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Angela Carter: New Critical Readings
Bringing together leading international scholars of contemporary fiction and modern women writers, this book provides authoritative new critical readings of Angela Carter's work from a variety of innovative theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Angela Carter: New Critical Readings both evaluates Carter's legacy as feminist provocateur and postmodern stylist, and broaches new ground in considering Carter as, variously, a poet and a 'naturalist'. Including coverage of Carter's earliest writings and her journalism as well as her more widely studied novels, short stories and dramatic works, the book covers such topics as rescripting the canon, surrealism, and Carter's poetics.
British Literature in Transition, 1980–2000 : Accelerated Times
The literature of twentieth-century Britain's final twenty years represents a crash course in transitional history. In the aftermath of the 1970s, the nation's hopes of becoming more efficient were high, leading to the fundamental domestic shake-up that was Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal revolution (1979-90). Following the end of the Cold War, Europe was undergoing radical rejuvenation, while the world as a whole began to thrive on new levels of connectivity and proximity brought through rapid advances in communication technology. Later, in the 1990s, Britons were asked to countenance not only internal devolution, but also the crystallisation of a brand-new European and global order. This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends as well as enduring transitional shifts in genre, tone, style and thematic preoccupation.
Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy
The manuscript of Hardy's first great novel Far From the Madding Crowdvanished shortly after its first publication. Rediscovered in 1918 it sheds remarkable new light on the whole of Hardy's work. The manuscript pages, some of which are reproduced here in facsimile, reveal Hardy's original composition in the novel, and the reluctantly `cancelled words' which were the result of a long struggle with Sir Leslie Stephen, Hardy's editor. Cancelled Wordsreveals the manner in which Hardy worked, his resistance to censorship, his obsessive attention to detail and precision, and the often concealed processes underlying his authorship. Ultimately, it serves to shape our understanding of the development of the modern novel.
Critical Insights: Midnight's Children
Midnight's Children marked a change in the global literary scene as it inaugurated a heightened interest in writings from the formerly colonized countries. There had been post-colonial writings before but in its richness, full with magical realistic depiction and historiographical narration, Rushdie's novel became a trendsetter. The essays in the volume discuss topics such as ethics, nationalism, translation, and the culture of globalization.
Critical Insights: Neil Gaiman
One of the most prolific writers of prose, graphic novels, feature-length films, and television serials, Neil Gaiman is as popular with critics as he is with readers. His works encourage readers to embrace love, fear, pain, pride, and most of the remaining emotional spectrum with an earnest vigor, gentle humor, and honest warmth, the likes of which humble the greats in all media to which he has contributed.
Critical Insights: T. S. Eliot
This title includes in-depth critical discussions of his life and works. This is a collection of fourteen essays by leading scholars examining the poetry, plays, criticism, and life of the Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot. Representing the best of a broad range of critical perspectives from the psychoanalytic to the poststructural, the volume serves as an excellent introduction to Eliot's works and the critical conversation surrounding them. Each piece is introduced by John Paul Riquelme, Professor of English at Boston University and author of ""Harmony of Dissonances: T.S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination"" (1991). In his introductions, Riquelme distills each author's key insights and relates them to the wider conversation of Eliot's work. Original essays illuminate the influences that shaped Eliot, contextualize his work, and assess his enduring impact on American and British poetry, drama, and literary theory. A biography of Eliot's early life sketches the familial, intellectual, social and cultural forces that formed his aesthetic and character; a reception history engages Eliot's initial success with ""The Waste Land"" in light of the critical controversies that followed in his later years and after his death; a comparison of Eliot's and Robert Browning's works finds that Eliot may have been more strongly influenced by the Victorian poet than he ever publicly acknowledged; and, a reading of ""The Waste Land"" draws out how the poem's use of juxtaposition, polyphony, and allusion prefigures Eliot's later work in Four Quartets. Further, a selection of the most outstanding contemporary Eliot criticism offers detailed analyses of Eliot's most important works like ""The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"", ""The Waste Land"", ""Ash Wednesday"", ""Four Quartets"", ""Tradition and the Individual Talent"", ""Murder in the Cathedral"", and ""The Cocktail Party"". These essays examine Eliot's poetry and critical writings through the lens of his relations to romanticism and modernism; analyze the psychic dramas contained in his early and unpublished poems; investigate the biographical details informing Eliot's work; assess the Eliot cannon and his contributions to poststructuralism; elucidate the spiritual vision of the later poems; and, explore the gothic elements pervading the writer's plays. Uniquely, the collection also contains an original essay by Paris Review contributor Gemma Sieff. Celebrating the beauty and endless complexity of Eliot's poetry while pondering his enigmatic character, Sieff offers a writer's perspective on one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Finally, a wealth of reference material, including a complete list of Eliot's publications and a full bibliography, rounds out the volume by giving readers ample sources for continuing their studies.
Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers
This volume examines a diverse set of texts published by notable women in the mid-20th century. From Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood to Willa Cather and Kate Chopin, essays survey the critical conversation regarding these works, explore their historical, societal and cultural contexts, and offer close and comparative readings of key texts in the genre through a variety of critical approaches.
Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter
This thoroughly revised edition includes updated essays on cultural themes and literary analysis, and its new essays analyze the full scope of the seven-book series as both pop cultural phenomenon and as a set of literary texts. Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter, Second Edition draws on a wider range of intellectual traditions to explore the texts, including moral-theological analysis, psychoanalytic perspectives, and philosophy of technology. The Harry Potter novels engage the social, cultural, and psychological preoccupations of our times, and Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter, Second Edition examines these worlds of consciousness and culture, ultimately revealing how modern anxieties and fixations are reflected in these powerful texts. ("DISCLAIMER: This book is not authorized, approved, licensed, or endorsed by J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., or anyone associated with the Harry Potter books or movies.")
Irish Literature Since 1990
This is a distinctive book that examines the diversity and energy of writing in a period marked by the unparalleled global prominence of Irish culture. This collection provides a wide-ranging survey of fiction, poetry and drama over the last two decades, considering both well-established figures and also emerging writers who have received relatively little critical attention. Contributors explore the central developments within Irish culture and society that have transformed the writing and reading of identity, sexuality, history and gender. The book examines the impact of Mary Robinson's Presidency; growing cultural confidence 'back home'; legislative reform on sexual and moral issues; the uneven effects generated by the resurgence of the Irish economy (the 'Celtic Tiger' myth); Ireland's increasingly prominent role in Europe; and changing reputation. In its breadth and critical currency, this book will be of particular interest to academics and students working in the fields of literature, drama and cultural studies.
Legilimens! : Perspectives in Harry Potter Studies
The current state of scholarship surrounding Harry Potter is both vibrant and varied. One of the reasons scholars continue to be attracted to the series as an artifact is the colossal range of disciplinary foci that can find treasures to unearth in its pages and films. In the Harry Potter series, legilimens is the spell that allows a wizard to see into another person's mind, reading the subject's thoughts. As such, it is an appropriate moniker for the attempt of scholars to see into the Harry Potter texts and search for greater meaning. Legilimens!: Perspectives in Harry Potter Studies contains the work of anthropologists and theologians, of historians and rhetoricians. The collection is a wide-ranging discussion of the Harry Potter texts (and the meanings contained within) among scholars from broadly disparate fields, coming together to deliberate over the greater scholarly significance of these rich and fertile texts.
Modernism and Eugenics : Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration
In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs reveals how Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of racial improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. He traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.
Tolkien's Art : A Mythology for England
" J.R.R. Tolkien's zeal for medieval literary, religious, and cultural ideas deeply influenced his entire life and provided the seeds for his own fiction. In Tolkien's Art, Chance discusses not only such classics as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, but focuses on his minor works as well, outlining in detail the sources and influences-from pagan epic to Christian legend-that formed the foundation of Tolkien's masterpieces, his "mythology for England."
Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision
The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf's novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf's processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself - a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text. The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.
The World of Angela Carter : A Critical Investigation
Angela Carter, a prolific author who worked in numerous genres, remains one of the most important British writers of the last century. She was particularly renowned for her investigation of cultural mythologies, which shape our lives but which we often leave unexamined. This text explores a selection of Carter's novels and short stories, supplemented with her perspectives on politics, society and aesthetics, and her attempts to redefine popular genres such as the fairy tale. This critical work is a strong addition to the scholarship on this important but often overlooked writer.
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The Artistry of Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) reigns as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning series The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for Neverwhere, Coraline, and the award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, children, comics readers, and viewers of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media, making him a celebrity around the world. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to comics, his work remains underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. In this book, the thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, examine the work of Gaiman and his many illustrators. The essays discuss Gaiman's oeuvre regarding the qualities that make his work unique in his eschewing of typical categories, his proclamations to "make good art," and his own constant efforts to do so however the genres and audiences may slip into one another. The Artistry of Neil Gaiman forms a complicated picture of a man who has always seemed fully assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own voice far later in life.
The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is a unique phenomenon in contemporary literature, as a poet whose individual volumes (such as his Beowulf translation, and individual volumes of poems such as Electric Light and District and Circle) have been high in the bestseller lists for decades. Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he has come to be considered one of the most important English language poets in the world. This Companion gives an overview of his career and of his reception in Ireland, England and around the world. Its distinguished contributors offer detailed readings of his major publications, in poetry, prose and translation. The essays further explore the central themes of his poetry, his relations with other writers, and his prose writing. Designed for students, this volume will also have much to interest and inform the general reader and admirer of Heaney's unique poetic voice.
The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
In this Companion, an international team of leading T. S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully co-ordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays from several distinct points of view. The major aspects and issues of his life and thought are assessed: his American origins and his becoming English; his position as a philosopher; his literary, social, and political criticism; and the evolution of his religious sense. Later chapters place his work in a number of historical perspectives; and the final chapter provides an expert review of the whole field of Eliot studies and is supplemented by a listing of the most significant publications. There is a useful chronological outline. Taken as a whole, the Companion comprises an essential handbook for students and other readers of Eliot.
The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden
This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. It provides scholars, students and general readers with a comprehensive and authoritative account of Auden's life and works in clear and accessible English. Besides providing authoritative accounts of the key moments and dominant themes of his poetic development, the Companion examines his language, style and formal innovation, his prose and critical writing and his ideas about sexuality, religion, psychoanalysis, politics, landscape, ecology, and globalisation. It also contains a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Auden.
Conversations with Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning DC/Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, and American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comics reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language, making him a celebrity on a worldwide scale. The interviews presented here span the length of his career, beginning with his first formal interview by the BBC at the age of seven and ending with a new, unpublished interview held in 2017. They cover topics as wide and varied as a young Gaiman's thoughts on Scientology and managing anger, learning the comics trade from Alan Moore, and being on the clock virtually 24/7. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who seems fully assembled from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and voice far later in life. The man who brought Morpheus from the folds of his imagination into the world shares his dreams and aspirations from different points in his life, including informing readers where he plans to take them next.
Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot : A Literary Reference to His Life and Work
Best known for his works ""The Waste Land"", ""Four Quartets"", and ""The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"" T.S. Eliot is one of the most popular 20th-century poets studied in high school and college English classes today. Eliot's masterful use of classical allusions throughout his works demonstrates the great importance he placed on tradition and its place within literary history. Believing that the fragments of a once-great culture surrounded the modern world through literature, he used his writing to recreate the past through tradition. ""Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot"" explores the life and works of this amazing Nobel Prize-winning writer, with extensive analyses of Eliot's writing, as well as entries on related topics and relevant people, places, and influences. This accessible volume also provides crucial historical and thematic information, along with illustrations, a bibliography, and cross-references. Coverage includes: a concise but comprehensive biography of Eliot; entries on Eliot's major works, including all of his poems, plays, and major critical essays; related people, places, and topics, including friends and literary influences, places where Eliot lived and taught, and publications he wrote for; and, appendixes, including a chronology, a bibliography of Eliot's works, and a secondary source bibliography.
Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie
Essays pay tribute to the popular Anglo-Indian novelist who helped open the door for the recent introduction of Indian literature into mainstream Western culture.
The Dead: complete, authoritative text with biographical and historical contexts, critical history, and essays from five contemporary critical perspectives
This edition of Joyce's classic short story from Dubliners presents the 1969 Viking critical edition, prepared by Robert Scholes, along with five critical essays - newly commissioned or revised for a student audience - that read The Dead from five contemporary critical perspectives. Each critical essay is accompanied by a succinct introduction to the history, principles, and practice of the critical perspective, and a bibliography that promotes further exploration of that approach. The text and essays are further complemented by an introduction providing biographical and historical contexts to Joyce and The Dead, a survey of critical responses to the story since its initial publication, and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms.
Heart of Darkness
In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrator, Marlowe journeys on business deep into the heart of Africa. But there he encounters Kurtz, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and discussion. Heart of Darkness grew out of a journey Joseph Conrad took up the Congo River; the verisimilitude that the great novelist thereby brought to his most famous tale everywhere enhances its dense and shattering power. Apparently a sailor's yarn, it is in fact a grim parody of the adventure story, in which the narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the heart of the Congo where he encounters the crazed idealist Kurtz and discovers that the relative values of the civilized and the primitive are not what they seem. Heart of Darkness is a model of economic storytelling, an indictment of the inner and outer turmoil caused by the European imperial misadventure, and a piercing account of the fragility of the human soul. (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
James Joyce's Ulysses
James Joyce's Ulysses is probably the most famous-or notorious-novel published in the twentieth century. Its length and difficulty mean that readers often turn to critical studies to help them in getting the most out of it. But the vast quantity of secondary literature on the book posesproblems for readers, who often don't know where to begin. This casebook includes some of the most influential critics to have written on Joyce, such as Hugh Kenner and Fritz Senn, as well as newer voices who have made a considerable impact in recent years. A wide range of critical schools isrepresented, from textual analysis to historical and psychoanalytic approaches, from feminism to post-colonialism. One essay considers the relation between art and life, nature and culture, in Ulysses, while another explores the implications of the impassioned debates about the proper editing ofJoyce's great work. In an iconoclastic discussion of the book, Leo Bersani finds reasons for giving up reading Joyce. All the contributions are characterized by scrupulous attention to Joyce's words and a sense of the powerful challenge his work offers to our ways of thinking about ourselves, ourworld, and our language. Also included are records of some of the conversations Joyce had with his friend Frank Budgen during the composition of Ulysses in Zurich, and in an appendix readers will find a version of the schema which Joyce drew up as a guide to his book. Derek Attridge provides anintroduction that offers advice on reading Ulysses for the first time, an account of the remarkable story of its composition, and an outline of the history of the critical reception that has played such an important part in our understanding and enjoyment of this extraordinary work.
Looking for God in Harry Potter
For the latest edition of this book that covers all 7 Harry Potter novels, see How Harry Cast His Spell.Millions of children, even Christian children, are reading the mega-selling Harry Potter book series and are exposed to the Harry Potter movies. John Granger, a devout Christian, teacher of classic literature, and father of seven children, first read the Harry Potter books so he could explain to his children why they weren't allowed to read them. After intense study, however, he became convinced that the books are underestimated as literature-and reflect important Christian truths. In Looking for God in Harry Potter, Granger gives parents and teachers a roadmap for using the Harry Potter books to teach Christian truth to children.
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (as he was born in 1857) is one of the most compelling and complex figures in English literature. His own life was as astonishing as any of his novels: born in the Ukraine of Polish parents, after a childhood in exile and a 20-year career as a merchant seaman,he began in middle age to write in English, the language of his newly adopted country. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad represents a unique and long-overdue achievement in Conrad scholarship: the first comprehensive and authoritative reference to distil in a lively, readable way a vast range of information on Joseph Conrad's life, works, reputation, and the historical andcultural contexts in which he lived. Much of the material in the Companion is entirely new, compiled from scattered Conrad resources, many of which have never been published before. The authors, together with a small team of specialist contributors, have brought together the latest findings of modern scholarship together to provide anunparalleled resource for all Conrad enthusiasts.
Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy
The first attempt to produce a Thomas Hardy Dictionary was made in 1911, before many of his finest poems had even been written, and since then there have been many attempts to produce reference works on his works and his life. None, however, can claim the authority and comprehensiveness ofthis Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy. Under the editorial direction of Professor Norman Page, more than 40 of the world's most prominent experts on Hardy have been brought together to combine their insights and understandings of all aspects of Hardy studies. The result is a unique synthesis of knowledge, incorporating different nationalinterests and traditions of scholarship, investigating Hardy's life, work, and influences, and the historical context in which he wrote. As well as the assurance of sound scholarship and the convenience of the companion format, there are unexpected delights for the browser, such as entries on alcohol, humour, and pets. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy is an indispensable bible for the Hardy scholar and the Hardy readeralike.
A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas
Almost a half century after his death in 1953, the Welsh author Dylan Thomas continues to capture the attention of scholars and critics. Though he attained some measure of fame before he died, he never enjoyed financial prosperity. His life was plagued with difficulties of all kinds, and he was only 39 years old at the time of his death. Some of his works, such as Fern Hill and Do not go gentle into that good night are frequently included in anthologies, and Thomas is now often considered one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. During his trips to the United States, he read his works to large audiences on college campuses. He also made a number of radio broadcasts and recordings, and his moving voice made scores of listeners respond emotionally to his poems. Though Dylan Thomas has earned his place in literary history, readers often find his poems difficult to understand. This reference book is a valuable guide to his life and work. Because his writings are so very much a product of his troubled life, the volume begins with an insightful biography that provides a context for understanding Thomas's works. The second section then systematically overviews his works. While his poems receive much attention, the section also includes discussions of his prose works, his filmscripts, and his broadcasts. A third section then surveys the critical and scholarly response to his writings, with separate chapters detailing his reception in Wales, England, and North America. A selected bibliography lists editions of Thomas's works, along with the most important general studies of his writings.
The Waste Land and Other Poems
A selection of some of the classic poems considered a major achievement in twentieth century modernist poetry. Includes the masterpieces "The Wasteland," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady." By Thomas Stearns Eliot - a poet, dramatist and literary critic who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
Understanding what life was like when a work was written can help you understand the meaning of the work.
Defining Documents in World History: The 20th Century (1900-1950)
By 1950, the technological advances of the 20th century were in full swing and several important social and political reforms were making their mark. This set offers in-depth analysis of a broad range of historical documents, including legal codes, letters, speeches, constitutions, reports, and books, from "Essential Truths" by Rufus Jones to the Nato Treaty.
Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century, 1901-1940
This six-volume set profiles 1,037 of the most important events during the early years of the 20th century, including World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Nazi party.
Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century, 1941-1970
The second in a three-part series on the 20th century, these six volumes include such important events as World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Holocaust.
Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century, 1971-2000
Coverage in this set includes the end of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the completion of sequencing the human genome in 2000.
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