class difference, and language ideologies; draws connections between his sojourn abroad and strategies of "mapping" the city of Tokyo in his literature; and takes into account works previously understudied, including his biography of Washizu Kido and his photographs.

A methodologically innovative account of the role of women writers in the development of early psychological theory and practice in the long eighteenth century. Women writers played a central, but hitherto under-recognised, role in the development of the philosophy of mind and its practical outworkings in Romantic era England, Scotland and Ireland. This book focuses on the writings and lives of five leading figures - Anna Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth - a group of women who differed profoundly in their political, religious and social views but were nevertheless associated through correspondence, family ties and a shared belief in the importance of female education. It shows how through the philosophical language of materiality and embodiment that they developed and the 'enlightened domesticity' that they espoused they transformed educational practice and made substantial interventions into the social reformist politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alive to the manifold overlaps between emotional, and often religious, experience and experiment in the developing science of mind at this time, the book illuminates the potential and the limits of domestic Enlightenment, particularly in projects of moral and industrial 'improvement' and casts new light on a wide variety of other fields: the history of science, early psychology and religion, reformist politics and Romanticism, and how all these reflected the political and social fallout of the French Revolution in the first years of the nineteenth century. JOANNA WHARTON is an Early Career Fellow at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Goettingen Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives to enbable students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop critical thinking. This volume explores Gulliver's Travels and The Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.

Building on the formula of York Notes, this series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enbables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop critical thinking. This text covers The Aeneid by Virgil.

This is an important new monograph offering a novel reading of the philosophy of Iris Murdoch."Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining" offers a new appreciation of Iris Murdoch's philosophy, emphasising the importance of images and the imagination for her thought.This book is first and foremost a study of Iris Murdoch's philosophical work. It examines how literature and imagination enabled Murdoch to form a philosophical response to the decline of religion. It thus argues that Murdoch is an important philosopher, because she has not confined herself to philosophy. The book also reconsiders various contemporary assumptions about what philosophy is and does. Through Le Doeuff's notion of the philosophical imaginary, it examines the different ways in which images and imagination are part of philosophy.

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

The presence of Irish writers is almost invisible in literary studies of London. The Irish Writing London redresses the critical deficit. A range of experts on particular Irish writers reflect on the diverse experiences and impact this immigrant group has had on the city. Such sustained attention to a location and concern of Irish writing, long passed over, opens up new terrain to not only reveal but create a history of Irish-London writing. Alongside discussions of MacNeice, Boland and McGahern, the autobiography of Brendan Behan and identity of Irish-language writers in London is considered. Written by an internal array of scholars, these new essays on key figures challenge the deep-seated stereotype of what constitutes the proper domain of Irish writing, producing a study that is both culturally and critically alert and a dynamic contribution to literary criticism of the city.

This anthology of articles on the Roman novels of Petronius and Apuleius makes available some of the most useful and important articles published in German and Italian as well as English over the last thirty years. The introduction, by the editor, provides a general assessment of all scholarly work written about the texts from the 1900s to the 1990s, setting the papers usefully in context. The articles in this collection which concern the work of Petronius include a general interpretation of a fragmentary and problematic text, exploration of narrative technique, relation to Menippean satire and recently discovered Greek novel papyri, and realism. On Apuleius, the collection includes pieces on narrative and ideological unity, relation to religion and Platonism, exploration of narrative technique, relation to epic and to the Greek ass stories, to folk-tale, and historical realism. A reflection of the period of rapid expansion of scholarly interest in the area of the ancient novel, this book combines the best of current international scholarly interpretation.

This study presents an exciting new approach to novels that combine the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life. Women are the prototypical Other in patriarchal societies, as can be seen in the first four novelists-Eudora Welty, Gloria Naylor, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing-who are primarily known as realists but who disrupt our expectations to shift our perspective. Moreover, Shinn analyzes how Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Cade Bambara write out of their consciousness as hyphenated Americans about what is necessary to achieve an integrated self and an integrated society. Shinn explores how these women have expanded not only the language but the very structure of their novels and have transformed the novelistic tradition.

In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.

This collection of essays by a diverse group of young academics, established critics, and well-known writers strikes an intriguing balance between scholarship and reminiscence. The only full-length book on Mary McCarthy that is not a biography, this volume contains discussions of McCarthy as a member of the New York intelligentsia, her search for a just and ethical political philosophy, and the paradox of her views on feminism. The contributors include McCarthy biographers Carol Brightman, Carol Gelderman, and Fran Kiernan; novelists Thomas Flanagan, Maureen Howard, and Thomas Mallon; Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Frances Fitzgerald; and critics Morris Dickstein and Katie Roiphe. The book concludes with a moving reminiscence by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is unquestionably one of the greatest works of world literature. With its dramatic portrayal of a Russian family in crisis and its intense investigation into the essential questions of human existence, the novel has had a major impact on writers and thinkers across a broad range of disciplines, from psychology to religious and political philosophy. This proposed reader's guide has two major goals: to help the reader understand the place of Dostoevsky's novel in Russian and world literature, and to illuminate the writer's compelling and complex artistic vision. The plot of the novel centers on the murder of the patriarch of the Karamazov family and the subsequent attempt to discover which of the brothers bears responsibility for the murder, but Dostoevsky's ultimate interests are far more thought-provoking. Haunted by the question of God's existence, Dostoevsky uses the character of Ivan Karamazov to ask what kind of God would create a world in which innocent children have to suffer, and he hoped that his entire novel would provide the answer. The design of Dostoevsky's work, in which one character poses questions that other characters must try to answer, provides a stimulating basis for reader engagement. Having taught university courses on Dostoevsky's work for over twenty years, Julian W. Connolly draws upon modern and traditional approaches to the novel to produce a reader's guide that stimulate the reader's interest and provides a springboard for further reflection and study.

During a period of twenty years--from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken's classic pulp magazine The Black Mask in the early 1930s, through the publication of his novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s--Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.Drawn from those journals, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler offers an intimate view of the writer at work, revealing early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes that would later be used in The Long Goodbye, The Blue Dahlia, and other classics.Filled with both public and private writings, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler includes "Marlowesque" particulars such as pickpocket lingo, San Quentin jailhouse slang, a "Note on the Tommygun," and musings on "Craps." Here, too, are surprising, lesser known essays on Hollywood, the mystery story, British and American writing, and a wicked parody of Hemingway. This sampler--by turns whimsical, provocative, irreverent, and fascinating--also contains a list of possible story titles; "Chandlerisms;" and his short work "English Summer: A Gothic Romance," which the writer viewed as a turning point in his career.

F Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of twentieth century America. His reputation is infinitely more lustrous since his untimely death than it was for much of his twenty-year literary career and is largely based on his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as on the colourful and tragic incidents of his personal life. His alcoholism; his fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Zelda Sayre, and her gradual descent into schizophrenia; the incandescent blossoming and dissipation of his literary gifts have all added to his legend. Fitzgerald was an individual who seemed to be composed of opposites and who, fittingly, could have been one of his own characters. He was charming, witty and in love with the magic and splendour of life, but also felt compelled to embrace the darkness. As a writer, his perception of the world around him was so finely tuned and acute that his life and career were a mirror of the 1920s and 30s, so that just as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, Fitzgerald's dazzling and youthful success yielded to drunkenness, despair and what he termed 'emotional bankruptcy'. This Pocket Essentials examines both Fitzgerald's life and writing and probes the infinitely complex and symbiotic relationship between the two, revealing the man behind the myth and behind some of the finest prose of all time.

Almost three hundred years after his birth in 1694, this is the first comprehensive study of Voltaire's contes philosophiques - the philosophical tales for which he is now best remembered and which include the masterpiece Candide. The Fables of Reason situates each of the twenty-six stories in its historical and intellectual context and offers new readings and approaches in the light of modern critical thinking. It rejects the traditional view that Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical perplexity, written merely in the margins of his historiography and his campaigns against the Establishment. Arguing that narrative is Voltaire's essential mode of thought, the book stresses the role of the reader and shows how the contes are designed less to communicate a set of truths than to encourage independence of mind. Roger Pearson has written a witty, lucid and scholarly guide to the `fables of reason' with which Voltaire undermined - and continues to undermine - the religious, philosophical, and economic `fables', by which other thinkers have tried to explain and direct human experience.

Since the publication of White Teeth in 2000, Zadie Smith has become one of the most popular contemporary writers and also one of the mostly widely studied. Taking criticism of Smith's work beyond its traditional focus on postcolonialism and multicultural identity, Reading Zadie Smith brings together leading international scholars to open up new directions in criticism of Smith's work. Covering such key topics as posthumanism, 'hysterical realism', religion, identity and ethics, this book brings together a full range of current critical perspectives to explore not only Smith's novels but also her short stories, her criticism and her non-fiction writing.

Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism details a variety of functionalities of the mode of magical realism, focusing on its capacity to construct sociological representations of belonging. This usage is traced closely in the novels of Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Cristina Garcia, and Helen Oyeyemi.

This innovative book examines the emergence of a memory discourse in Spain since the millennium, taking as its point of departure recent grave exhumations and the Law of Historical Memory. The chapters focus on cultural products that interrogate the processes and pitfalls of traumatic remembrance. Through an analysis of exhumation photography, novels, films, television shows, and comics, the volume examines a substantial body of works in which there is a focus on overcoming the notion that Spanish history is pathological.