This volume analyzes the literary role played by history in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It argues that the events of The Lord of the Rings are placed against the background of an already-existing history, both in reality and in the fictional worlds of the books. History is unfolded in various ways, both in explicitly archival annals and in stories told by characters on the road or on the fly, and in which different visions of history emerge. In addition, the history within the work can resemble, or be patterned on histories in our world. These histories range from the deep past of prehistoric and ancient worlds to the early medieval era of the barbarian invasions and Byzantium, to the modern worlds of urbane civility and a paradoxical longing for nature, and finally to great power-rivalries and global prospects. The book argues that Tolkien did not employ these histories indiscriminately or reductively. Rather, he regarded them as aspects of aesthetic and representative figuration that are above all literary. While most criticism has concentrated on Tolkien’s use of historical traditions of northern Europe, this book argues that Tolkien also valued Southern and Mediterranean pasts and registered the Germanic and the Scandinavian pasts as they related to other histories as much as his vision of them included a primeval mythic aura.

Roberto Bolano as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist that highlights his connections with classic and contemporary masters of world literature and his investigation of topics of international interest, such as the rise of rightwing and neofascist movements during the last decades of the 20th century. But this anthology also shows how Roberto Bolano's participation in world literature is informed in his experiences, identity, and, more generally, cultural location as a Chilean, Latin American and, more generally, Hispanic writer and man. This book provides a corrective to readings of his novels as exclusively "postmodern" or as unproblematically representative of Chilean or Latin American reality. Roberto Bolano as World Literature thus helps readers to better understand such complex works as his monumental global five-part masterpiece 2666, his Chilean novels (Distant Star, By Night in Chile), and his Mexican narratives (Amulet, The Savage Detectives), among other works.

Anthony Trollope's novels and stories entertain while vividly bringing the Victorian era to life. His deep empathy for the underdog led him to subvert conventions, exploring the lives of women, as well as men, and choosing as heroes and heroines outsiders who would be viewed with suspicion by his readers. Trollope's profound insight to human nature made him the first novelist in English to develop three dimensional characters and to create the novel sequence. This literary companion introduces readers to his life and work. A-to-Z entries explore Trollope's short story collections, and nonfiction contributions, as well as important themes in the works. This companion also includes fresh voices of contributors that bring in their contemporary insights to bear on Trollope's achievements, facilitating the understanding of Trollope's perspectives in relation to feminism, queer studies, and transnationalism.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Retrospect gathers fifteen essays by noted scholars in the fields of Latin American literature, politics, and theater. The volume offers broad overviews of the Colombian author's total body of work, along with closer looks at some of his acknowledged masterpieces. The Nobel laureate's cultural contexts and influences, his variety of themes, and his formidable legacy (Hispanic, U.S., world-wide) all come up for consideration. New readings of One Hundred Years of Solitude are further complemented by fresh, stimulating, highly detailed examinations of his later novels (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Of Love and Other Demons) and stories (Strange Pilgrims). Further attention is focused on "Gabo's" labors as journalist and as memoirist (Living to Tell the Tale), and to his sometime relationships with the cinema and the stage. Reactions to his enormous stature on the part of younger writers, including recent signs of backlash, are also given thoughtful scrutiny. Feminist and ecocritical interpretations, plus lively discussions of Gabo's artful use of humor, character's names, and even cuisine, are to be found here as well. In the wake of Garcia Marquez's passing away in 2014, this collection of essays serves as a fitting tribute to one of the world's greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.

Dear Angela includes fourteen critical essays that examine the brief-lived but landmark television series, My So-Called Life (1994-1995). Though certainly not the first young woman to be the center of a television series, Angela Chase and the show about her life were doing something new on television and influenced many of the shows about young people that followed. Michele Byers and David Lavery bring together enthusiastic and engaging voices that bear on a series that continues to be hailed as a breakthrough moment in television, even though more than a decade has passed since its cancellation. Tackling a broad range of topics-from identity politics, to music, to infidelity, and death-each essay builds upon a belief that My So-Called Life is a particularly rich text worth studying for the clues it offers about a particular moment in cultural and television history. Dear Angela offers a sophisticated analysis of the show's legacy and cultural relevance that will appeal to media studies scholars and fans alike.

Dear Angela includes fourteen critical essays that examine the brief-lived but landmark television series, My So-Called Life (1994-1995). Though certainly not the first young woman to be the center of a television series, Angela Chase and the show about her life were doing something new on television and influenced many of the shows about young people that followed. Michele Byers and David Lavery bring together enthusiastic and engaging voices that bear on a series that continues to be hailed as a breakthrough moment in television, even though more than a decade has passed since its cancellation. Tackling a broad range of topics_from identity politics, to music, to infidelity, and death_each essay builds upon a belief that My So-Called Life is a particularly rich text worth studying for the clues it offers about a particular moment in cultural and television history. Dear Angela offers a sophisticated analysis of the show's legacy and cultural relevance that will appeal to media studies scholars and fans alike.

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and crucial present of the Australian novel.

This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.

A fresh, twenty-first-century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive, and multicultural sense. Australian literature is one of the world's richest, dealing not only with "local" Australian themes and issues but with those at the forefront of global literary discussion. This book offers a fresh look at Australian literature,taking a broad view of what literature is and viewing it with Australian cultural and societal concerns in mind. Especially relevant is the heightened role of indigenous people and issues following the landmark 1992 Mabo decision on Aboriginal land rights. But attention to other multicultural connections and the competing pull of Australia's continued connection to Great Britain are also enlightening. Chapters are devoted to internationally prominent writers such as Patrick White, Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Christina Stead; fast-rising authors such as Gerald Murnane and Tim Winton; less-publicized writers such as Xavier Herbert and Dorothy Hewett; and on prose fiction,poetry, and drama, women's and gay and lesbian writing, children's literature, and science fiction. The Companion goes beyond Eurocentric ideas of national literary history to reveal the full, resplendent variety of Australian writing. Contributors: Nicholas Birns, Rebecca McNeer, Ali Gumillya Baker, Gus Worby, Anita Heiss, Ruth Feingold, Wenche Ommundsen, Susan Jacobowitz, Deborah Madsen, Marguerite Nolan, Tanya Dalziell, Richard Carr, David McCooey, Maryrose Casey, Brigid Rooney, John Beston, John Scheckter, Werner Senn, Carolyn Bliss, Paul Genono, Lyn Jacobs, Nicole Moore, Ouyang Yu, Jaroslav Kusnir, Brigid Magner, Russel Blackford, Toni Johnson-Woods, Theodore F. Sheckels, Alice Mills, Gary Clark, Damien Barlow, Leigh Dale Nicholas Birns teaches literature at the New School in New York City and is the editor of Antipodes. Rebecca McNeer is Associate Dean Emerita at Ohio University Southern.

"The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel" provides an accessible introduction to an important World literature. While many of the authors covered--Aira, Bolano, Castellanos Moya, Vasquez--are gaining an increasing readership in English and are frequently taught, there is sparse criticism in English beyond book reviews. This book provides the guidance necessary for a more sophisticated and contextualized understanding of these authors and their works. Underestimated or unfamiliar Spanish American novels and novelists are introduced through conceptually rigorous essays. Sections on each writer include: *the author's reception in their native country, Spanish America, and Spain*biographical history*a critical examination of their work, including key themes and conceptual concerns*translation history*scholarly reception"The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel" offers an authoritative guide to a rich and varied novelistic tradition. It covers all demographic areas, including United States Latino authors, in exploring the diversity of this literature and its major themes, such as exile, migration, and gender representation.

Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia. In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia's distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance.In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward.Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice - one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it. Contrary to the despairing of the critics, Australian literary identity continues to flourish. And as Birns finds, it is not one thing, but many.

Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality-one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from their indigenous peoples. This volume explores significant themes and topics in Australian and New Zealand literature. In their introduction, the editors address both the commonalities and differences between the two nations' literatures by considering literary and historical contexts and by making nuanced connections between the global and the local. Contributors share their experiences teaching literature on the iconic landscape and ecological fragility; stories and perspectives of convicts, migrants, and refugees; and Maori and Aboriginal texts, which add much to the transnational turn. This volume presents a wide array of writers-such as Patrick White, Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Witi Ihimaera, Christina Stead, Allen Curnow, David Malouf, Les Murray, Nam Le, Miles Franklin, Kim Scott, and Sally Morgan-and offers pedagogical tools for teachers to consider issues that include colonial and racial violence, performance traditions, and the role of language and translation. Concluding with a list of resources, this volume serves to supportnew and experienced instructors alike.

Theory After Theory provides an overview of developments in literary theory after 1950. It is intended both as a handbook for readers to learn about theory and an intellectual history of the recent past in literary criticism for those interested in seeing how it fits in with the larger culture. Accessible but rigorous, this book provides a wealth of historical and intellectual context that allows the reader to make sense of the movements in recent literary theory.

Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality-one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from their indigenous peoples. This volume explores significant themes and topics in Australian and New Zealand literature. In their introduction, the editors address both the commonalities and differences between the two nations' literatures by considering literary and historical contexts and by making nuanced connections between the global and the local. Contributors share their experiences teaching literature on the iconic landscape and ecological fragility; stories and perspectives of convicts, migrants, and refugees; and Maori and Aboriginal texts, which add much to the transnational turn. This volume presents a wide array of writers-such as Patrick White, Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Witi Ihimaera, Christina Stead, Allen Curnow, David Malouf, Les Murray, Nam Le, Miles Franklin, Kim Scott, and Sally Morgan-and offers pedagogical tools for teachers to consider issues that include colonial and racial violence, performance traditions, and the role of language and translation. Concluding with a list of resources, this volume serves to supportnew and experienced instructors alike.

Roberto Bolano as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist that highlights his connections with classic and contemporary masters of world literature and his investigation of topics of international interest, such as the rise of rightwing and neofascist movements during the last decades of the 20th century. But this anthology also shows how Roberto Bolano's participation in world literature is informed in his experiences, identity, and, more generally, cultural location as a Chilean, Latin American and, more generally, Hispanic writer and man. This book provides a corrective to readings of his novels as exclusively "postmodern" or as unproblematically representative of Chilean or Latin American reality. Roberto Bolano as World Literature thus helps readers to better understand such complex works as his monumental global five-part masterpiece 2666, his Chilean novels (Distant Star, By Night in Chile), and his Mexican narratives (Amulet, The Savage Detectives), among other works.