This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), and Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion, the author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European Painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then proceeds to analyze the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries. .

This collection seeks to examine the intersections of aesthetics and morality, of what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. Both artistic and social values are inflected by their histories, and, as time passes, so the definition of what it means to be D/decadent alters. The very ideas of the decline from a higher standard, of social malaise, of aesthetic ennui, all presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. Purportedly decadent artists focused upon the fleeting present, ascribed value to experiencing the aesthetic moment in its purest form, and it was precisely due to this focus upon living in, and for, the moment that society often responded by expressing moral contempt for the perceived hedonism of art. The aesthetic rejection of contemporary value added to the conflict between the literary and social inflections of Decadent interpretation. The truly decadent was condemned by artists as the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself. This conflict underlies the range of essays in the collection.

The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalising tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative is an exhaustive survey of Australian literature proposing itself as a journey through time and space. With a sound selection of texts which recount Australian history from the early days of white colonization to the present, this study endeavours to cast light on the process of socio-topographic construction that the settlers imposed upon the continent. As suggested by the title, the textual inquiry conducted in this book is driven by the stimulating ambiguity that lies between physical space and its discursive construction. A selection of canonical and non-canonical texts by authors ranging from Henry Lawson to Christos Tsiolkas aims to reveal the relationship between the space of the city (the scene) and the outback (the ob-scene space beyond the metropolitan area) and its role in the process of spatial construction that, through the last two centuries, has shaped Australia. Pablo Armellino's distinctive approach to Australian literature makes Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative a very interesting work. Using a carefully selected range of novels, linked together using social and literary theory, it recounts the history of colonization in Australia in a particularly approachable manner. Through the analysis of each text the reader seamlessly learns about the expansion of the frontier, the creation of an ob-scene space beyond it and the use the Discourse makes of this mechanism. These characteristics would appeal to both an academic audience, which would appreciate the detailed text analysis, and a general audience, which would enjoy the historical and thematic aspect of the book. - Professor Carmen Concilio and Professor Pietro Deandrea, Facolta di Lingue, Universita di Torino Pablo Armellino was born in Turin, Italy. He studied at the University of Turin and, in 2007, received a PhD in English. His main interest lies with Australian literature, but he has also worked on post-colonial and contemporary English literature. He has published on the contemporary relevance of god in English literature and on Australian Aboriginal narrative. During and after his studies he resided in Melbourne, Australia, and was a guest of La Trobe University.

Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in con-temporary Anglophone novels - Patricia Grace's Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven's Her Sister's Eye (2002), Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995) - in which the figure of the ghost is often entrusted with the task of questioning Western culture and history. After an in-troductory chapter which investigates Freud's concept of the un-canny along with theoretical issues raised by Iain Chambers and Jacques Derrida, Ghostly Alterities discusses the novels from different critical orientations (postcolonialism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), presenting ghostliness as intersecting with three major themes: the problem of the spectre's visibility and "bodily" nature; the particular melancholic state of mind the ghost can trigger which brings about a very special kind of (g)hospitality; the spectral nature of history and its relationship with the characters' personal memory.

These proceedings of the international 2006 symposium 'The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature' at Halic University, Istanbul, include the majority of contributions to this event, some of them heavily revised for publication. A first group, treatments of more comprehensive and/or theoretical aspects of life and travel writing, concerns genre history (Nazan Aksoy; Manfred Pfister), typology (Manfred Pfister; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson), issues of narration (Gerald P. Mulderig; Rana Tekcan), the recent phenomenon of blogging (Leman Giresunlu), and therapeutic narrative (Wendy Ryden). A second group-whose concern often heavily overlaps with the first in that it also pursues theoretical goals-concentrates on individual authors and artists: Saba Altinsay and Dido Sotiriou (Banu Ozel), Samuel Beckett (Oya Berk), the sculptor Alexander Calder (Barbara B. Zabel), G. Thomas Couser and his filial memoir, Moris Farhi (Bronwyn Mills), Jean Genet (Clare Brandabur), Henry James (Laurence Raw), Orhan Pamuk (Dilek Doltas; Ayse F. Ece), Sylvia Plath (Richard J. Larschan), Edouard Roditi (Clifford Endres), Sara Rosenberg (Claire Emilie Martin), the dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai (Leena Chandorkar), Alev Tekinay (Ozlem Ogut), Uwe Timm (Jutta Birmele), and female British and American Oriental travellers (Tea Jansson).

This collection of new essays brings together scholarly examinations of a writer who -- despite the prestige that the Nobel Prize has earned him -- remains controversial with respect to his place in the literary tradition of his home country. This is in part because the positioning of Turkey itself in relation to the cultural divide between East and West has been the subject of a debate going back to the beginnings of the modern Turkish state and earlier. The present essays, written mostly by literary scholars, range widely across Pamuks novelistic oeuvre, dealing with how the writer, often adding an allegorical level to the personages depicted in his experimental narratives, portrays tensions such as those between Western secularism and traditional Islam and different conceptions of national identity.

This monograph seeks to reconstruct the culture of the pioneer woman as presented in O. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, and Willa Cather's My Antonia. Essentially, the textual analyses show the pioneer woman's evolving and dynamic reaction to both felicitous space and the open spaces of the western frontier as she progresses from completely loathing to totally embracing vast spaces. The texts discussed demonstrate the genesis and growth of the modern American, independent woman who successfully negotiated the volatile topics of gender and space.