Speculative fiction often shows the complicated and rather fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women. Through prominent writers like Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson, Jones highlights how personal experiences of illness and disease frequently reflect larger societal sicknesses in connection to race and gender.

Implementing a never-before-seen approach to sea literature, American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations explores the role of American maritime activities and their cultural representations in literature. Differentiating between the 'terrestrial' and 'oceanic' as concepts, Shin Yamashiro divides sea literature into three categories: literature on the sea, by the sea, and beneath the sea. Discussing both canonical works and new books on scuba diving, deep-sea explorations, and surfing, this fascinating study recognizes sea literature's unique influence on American history.

Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is one of the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre's surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts from the Napoleonic era to today, the studies gathered here consider how memoirs have been used to transmit particular views of war even as they have emerged within specific social and political contexts.

Consisting of sixteen original essays by experts in the field, including leading and lesser-known international scholars, Global Frankenstein considers the tremendous adaptability and rich afterlives of Mary Shelley's iconic novel, Frankenstein, at its bicentenary, in such fields and disciplines as digital technology, film, theatre, dance, medicine, book illustration, science fiction, comic books, science, and performance art. This ground-breaking, celebratory volume, edited by two established Gothic Studies scholars, reassesses Frankenstein's global impact for the twenty-first century across a myriad of cultures and nations, from Japan, Mexico, and Turkey, to Britain, Iraq, Europe, and North America. Offering compelling critical dissections of reincarnations of Frankenstein, a generically hybrid novel described by its early reviewers as a "bold," "bizarre," and "impious" production by a writer "with no common powers of mind", this collection interrogates its sustained relevance over two centuries during which it has engaged with such issues as mortality, global capitalism, gender, race, embodiment, neoliberalism, disability, technology, and the role of science.

This book is a concise and engaging analysis of contemporary literature viewed through the critical lens of cosmopolitan theory. It covers a wide spectrum of issues including globalization, cosmopolitanism, nationhood, identity, philosophical nomadism, posthumanism, climate change, devolution and love.

This new volume in the "Literary Lives" series focuses on the career of the popular Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), and provides a new account of his professional life in the literary world of nineteenth-century Britain. It draws on recently available business and personal correspondence to establish a fresh portrait of one of Victorian Britain's busiest authors, taking in Collins's notoriously complicated private life and his friendship with Charles Dickens, as well his work as journalist, reviewer and playwright. New insights are given into the international dimensions of Collins's career. There is discussion of Collins's best-known novels, including "The Woman in White," "The Moonstone" and "Armadale," but attention is also given to lesser-known works and to Collins's plays, which have long been neglected. The volume will appeal to all students of Wilkie Collins and also to those interested in the literary world of Victorian Britain and the social and business networks which lay at its heart.

John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions is an exploration of Banville's novels from the point of view of various psychoanalytic understandings of the concept of narcissism. It presents this increasingly central figure in contemporary fiction as a writer for whom narcissism is both an essential truth of selfhood and a fundamental aspect of the writing of fiction. Though it deals with a number of theoretical concepts, it does so in a straightforward and highly accessible manner. The book is not simply a reading of a single, isolated aspect of Banville's work; rather, it presents narcissism as the key to understanding this writer, and as a way of bringing together the various disparate strands - thematic, stylistic and formal - of his complex and enigmatic oeuvre.

Gathering some of the most important Wright scholarship in the world, along with perspectives from emerging Wright critics, "Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century," ""explores new themes and theoretical orientations. Essays center on modernism, racism and spatial dimensions, the transnational and political Wright, Wright and class, Wright and the American 1950s and 1960s, and some of the first analyses of Wright's recently published "A Father""'""s Law" (2008). This dynamic collection combines literary and cultural theory with methods of archival research to provide an expanded vision of Wright's impact on thinking in the twenty-first century.

Why have scholars located the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England? What historical forces and stylistic developments helped to turn a disreputable type of writing into an eminent literary form?
This Reader's Guide explores the key critical debates and theories about the rising novel, from eighteenth-century assessments through to present day concerns. Nicholas Seager:

surveys major criticism on authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen
covers a range of critical approaches and topics including feminism, historicism, postcolonialism and print culture
demonstrates how critical work is interrelated, allowing readers to discern trends in the critical conversation.
Approachable and stimulating, this is an invaluable introduction for anyone studying the origins of the novel and the surrounding body of scholarship.

This groundbreaking collection of essays represents Herman Melville as an artist for whom questions of sensation, pleasure, and form cannot be separated from philosophical and political concerns. Contributors offer original and provocative readings that span Melville's career and engage the resurgence of interest among literary scholars in aesthetics. The first of its kind, this collection returns us to the particularities of Melville's extraordinarily varied works and transforms the subject of aesthetics into an invigorating and unpredictable source of interpretive energy.

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

This study introduces the reader to Victor Serge's life and extraordinary novels, locating them amidst crucial debates about revolution, communism, anarchism, literature and representation, and in comparison with his contemporaries. Marshall demonstrates that the voice of Serge is unified by a notion of dissent - an active dissent far removed from the quietism and conservatism of other dissidents.

The Henty family emigrated from Sussex to Launceston in Van Diemen's Land in the early 1830s. Three of the brothers became pioneer settlers at Portland Bay on Australia's southern coast. Their journals, which are among the most valuable items in the manuscript collection of the LaTrobe Library, State Library of Victoria, have never before been published. Written by Edward and Francis, with some entries by John, this daily working record tells of five years in the lives of four young men variously engaged in farming, whaling and coastal shipping. These meticulous journals are enlivened by a fascinating range of contemporary illustrations. The book is an invaluable record both of the introduction of well-ordered English farming methods to a new land and of the populations of right whales that once visited Portland Bay-interspersed with events such as the arrival of Major Mitchell, Surveyor-General of New South Wales, who 'was not a little surprised to find Englishmen in this Part of the World'.

Victorian writer Frances Trollope has largely been relegated to a mere footnote in literary history as simply the mother of Anthony. Equally unfortunate is that, aside from her nonfiction work "Domestic Manners of the Americans," her 34 novels have been out of print since the nineteenth century. She was, nonetheless, the most provocative female writer of the early Victorian period who used the novel to impel social change. She has been credited for writing the first anti-slavery novel that predates "Uncle ToM's Cabin," along with a number of works that incited reform legislation regarding bastardy clauses, poor laws, and labor conditions.

Expert contributors examine her life and writings, her social activism, and the impact of her works. The book includes discussions of her influence on Anthony Trollope, the rivalry between Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens, her belief in the power of female friendship, her ambivalence toward the ability of women to effect social change, her thoughts on Evangelicalism, her views on women and aging, and her innovative contribution to early crime fiction. Contributors argue for the value of reprinting her novels and travel books and point to her enduring literary legacy.

'A smart and highly entertaining portrait of a literary powerhouse' - THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'A riveting portrait' - GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** 'Christie lovers should read this biography for the same reason they read her novels.' - The Times 'A model of how to combine biographical information, analysis and literary criticism into a propulsive narrative' - Daily Telegraph 'Worsley's book excels in bringing a broader historical perspective to Christie's life and work, and her enthusiasm is infectious.' - Observer Ms Worsley herself writes engagingly... She combines an almost militant support for her subject with a considered analysis of her books and plays.' - Economist 'Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.' Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why - despite all the evidence to the contrary - did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? She was born in 1890 into a world which had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of an internationally renowned bestselling writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Centering on the British kitchen sink realism movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically its documentation of the built environment's influence on class consciousness, this book highlights the settings of a variety of novels, plays, and films, turning to archival research to offer new ways of thinking about how spatial representation in cultural production sustains or intervenes in the process of social stratification. As a movement that used gritty, documentary-style depictions of space to highlight the complexities of working-class life, the period's texts chronicled shifts in the social and topographic landscape while advancing new articulations of citizenship in response to the failures of post-war reconstruction. By exploring the impact of space on class, this book addresses the contention that critical discourse has overlooked the way the built environment informs class identity.

Italian scholar, novelist, journalist, and philosopher Claudio Magris is among the most prominent of living European intellectuals. This study is the first comprehensive critical analysis of Magris's corpus for an English-speaking audience and addresses the crucial question of the return to humanism that is moving literature and theory forward.

Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader? How did his reading choices respond to his environment? This book looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s and examines the masculine reader and author, and how they challenged feminine middlebrow and literary modernism.

This book is a critical study of visual representations of Jose Marti-The National Hero of Cuba-, and the discourses of power that make it possible for Marti's images to be perceived as icons today. It argues that an observer of Marti's icons who is immersed in the Cuban national narrative experiences a retrospective reconstruction of those images by means of ideologically formed national discourses of power. Also, the obsessive reproduction of Marti's icons signals a melancholia for the loss of the martyr-hero. But instead of attempting to forget Marti, the book concludes that the utopian impulse of his memory should serve to resist melancholia and to visualize new forms of creative re-significations of Marti and, by extension, the nation. Contents: Gaze, Intentionality, and Manipulation Battling for the National Icon The Filming of a Memory Melancholia for Marti Afterthoughts: Resisting Cuban Melancholia

A full account of Lawrence, ranging from his talent as a young writer to the continuing genius of his later work, and concentrating on his exceptionally acute powers of observation, both human and natural.

By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-Francois Vernay's plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, particularly within the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed.

This book explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The legacy of Romantic historicism, the professionalization of the historical discipline, and even the growth of social history, all heightened the stakes. This book brings together Victorian histories and novels to show how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways. Many historians shrank from engaging with controversial recent events. This study showcases the work of those rare historians who defied convention, including the polymath Harriet Martineau, English nationalist J. R. Green, and liberal enthusiast Spencer Walpole. A striking number of popular Victorian novels are retrospective. This book argues that Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot's "novels of the recent past" are long overdue recognition as genuinely historical novels. By focusing on provincial communities, these novelists reveal undercurrents invisible to national narratives, and intervene in debates about women's contribution to history.

Cosmopolitanism and Place considers the way contemporary Anglophone fiction connects global identities with the experience in local places. Looking at fiction set in metropolises, regional cities, and rural communities, this book argues that the everyday experience of these places produces forms of wide connections that emphasize social justice.