International in her appeal, Nadine Gordimer is an original and accomplished novelist whose works have found literary and popular recognition. In this critical study, first published in 1988 and the first by a woman, Judie Newman discusses all Gordimer's novels, including A Sport of Nature. Gordimer's writing is both political committed and formally innovative, confronting subject matter of great contemporary interest and at the same time seeking out narrative forms that combine European and indigenous culture. Her novels are sensitive to their context, while also offering an important contribution to postmodernist reassessments of narrative poetics, and a challenge to European conceptions of the novel. Judie Newman places particular emphasis on Gordimer's searching investigation of the relation of gender to genre, and explores other major concerns such as the crisis of liberal values, the nature of historical consciousness, racism, sexual politics, and the psychopathology of power. Her study combines close literary analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of ideas, showing clearly how the artist can contribute to contemporary debate.

The Internet has had a huge impact on channels of communication and information, reaching across time and space to connect the world through globalisation. In this Internet-led world, story links to story, windows open on new stories and no overall authority establishes priority. This sense of globalisation has raised many questions for contemporary American Novelists, primarily the usefulness or redundancy of narrative and its potentially adaptive function. What are the right stories for such a broadband world? How do contemporary American novelists respond to issues such as the influence of the multinational corporation and its predecessors, human rights Imperialism, the literary work as a marketable commodity, translation as betrayal, data overload, and the implosion of the virtual into the biosphere? Is globalisation inevitable - or is it a fiction which fiction turns into reality?

Fictions of America explores these questions and looks at the ways in which India, China and Africa can be said to have underwritten American culture, how literature has been marketed globally, and how novelists have answered back to power with resistant fictions. Judie Newman examines a wide range of fiction from the mid nineteenth to the twenty-first century including the transnational adoption narrative, short story, historical novel, slave narrative, international bestseller and Western to illustrate her argument. Looking closely at authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, John Updike, Emily Prager, Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston, David Bradley, Peter Hoeg, and Cormac McCarthy, Fictions of America provides a bold response to the crucial questions raised by globalisation.

International in her appeal, Nadine Gordimer is an original and accomplished novelist whose works have found literary and popular recognition. In this critical study, first published in 1988 and the first by a woman, Judie Newman discusses Gordimer's novels, including A Sport of Nature. Gordimer's writing is both political committed and formally innovative, confronting subject matter of great contemporary interest and at the same time seeking out narrative forms that combine European and indigenous culture. Her novels are sensitive to their context, while also offering an important contribution to postmodernist reassessments of narrative poetics, and a challenge to European conceptions of the novel. Judie Newman places particular emphasis on Gordimer's searching investigation of the relation of gender to genre, and explores other major concerns such as the crisis of liberal values, the nature of historical consciousness, racism, sexual politics, and the psychopathology of power. Her study combines close literary analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of ideas, showing clearly how the artist can contribute to contemporary debate.

In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation. This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, Andre Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror - whether state or non-state, external or homegrown - shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.

The Internet has had a huge impact on channels of communication and information, reaching across time and space to connect the world through globalisation. In this Internet-led world, story links to story, windows open on new stories and no overall authority establishes priority. This sense of globalisation has raised many questions for contemporary American Novelists, primarily the usefulness or redundancy of narrative and its potentially adaptive function. What are the right stories for such a broadband world? How do contemporary American novelists respond to issues such as the influence of the multinational corporation and its predecessors, human rights Imperialism, the literary work as a marketable commodity, translation as betrayal, data overload, and the implosion of the virtual into the biosphere? Is globalisation inevitable - or is it a fiction which fiction turns into reality? Fictions of America explores these questions and looks at the ways in which India, China and Africa can be said to have underwritten American culture, how literature has been marketed globally, and how novelists have answered back to power with resistant fictions. Judie Newman examines a wide range of fiction from the mid nineteenth to the twenty-first century including the transnational adoption narrative, short story, historical novel, slave narrative, international bestseller and Western to illustrate her argument. Looking closely at authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, John Updike, Emily Prager, Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston, David Bradley, Peter Hoeg, and Cormac McCarthy, Fictions of America provides a bold response to the crucial questions raised by globalisation.

This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, Andre Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror whether state or non-state, external or homegrown shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought. "

This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field--the history of letters and letter writing--is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature.

Essays on the links between film and fiction, and their mutual influence. Fiction and film interrelate closely to each other, and the specially commissioned essays in this volume all consider different aspects of this relationship. Beginning with discussions of Dickens and Victorian literature, the contributors, all leading scholars in this field, demonstrate how visual devices like the magic lantern caught the interest of writers and affected their choice of subject and method. The impact of the cinema on the British modernistsis then discussed, and the remaining essays provide detailed case studies on such subjects as Hemingway, Updike, and the depiction of women in contemporary fiction and film.

A collection of essays that perceive Updike's America through the eyes of Western and Eastern European readers and scholars, contributing to Updike scholarship while demonstrating his resonance across the Atlantic. From the publication in 1958 of his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages. He had a strong following in the United Kingdom, where his books were routinely reviewed in all the leading national newspapers. In Germany, France, Italy, and other countries too, his books were discussed in major publications. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his writing remains strong among European scholars. They are active in the John Updike Society and on the John Updike Review (which began publishing in 2011). During the past four decades, several Europeans have influenced the study of Updike worldwide. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on his oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike's renditions of America through the eyes of scholar-readers from both Western and Eastern Europe. Contributors: Kasia Boddy, Teresa Botelho, Biljana Dojcinovic, Brian Duffy, Karin Ikas, Ulla Kriebernegg, Sylvie Mathe, Judie Newman, Sue Norton, Andrew Tate, Aristi Trendel, Eva-Sabine Zehelein. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Sue Norton is a Lecturer in English at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writing This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field--the history of letters and letter writing--is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties. Key Features Draws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contexts Methodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academics Offers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others

Saul Bellow is one of the twentieth century's most influential, respected, and honored writers. His novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet won the National Book Award, and Humboldt's Gift was awarded the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition, his plays garnered popular and critical acclaim, and some were produced on Broadway. Known for his insights into life in a post-Holocaust world, Bellow's explorations of modernity, Jewish identity, and the relationship between art and society have resonated with his readers, but because his writing is not overtly political, his politics have largely been ignored.

A Political Companion to Saul Bellow examines the author's novels, essays, short stories, and letters in order to illuminate his evolution from liberal to neoconservative. It investigates Bellow's exploration of the United States as a democratic system, the religious and ideological influences on his work, and his views on race relations, religious identity, and multiculturalism in the academy. Featuring a fascinating conclusion that draws from interviews with Bellow's sons, this accessible companion is an excellent resource for understanding the political thought of one of America's most acclaimed writers.

South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Her seventh novel, Burger's Daughter, focuses upon the daughter of a white, communist Afrikaner hero. Based partly on fact, successively banned and unbanned by the South African authorities, the novel has also become something of a test case for feminist critics of Gordimer's writing. This casebook includes an interview with and an essay by Nadine Gordimer on the novel, classic and recent critical essays, an introduction discussing biographical and historical contexts and the literary reception, and a bibliography.

In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation.

This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.