Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Gordon Lish
Book SynopsisKnown as “Captain Fiction”, Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential--and controversial--figures in modern American letters. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments.
£77.35
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The African American Sonnet A Literary History
Book SynopsisBased on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Muller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history, and examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas
Book SynopsisPlaces William Faulkner's literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the United States and the Caribbean. The volume's seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas.
£26.06
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Edwidge Danticat
Book SynopsisSheds a much-needed light on Edwidge Danticat and her ability to depict timely issues in sparkling prose that delves deep into the borderlands, an uncharted in-between space located outside fixed geographic, cultural, and ideological bounds. Prevalent throughout is Danticat's expressed determination to make Haiti’s nuanced culture and its vibrant traditions accessible to a wide audience.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with James Salter
Book SynopsisCollects interviews published from 1972 to 2014 with the award-winning author of The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All That Is. Gathered here are his earliest interviews following acclaimed but moderately selling novels, conversations covering his work as a screenwriter and director, and interviews charting his popularity after publishing All That Is.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Edna OBrien
Book SynopsisIn these interviews, Edna O'Brien finds her own critical voice and moves interviewers away from a focus on her life as the “once infamous Edna” toward a focus on her works. Parallels between Edna O'Brien and her literary muse and mentor, James Joyce, are often cited.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Direct Democracy Collective Power the Swarm and the Literatures of the Americas
Book SynopsisBeginning with the Haitian Revolution, Scott Henkel lays out a literary history of direct democracy in the Americas. Henkel reinterprets direct democracy as a type of collective power. In the representations of slaves, women, and workers, Henkel traces a history of power through the literatures of the Americas during the long nineteenth century.
£27.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Graham Swift
Book SynopsisThe first collection of interviews conducted with the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders. Beginning in 1985 with Swift's arrival in New York to promote Waterland and concluding with an interview from 2016 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the collection spans Swift's more than thirty-five-year career as a writer.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Policing Intimacy Law Sexuality and the Color
Book SynopsisAnalyses literary depictions of sexual policing of the colour line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner's work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines's novels, Haiti through Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through work by Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, and Nelly Rosario.
£27.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Toni Morrison and the Natural World An Ecology
Book SynopsisOffers the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate's novels and brings to the fore an unequalled engagement between race and nature. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, this volume makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.
£22.46
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi DisOrienting Planets Racial Representations of
Book SynopsisIsiah Lavender III's Dis-Orienting Planets amplifies critical issues surrounding the racial and ethnic dimensions of science fiction. This volume explores depictions of Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular regard to China, Japan, India, and Korea.
£27.96
Wilfrid Laurier University Press The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound's The Cantos
Book Synopsis Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of The Cantos has yet to be properly understood - primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound's intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound's extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism. The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound's interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound's contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. The second section outlines a tripartite schema for The Cantos (katabasis/dromena/epopteia) which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that The Cantos is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds' occultism and its implications to his [Pounds'] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.
£30.56
Wilfrid Laurier University Press Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies
Book Synopsis Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts - political, social, and cultural - that have shaped the study of Canadian literature and the role it plays in our understanding of the Canadian nation-state. The essays are tied together as instances of critical practices that reveal the relations and exchanges that take place between the categories of the literary and the nation, as well as between the disciplinary sites of critical discourses and the porous boundaries of their methods. They are concerned with the material effects of the imperial and colonial logics that have fashioned Canada, as well as with the paradoxes, ironies, and contortions that abound in the general perception that Canada has progressed beyond its colonial construction. Smaro Kamboureli's introduction demonstrates that these essays engage with the larger realm of human and social practices - throne speeches, book clubs, policies of accommodation of cultural and religious differences, Indigenous thought about justice and ethics - to show that literary and critical work is inextricably related to the Canadian polity in light of transnational and global forces. Trade Review``Given the wide range of approaches and disciplines included in this volume, the index is particularly helpful in terms of orientation and contains not only major concepts and historical events related to Canadian studies, but also refers to important representatives of the Canadian literary scene. Moreover, each articles comes with an annotated section which, together with the overall bibliography, provides useful and interesting suggestions for further reading and discussion. The book's strengths certainly lie in the fact that it manages to emphasize the importance of the nation-state which, in spite of all cosmopolitan, global, and transnational developments at work, continues to serve as an important conceptual framework within the area of Canadian literary studies. Thus this volume is especially valuable for Canadian literary scholars and critics interested in the current debates centering on the nation with regard to (trans)national and global challenges.'' -- Felicitas Schweiker -- Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 25.2, September 2014Table of Contents Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias Preface Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias Introduction: Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English Smaro Kamboureli National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism Jeff Derksen ""Beyond CanLit(e)"": Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Transatlantically. Danielle Fuller White Settlers and the Biopolitics of State Building in Canada Janine Brodie ""Some Great Crisis"": Vimy as Originary Violence Robert Zacharias Amplifying Threat: Reasonable Accommodations and Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor Commission Hearings (2007) Monika Kin Gagnon and Yasmin Jiwani The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder Larissa Lai Archivable Concepts: Talonbooks and Literary Translation Kathy Mezei Is CanLit Lost in Japanese Translation? Yoko Fujimoto The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the ""Age of Apology"" Pauline Wakeham The Long March to ""Recognition"": Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity Len Findlay bush/writing: embodied deconstruction, traces of community, and writing against the state in indigenous acts of inscription peter kulchyski Notes Works Cited Contributors Index
£33.11
Purdue University Press La Tradicion Manuscrita De Los Suenos De Quevedo
Book SynopsisFrancisco de Quevedo, the Spanish poet and satirist whose books were by far the most widely read in Spain in the 17 th century, died unaware that his genius had created modern satire in Spanish, and that for the ensuing five centuries, as we now know, his name would be a household word wherever Spanish was spoken. Between 1605 and 1621, Quevedo wrote a sequence of five Dreams or Visions ( Suenos y discursos ), in each of which he hilariously envisions Spanish society as populated by people rightfully condemned to Hell. These astonishingly witty and irreverent satires of contemporary Spanish culture, morality, prejudice and religious fanaticism, were composed in a style so allusive, elliptical and equivocal as to successfully entertain both those who barely understood their full range and import, and others who celebrated the poet's rebellious insinuations. Censorship prohibited the publication of such satire in its original form, but hundreds of copies were made by hand and circulated widely. In 1993 a critical edition of all of the surviving manuscripts was published. Today the Suenos are commonly read in modern editions of the first censored version, printed in 1627. The present book ( La tradicion. . . ), compares this version with all of the 43 extant manuscripts, and for the first time identifies those groups of manuscripts from which the publishers of the first edition derived their text. This text can now be seen as a version not only censored, but corrupted successively by copyists and editors who did not understand Quevedo's satire, and did not hesitate to add entire clauses, omit others and transfer sentences from one place to another. The result is hardly what Spain 's most famous satirist originally wrote.
£999.99
Purdue University Press Naciones Intelectuales: Las Fundaciones De La
Book SynopsisIn Naciones intelectuales, Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on a period that goes from the signing of the Constitution in 1917 to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959, Sanchez Prado centers his analysis on the way in which four elements of Mexican cultural practice - the notion of literature, the figure of the intellectual, the creation of academic institutions and the definition of national identity - emerged through the various debates held by leading figures of the period. Through an appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'literary field', the book analyzes different key moments, controversies, and cultural interventions, which ultimately led the diverse aesthetic spectrum created by the Revolution into becoming a highly institutional system of literature. Sanchez Prado's work deals with a wide range of writers, including Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Cuesta, Manuel Maples Arce, Ramon Lopez Velarde, Francisco Monterde, Jose Gaos, the Hiperion philosophers, and Octavio Paz. As a result, this books offers a cartography of Mexican literary institutions unprecedented in scope, which will allow readers, students, and scholars to understand the construction of modern Mexican literature in a clear, rigorous, and systematic way.
£32.26
Purdue University Press Genero, nacion y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazan
Book SynopsisEmilia Pardo Bazan’s place in Spanish and Galician literatures has been hard won, and she has yet to receive the recognition she deserves. In Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española, Carmen Pereira-Muro studies the work and persona of this fascinating author in the context of Spanish and Galician competing nationalisms. She re-reads the literary histories and national canons of Spain and Galicia as patriarchal master narratives that struggle to assimilate or silence Pardo Bazán’s alternative national project. Pereira-Muro argues that Pardo Bazán posited the inclusion of women in the national culture as a key step in circumventing the representational logic behind Realism and Liberalism in the modern nation-state. By insisting that women should be equal partners, Pardo Bazán problematically adopted the patriarchal binarism that assigns women to Nature and men to Culture, but she also subverted it by denying its supplemental relationship. Her astute choice and manipulation of masculine cultural models (Realism, not Romanticism; prose, not poetry; Castilian language, not Galician) ultimately won her—despite fierce opposition—inclusion in the Spanish national canon. Furthermore, the study of her thorny relations with emerging Galician nationalism shows that her exclusion from “Galician literature” was due largely to her transgressive gender performance. Finally Pereira-Muro contends that in the author’s last novel, Pardo Bazán experimented with creating a feminine writing and a feminine canon for Spain. Nevertheless, the prevailing gender politics ensured that only her realist (masculine) production made it into the Spanish canon, and not this last, modernist (feminine) writing. In conclusion, this book questions the naturalisation of national canons by uncovering the gender politics behind what is cast as naturally determined by language and geography. Doing this also exposes the parallel gender strictures at work behind seemingly opposed central (Spanish) and peripheral (Galician) national projects.
£33.11
Purdue University Press Le personnel est politique: Médias, esthétique,
Book SynopsisLooking at questions of testimony, confession, trauma,sexuality, and violence in (semi-) autobiographical works, this book explores the co-construction of personal and collectiveidentities by women writers in the age of self-disclosure and mass media. In a time when literature is accused of being self-centeredand overly narcissistic, women's autofiction in France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversy because it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal and national identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writers Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, Mercédès Baillargeon contendsthat, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubtsregarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genreand gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual and sociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularly how these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance andself-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this workraises important questions relating to the media's complicated relationship with women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality,and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofiction as a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishing establishment and, of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well asnew insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self and nationalism intoday's ever-changing and multicultural French context.Table of Contents Remerciements Introduction: L'autofiction contemporaine des femmes: scandale, posture et imposture PREMIÈRE PARTIE: CHRISTINE ANGOT: VICTIME OU MARTYRE? Chapitre un: Autofiction, métafiction et personnage médiatique chez Christine Angot Chapitre deux: Lecture, provocation et scandale dans L'Inceste: déjouer le lecteur Chapitre trois: Quitter la ville: naissance d'une tragédie? DEUXIÈME PARTIE: CHLOÉ DELAUME: LA VICTIME ENFIN BOURREAU Chapitre quatre: L'autofiction expérimentale de Chloé Delaume Table des matières Chapitre cinq: Les Mouflettes d'Atropos: l'individu dans le collectif Chapitre six: Le Cri du sablier: déconstruire les fictions individuelles Chapitre sept: La Vanité des somnambules, ou le rapport au lecteur TROISIÈME PARTIE: PARI MANQUÉ? NELLY ARCAN, LES MÉDIAS ET LE DESTIN TRAGIQUE D'UNE ÉCRIVAINE Chapitre huit: Le pacte auto/métafictionnel chez Nelly Arcan Chapitre neuf: Miroir, narcissisme et projection Chapitre dix: "La honte": postface Conclusion: Engagement, médias et nouveaux médias Bibliographie Index
£33.11
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch
Book SynopsisCovers the major modernist literary works of Broch and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to his political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings. Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is best known for his two major modernist works, The Sleepwalkers (3 vols., 1930-1932) and The Death of Virgil (1945), which frame a lifetime of ethical, cultural, political, and social thought. A textile manufacturer by trade, Broch entered the literary scene late in life with an experimental view of the novel that strove towards totality and vividly depicted Europe's cultural disintegration. As fascism took over and Broch, a Viennese Jew, was forced into exile, his view of literature as transformative was challenged, but his commitment to presenting an ethical view of the crises of his time was unwavering. An important mentor and interlocutor for contemporaries such as Arendt and Canetti as well as a continued inspiration for contemporary authors, Broch wrote to better understand and shape the political and cultural conditions for a postfascist world. This volume covers the major literary works and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to Broch's political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings. Contributors: Graham Bartram, Brechtje Beuker, GiselaBrude-Firnau, Gwyneth Cliver, Jennifer Jenkins, Kathleen L. Komar, Paul Michael Lützeler, Gunther Martens, Sarah McGaughey, Judith Ryan, Judith Sidler, Galin Tihanov, Sebastian Wogenstein. Graham Bartram retired as Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK. Sarah McGaughey is Associate Professor of German at Dickinson College, USA. Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK.Trade Review[A] fantastic volume that introduces Broch, his work, and his historical environment. This task is noble and its execution well done, and in this they have done a significant service to the field. Instructors should be encouraged to assign chapters from this collection - no given chapter is particularly long- to be read in tandem with the works they discuss. -- STUDIES IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY LITERATURESpecialists and general readers will find themselves repeatedly turning to this book for overall context and specific elucidation, especially since the editors validate their hope for wide appeal by translating all passages in German. . . . . [P]rovides reliable knowledge expertly presented in essays uniformly lucid, winnowing the full range of scholarship and keeping the topic in focus, never straying into side issues. . . . [A] truly indispensable guide to Broch. Very highly recommended. -- Vincent Kling * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Well suited to giving a broad readership an overview of Broch's work while providing certain historical accents...The volume succeeds overall in portraying in some detail the complexity of and also the inner tension in Broch's works, and at the same time demonstrating that his texts remain relevant for the present day. -- Martin Klebes * GERMANISTIK *This valuable collection suggests reevaluation of the neglected Austrian writer Hermann Broch (1886-1951). . . . This exciting collection, with its suggestions of new scholarly possibilities, will certainly heighten interest in one of the major literary figures of the 20th century. Recommended. * CHOICE *A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch is an indispensable volume for all Broch readers, especially for new readers in the Anglophone world. Beyond its high level of scholarly contribution, the volume balances detailed readings of all Broch's major works (literary, dramatic, and political) with a longue durée view of Broch's intellectual development from his earlier years in Vienna to his transition to novelist to his exile in the United States. The editors have woven together individual readings with a universal assessment of Broch's wide-ranging intellectual commitments, and they have made a strong argument for the continued relevance of his novels, his aesthetic theory, and his humane politics. -Donald L. Wallace, Associate Professor, United States Naval Academy, author of Embracing Democracy: Hermann Broch, Politics, and Exile, 1918 to 1951 * . *[T]his Companion addresses a palpable need, namely to provide a point of entry for a larger readership to one of the major literary figures of European modernism. . . . While not every Broch text mentioned in this Companion will be accessible to those who do not read German, many are, and the book as a whole makes a strong case for seeking them out. -- Martin Klebes * Austrian Studies *[This Companion] is not only rigorous and thorough in its scholarship, but it is a pleasant book to read and spend time with. Its essayists strike a tone that is serious but companionable-which suggests strong leadership behind the scenes on the part of its editors. . . . [An] excellent collection. -- Steve Dowden * MONATSHEFTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Broch's Life and Works - Graham Bartram and Sarah McGaughey Perspectives on Broch's Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self - Kathleen L. Komar Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age - Gunther Martens Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch's Postromanticism - Galin Tihanov Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luft gegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine - Brechtje Beuker Limits of the Scientific: Broch's Die Unbekannte Größe - Gwyneth Cliver Broch's Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer - Gisela Brude-Firnau Hermann Broch's Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times - Judith Ryan Human Rights and the Intellectual's Ethical Duty: Broch's Political Writings - Sebastian Wogenstein Broch's Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable - Jennifer Jenkins From the "Tierkreis-Erzählungen" to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch's Last Novel - Judith Sidler Broch's Legacy and Resonance - Paul Michael Lützeler Selected Bibliography - Sarah McGaughey Notes on the Contributors Index
£89.10
University of Tennessee Press Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the
Book SynopsisDaniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. Southern Crossings"" crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea- or ideas, many and contrary- of ""Southernness"" to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner's close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm's central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, pass\u00e9. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.""- Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems Offering new perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing southern poets, from Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey to Betty Adcock, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and others, this study brilliantly illustrates poetry's value as a genre well suited to investigating historical conditions and the ways in which they are culturally assimilated and remembered. Daniel Cross Turner sets the stage for his wide-ranging explorations with an introductory discussion of the famous Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and their vision of a ""constant southerness"" that included an emphasis on community and kinship, remembrance of the Civil War and its glorified pathos of defeat, and a distinctively southern (white) voice. Combining poetic theory with memory studies, he then shows how later poets, with their own unique forms of cultural remembrance, have reimagined and critiqued the idealized view of the South offered by the Fugitives. This more recent work reflects not just trauma and nostalgia but makes equally trenchant uses of the past, including historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images) and countermemory (resistant strains of cultural memory that disrupt official historical accounts). As Turner demonstrates, the range of poetries produced within and about the American South from the 1950s to the present helps us to recalibrate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and even transnational levels. With its array of new insights on poets of considerable reputation—six of the writers discussed here have won at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry—Southern Crossings makes a signal contribution to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the U.S. South and its place in the larger world. Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms’ potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly.Trade Review“Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. “Southern Crossings” crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea—or ideas, many and contrary—of “Southernness” to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner’s close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm’s central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passÉ. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.”—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems
£34.46
University Press of Mississippi The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn
Book SynopsisEspecially in academia, controversy rages over the merits or evils of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular its portrayal of Jim, the runaway slave. Opponents disrupt classes and carry picket signs, objecting with strong emotion that Jim is no fit model for African-American youth of today. In continuing outcries they claim that he and the dark period of American history he portrays are best forgotten. That time has gone, Jim's opponents charge. This is a new day. But is it? Dare we forget? The author of The Jim Dilemma argues that Twain's novel, in the tradition of all great literature, is invaluable for transporting readers to a time, place, and conflict essential to understanding who we are today. Without this work, she argues, there would be a hole in American history and a blank page in the history of African-Americans. To avoid this work in the classroom is to miss the opportunity to remember. Few other popular books have been so much attacked, vilified, or censored. Yet Ernest Hemingway proclaimed Twain's classic to be the beginning of American literature, and Langston Hughes judged it as the only nineteenth-century work by a white author who fully and realistically depicts an unlettered slave clinging to the hope of freedom. A teacher herself, the author challenges opponents to read the novel closely. She shows how Twain has not created another Uncle Tom but rather a worthy man of integrity and self-reliance. Jim, along with other black characters in the book, demands a rethinking and a re-envisioning of the southern slave, for Huckleberry Finn, she contends, ultimately questions readers' notions of what freedom means and what it costs. As she shows that Twain portrayed Jim as nobody's fool, she focuses her discussion on both sides of the Jim dilemma and unflinchingly defends the importance of keeping the book in the classroom. Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua is director of the American studies program at Dallas Institute for the Humanities.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner
Book SynopsisThis book by a major scholar of William Faulkner's writings collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication underscores the significance of his indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts. Here, Polk's focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them as operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in these essays.
£20.85
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko
Book Synopsis""The most effective political statement I could make is in my art work. . . . The most radical kind of politics is language as plain truth."" Leslie Marmon Silko, one of America's best known Native authors, was born in 1948 and grew up at Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, of mixed Laguna, Mexican, and white ancestry. Her early short stories, poems, and brilliant first novel Ceremony (1977) earned her recognition as a star of the Native American Renaissance. In Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, her readers will find both the power that fueled her early work and an update on her recent career. A MacArthur ""genius"" grant funded the beginnings of her second novel, Almanac of the Dead. This epic retelling of the 500-year history of the Americas took her ten years to complete. She intended her most recent book, Gardens in the Dunes, a historical novel of the Victorian era, as a reward for her readers who survived the fury of Almanac of the Dead. Silko grants interviews rarely, but the sixteen included here are generously wide-ranging and deeply honest. They reflect her heritage of storytelling and give vivid accounts of her life experiences, her creative processes, and her forthright political views. As she speaks, she spins out descriptions of the living oral traditions, the communal relationships, and the desert landscape that are the sources of her inspiration. Before she decided to become a writer, Silko was a student in the Indian law program at the University of New Mexico. She has dedicated her life and career to the cause of justice for Native Americans. Her interviews, like her art, give voice to the silenced histories of the colonized peoples of the Americas and draw incisive connections between the abuses of the past and contemporary political corruption. The conversations included here reveal how Silko's thought and writing have been influenced by American and British literature, Eastern philosophies, economics, politics, psychology, and physics. As she integrates these into her powerful works and her expansive interviews, she expresses a hopeful vision of global spiritual awakening. Ellen L. Arnold is an assistant professor of English and ethnic studies at East Carolina University. Her work has been published in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Modern Fiction Studies, and National Women's Studies Association Journal.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Faulkner in America
Book SynopsisWith essays by Richard Godden, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Kathryn B. McKee, Peter Nicolaison, Charles A. Peek, Noel Polk, Hortense J. Spillers, Joseph R. Urgo, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Charles Reagan Wilson William Faulkner is Mississippi's most famous author and arguably one of the country's greatest writers. But what was his relationship with America? How did he view the nation, its traditions, its issues? In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner in America looks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively, the essays ask which American ideas, identities, and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate. The collection explores questions regarding Faulkner's place in American literature, his standing and esteem in literary studies, and his relation to the United States. To address such issues, the writers seek a definition of the phrase ""Faulkner in America."" One difficulty scholars wrestle with is how to deal with Mississippi's place in the union. Surely, Faulkner mused: Is Mississippi in America? When he thought about America, he thought about being left alone, about maintaining his distance. Essays in this volume look at Faulkner's views on the ""greening of American history,"" on American figures such as Thomas Jefferson, on women in American letters, and on the American dream. Authors find that the conceptually invigorating signification of the phrase ""Faulkner in America"" is, finally, provisional. Foremost in Faulkner's mind, in interviews as well as in the aesthetics of the apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, is that whoever and whatever is in America arrived by battles won and lost, by emigration and enslavement, by choice and by compulsion. Faulkner in America occasions a rigorous examination of Faulkner's American century. Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi. His books include Faulkner's Apocrypha, Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture, and In the Age of Distraction, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She has co-edited Faulkner in Cultural Context, Faulkner and the Natural World and Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect, among other Faulkner volumes, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy
Book Synopsis With essays by Edwin T. Arnold, J. Douglas Canfield, Christine Chollier, George Guillemin, Dianne C. Luce, Jacqueline Scoones, Phillip A. Snyder, Nell Sullivan, and John Wegner The completion of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy--All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)--marked a major achievement in American literature. Only ten years earlier this now internationally acclaimed novelist had been called the best unknown writer in America. The trilogy is McCarthy's most ambitious project yet, composed at the height of his mature powers over a period of fifteen years. It is ""a miracle in prose,"" as Robert Hass wrote of its middle volume, an unsentimental elegy for the lost world of the cowboy, the passing of the wilderness, and the fading innocence of post--World War II America. The trilogy is a literary accomplishment with wide appeal, for despite the challenging materials in each book, these volumes remained on bestseller lists for many weeks. This collection of essays is the first book to examine these novels as a trilogy, the first to read them as an integrated whole. Together these explorations of McCarthy's magnum opus serve as an ideal companion reader. Represented here are nine of the most notable Cormac McCarthy scholars, both American and European. Their essays provide a substantial exploration of the trilogy from different perspectives. Included are gender issues, eco-critical approaches, explications of the war or land history underlying the trilogy, studies of narrative voice, dreams, the cowboy tradition, and the pastoral tradition, and considerations of McCarthy's moral and spiritual outlook. These essays complement one another in highly provocative ways, prompting new appreciation of the complexity of McCarthy's work and the profundity of his vision. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce are editors of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (University Press of Mississippi). This new volume is an admirable companion to Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, bringing McCarthy scholarship into the 21st century.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Christopher Isherwood
Book SynopsisTo many readers Christopher Isherwood means Berlin. The author of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the British Isherwood found fame through the adaptation of that work into the stage play and film I Am a Camera and then into the stage musical and film Cabaret. Throughout his career he was a keen observer, always seemingly in the right place at the right time. Whether in Berlin in the 1930s or in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood (1904--86) reflected on his life and his world and wrote perceptive commentary on contemporary European and American history and culture. His ties to California made him more American than British. ""I have spent half my life in the United States,"" he said. ""Los Angeles is a great place for feeling at home because everybody's from someplace else."" Isherwood can be credited for helping make L.A. an acceptable setting for serious fiction, paving the way for John Rechy, Joan Didion, Paul Monette, and Bernard Cooper, among others. The interviews in this volume--two of which have never before been published--stretch over a period of forty years. They address a wide range of topics, including the importance of diary-keeping to his life and work; the interplay between fiction and autobiography; his turning from Christianity to Hinduism; his circle of friends, including W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster; several important places in his life--Berlin, England, and California; and his homosexual identity. These interviews are substantive, smart, and insightful, allowing the author to discuss his approach to writing of both fiction and nonfiction. ""More and more,"" he explains, ""writing is appearing to me as a kind of self-analysis, a finding-out of something about myself and about the past and about what life is like, as far as I'm concerned: who I am, who these people are, what it's all about."" This emphasis on self-discovery comes as no surprise from a writer who mined his own diaries and experiences for inspiration. As an interviewee, Isherwood is introspective, thoughtful, and humorous. James J. Berg is the program director for the Center for Teaching and Learning, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Chris Freeman is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University. Berg and Freeman are editors of The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood, which was a finalist for the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Studies.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Margaret Walker
Book SynopsisMargaret Walker (1915-1998) began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim. In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1996, Conversations with Margaret Walker captures Walker's voice as she discusses an incredibly wide range of interests. The same erudition, wit, and love of language on display in Jubilee comes through in conversations, as well as her sense of moral authority--imbued by a resonant Christian humanism--and her attention to historical detail. In a long 1972 conversation with fellow poet Nikki Giovanni, Walker argues about the tribulations and triumphs of motherhood, the presence of black women in literature, and race relations in American culture from 1900 to the present. With Marcia Greenlee in 1977, she talks extensively about her family's history and her love of botany. In several of the interviews, her friendship with Richard Wright rises to the forefront. Even in her interviews with Claudia Tate and John Griffin Jones, in which the interviewers try to direct the conversations toward the mechanics and thought processes behind Walker's writing, the talks often sweep into broader issues of African American culture, family history, and the past's influence on the present. This collection amply shows that Margaret Walker was a writer who considered her work to be deeply influenced by the culture around her. She viewed her writing as part of her larger life and not separate or distanced from her existence. Bracingly direct, witty, and oddly charming, the writer in Conversations with Margaret Walker is complicated, passionate, forceful, and piercingly intelligent.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Joseph Brodsky: Conversations
Book SynopsisJoseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared émigré into, as he himself termed it, ""a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen."" In interviews from 1972 to 1995, Joseph Brodsky: Conversations covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. Brodsky's poetry earned him a Nobel, and his essays won him awards and international acclaim. This volume shows that there was a third medium, in addition to poetry and essays, in which Brodsky excelled--the interview. Although he said that ""in principle prose is simply spilling some beans, which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod,"" he nevertheless emerges as an extraordinary and inventive conversationalist. This volume includes not only his notable interviews that helped consolidate Brodsky's international reputation but also early and hard-to-find interviews in journals that have since disappeared. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Cortland Review, and Stanford Magazine. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Washington Post, and the Georgia Review.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book SynopsisConversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the St. Paul Daily News. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the Saturday Evening Post. Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited American Decades: 1920-1929.
£25.46
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Audre Lorde
Book SynopsisAudre Lorde (1934-1992), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a ""Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother,"" but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full identity. The interviews in this collection portray the many additional sides of the Harlem-born author and activist. She was also a rebellious child of Caribbean parents, a mastectomy patient, a blue-collar worker, a college professor, a student of African mythology, an experimental autobiographer in her book titled Zami, a critic of imperialism, and a charismatic orator.Despite her intense engagement with the major social movements of her time, Lorde told interviewers that she was always an outsider, a position of weakness and of strength.Most of her schoolmates were white. She married a white legal-aid attorney, and after their divorce she was the partner of a white psychologist for many years. These intimate alliances with whites caused some African Americans of both genders to question the depth of her solidarity. Lorde expressed distrust of some white feminists and charged that they lacked real understanding of African American struggles.Writing proved to be her powerful weapon against injustice. Painfully aware that differences could provoke prejudice and violence, she promoted the bridging of barriers. These interviews reveal the sense of displacement that made Lorde a champion of the outcast and the forgotten--whether in New York, Mississippi, Berlin, or Soweto.
£25.46
University Press of Mississippi Multicultural American Literature: Comparative
Book SynopsisIn the United States, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ralph Ellison, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn are among the notable writers of color who have emerged since World War II. Although definitely individual and widely diverse, they are all-American in their collective mixture of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic strains. The work of each, although distinct, has not remained in cultural isolation but has enriched the inclusive literary treasury of the United States. This comprehensive, timely study by a British scholar closely examines their fiction and autobiographical writings in cultural perspective. It analyzes the ways politics and popular tradition have influenced their work and the ways these ethnic authors address and question such matters as whiteness, autobiography, geography, and the forms of prose. Other books have explored the variety of ethnic traditions in American literature, but this is the first to consider them in comparative terms in a single volume. In focusing on these writers and their place in the context of American history and contemporary popular culture, Multicultural American Literature underlines the reality that it is multicultural writing that has revolutionized recent American literary history. For those wishing clear and accurate perspective on the national literature of the present day, this informative book analyzes the spectrum and provides an exact and faithful view of its multicultural character. A. Robert Lee, a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo, is the author of Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America and, with Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations.
£29.71
University Press of Mississippi Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture
Book SynopsisTo early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy--African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites--the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture explores the interplay of contradictory but equally pre-vailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern eco-culture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination. Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, Shadow and Shelter considers the many repre-sentations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South. Anthony Wilson is assistant professor of English at LaGrange College. His work has been published in the Southern Literary Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education's online edition.
£35.96
University Press of Mississippi Robbing The Mother: Women in Faulkner
Book SynopsisWilliam Faulkner claimed that it may be necessary for a writer to ""rob his mother,"" should the need arise. ""If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies,"" he remarked.This study of Faulkner's paradoxical attitude toward women, particularly mothers, will stimulate debate and concern, for his novels are shown here to have presented them as both a source and a threat to being and to language.""My reading of Faulkner,"" the author says, ""attempts more than an identification of female stereotypes and an examination of misogyny, for Faulkner, who almost certainly feared and mistrusted women, also sees in them a mysterious, often threatening power, which is often aligned with his own creativity and the grounds of his own fiction.""Drawing on both American and French feminist criticism, Robbing the Mother explores Faulkner's artistic vision through the maternal influence in such works as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Light in August, and The Wild Palms.
£999.99
University Press of Mississippi Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity
Book SynopsisThis collection of the most significant and illuminating critical essays about the works of Wole Soyinka over the past three decades is evidence of the international esteem he has achieved. This Nobel Prize winner from Nigeria is arguably Africa's greatest living writer. His novels and plays are appreciated throughout the world. His works have attracted the attention of such acclaimed authors and critics as Wilson Harris, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah, as well as such leading academicians as Philip Brockbank, Joachim Fiebach, Abiola Irele, Femi Osofisan, and Niyi Osundare. An essay by each of these is included in this volume. Nearly every major contemporary school of critical theory is represented here-from analytic philosophy to reconstructed Marxism, from poststructuralism to postcoloniality, and from feminism to recuperated phenomenology. This diversity of theoretical interests and interpretive approaches unites Soyinka's art with his political activism. Gathered here in this remarkable collection, the essays simultaneously showcase Soyinka's postcolonial politics and his literary aestheticism. They reveal the irony that the downtrodden peoples whom Soyinka champions are those who cannot read his stirring books or see his compelling dramas. Biodun Jeyifo was Soyinka's student, junior colleague, and even, Jeyifo says, his ""adversary in the ferocious intramural ideological debates within the community of African leftist writers, critics, and academics in the seventies and eighties."" ""This book,"" Jeyifo writes in his introduction, ""is the product of [an] extensive review of the scholarly aspects of the reception of Soyinka in the last three decades of his career as one of the most influential of writers of Africa."" This volume will afford Soyinka's readers a heightened sense of the wit, humor, and eloquence of this leading writer-activist of Africa and the English-speaking world. Biodun Jeyifo is a professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of The Popular Traveling Theatre of Nigeria and The Truthful Lie.
£999.99
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching Duras's Ourika
Book SynopsisWhen it was first published, in 1823, Claire de Duras's novel Ourika became a best seller almost immediately, and in recent decades, instructors have found it an irresistible addition to their syllabi. But from a teacher's perspective the novel presents something of a paradox. It is short, its narrative structure is uncomplicated, its vocabulary is limited, its plot is straightforward. It thus lends itself to "simple" readings that fail to reveal the novel's rich fund of social and historical themes. Set against the backdrop of the French and Haitian revolutions, the Terror, and the restoration and featuring the first black woman narrator in French literature,Ourika raises issues of identity, inequality, exclusion, power, and race and gender relations. The goal of this Approaches volume is to help teachers bring out the novel's profound and complex underpinnings and reveal Ourika, its Senegalese protagonist, as a victim of history and a timeless tragic heroine.Part 1 provides an overview of editions of the novel and secondary resources, including critical, historical, and biographical studies. Also featured is a useful time line situating Duras's life in its historical framework. Part 2 offers a wealth of pedagogical approaches, grouped in four sections, which focus on the historical context of the novel; on race, gender, and class issues; on teaching Ourika with other works of literature; and on interdisciplinary perspectives.Throughout the volume, the editions of Ourika referred to are the MLA Texts and Translations paperback editions, in French and in English translation, published in 1994.
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching Duras's Ourika
Book SynopsisWhen it was first published, in 1823, Claire de Duras's novel Ourika became a best seller almost immediately, and in recent decades, instructors have found it an irresistible addition to their syllabi. But from a teacher's perspective the novel presents something of a paradox. It is short, its narrative structure is uncomplicated, its vocabulary is limited, its plot is straightforward. It thus lends itself to "simple" readings that fail to reveal the novel's rich fund of social and historical themes. Set against the backdrop of the French and Haitian revolutions, the Terror, and the restoration and featuring the first black woman narrator in French literature, Ourika raises issues of identity, inequality, exclusion, power, and race and gender relations. The goal of this Approaches volume is to help teachers bring out the novel's profound and complex underpinnings and reveal Ourika, its Senegalese protagonist, as a victim of history and a timeless tragic heroine.Part 1 provides an overview of editions of the novel and secondary resources, including critical, historical, and biographical studies. Also featured is a useful time line situating Duras's life in its historical framework. Part 2 offers a wealth of pedagogical approaches, grouped in four sections, which focus on the historical context of the novel; on race, gender, and class issues; on teaching Ourika with other works of literature; and on interdisciplinary perspectives.Throughout the volume, the editions of Ourika referred to are the MLA Texts and Translations paperback editions, in French and in English translation, published in 1994.
£33.11
Modern Language Association of America Silent Souls and Other Stories
Book SynopsisCaterina Albert i Paradís (1869-1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue ""The Infanticide,"" delivered by a young woman, won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. In the tradition of George Eliot, George Sand, and other controversial women authors, Albert had assumed a man's name, Víctor Català. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance of Peninsular Spanish.Trade Review“McNerney’s review of concepts relating to modernity and women’s writing in Spain alongside her discussion of Albert’s literary techniques make this […] a useful tool for graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Specialists will enjoy the fact that it debunks myths long perpetuated in Albert’s criticism, as it clarifies that Albert resided in rural as well as urban locales and wrote fiction featuring both back-drops.” – Kate Good, Bulletin of Spanish Studies
£24.26
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Works of Tim O'Brien
Book Synopsis“The works of Tim O’Brien are among the most significant recent contributions to a lengthy canon of war literature,” write the editors of this volume; they serve “as an ideal point of entry for discussions of war and its human impact.” The author of the highly acclaimed The Things They Carried, O’Brien is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of a National Book Award for Going After Cacciato.This volume in the Approaches to Teaching series considers the range and depth of O’Brien’s writing, with an emphasis on works that focus on the Vietnam War. Part 1, “Materials,” provides information on O’Brien’s life and an overview of his literary output. It also directs readers to critical and reference works on subjects encountered in his writing. The twenty-three essays in part 2, “Approaches,” provide historical background on the Vietnam War; explore narrative issues in O’Brien’s works, such as the melding of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir; and suggest ideas for teaching the author’s works in a variety of classroom and conceptual settings (e.g., composition, American literature, war fiction, narrative theory, postmodernism).
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Works of Tim O'Brien
Book Synopsis“The works of Tim O’Brien are among the most significant recent contributions to a lengthy canon of war literature,” write the editors of this volume; they serve “as an ideal point of entry for discussions of war and its human impact.” The author of the highly acclaimed The Things They Carried, O’Brien is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of a National Book Award for Going After Cacciato.This volume in the Approaches to Teaching series considers the range and depth of O’Brien’s writing, with an emphasis on works that focus on the Vietnam War. Part 1, “Materials,” provides information on O’Brien’s life and an overview of his literary output. It also directs readers to critical and reference works on subjects encountered in his writing. The twenty-three essays in part 2, “Approaches,” provide historical background on the Vietnam War; explore narrative issues in O’Brien’s works, such as the melding of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir; and suggest ideas for teaching the author’s works in a variety of classroom and conceptual settings (e.g., composition, American literature, war fiction, narrative theory, postmodernism).
£33.11
Modern Language Association of America Gabriel
Book Synopsis“An admirable ruse, indeed! To inspire in me the horror of females, only to throw it in my face and say: but this is what you are.”The handsome, heroic heir to a vast estate, raised as a man to follow a man’s pursuits and to despise women, is devastated to learn at the age of seventeen that he is in fact a she. Gabriel courageously refuses to give up her male privileges, and her tragic struggle to work and fight and love in all the ways she knows how offers a window into the obstacles faced by George Sand, the prolific intellectual woman whom the popular press portrayed as a promiscuous, cigar-smoking oddity in trousers. “Strange that the most virile talent of our time should be a woman’s!” exclaimed a reviewer in 1838.Kathleen Robin Hart’s introduction contextualizes the drama, discussing its relation to the theater of Sand’s day, the sentimental tradition, the subversive workings of carnival and masquerade, and the vein of literary androgyny in Romantic works.
£22.91
Modern Language Association of America Teaching French Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation
Book SynopsisConsiders the issues critical to teaching recently rediscovered writers, such as Hélisenne de Crenne, Pernette Du Guillet, and Louise Labé, who have enriched the literary canon by offering alternative perspectives on the social, political, and religious issues of early modern France. Addressing topics from law and medicine to motherhood and aesthetics, these women wrote in nearly every genre, and their works include several literary firsts: the first book of Christian emblems ever published by a woman (Georgette de Montenay), the first published collection of private letters between women in French (the Dames Des Roches), and the first full-length memoir by a woman in French (Margaret of Valois).The volume considers techniques for reading women’s writing alongside the texts of their male contemporaries and offers guidance on incorporating a range of resources into the classroom. Essays in part 1 explore the background and contexts so crucial for helping students understand how these writers negotiated their entry into the public world of writing. In part 2, contributors discuss specific genres. Part 3 describes critical methodologies that are useful in the classroom and demonstrates the benefits of teaching certain pairings of texts and authors. The fourth and final part recommends a range of electronic and print resources.
£34.81
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella
Book SynopsisNella Larsen’s novels Quicksand and Passing, published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, fell out of print and ere thus little known for many years. Now widely available and taught, Quicksand and Passing challenge conventional “tragic mulatta” and “passing” narratives. In part 1, “Materials,” of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen, the editor surveys the canon of Larsen’s writing, evaluates editions of her works, recommends secondary readings, and compiles a list of useful multimedia resources for teaching.The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” aim to help students better understand attitudes towards women and race during the Harlem Renaissance, the novels’ relations to other artistic movements, and legal debates over racial identities in the early twentieth century. In so doing, contributors demonstrate how new and seasoned instructors alike might use Larsen’s novels to explore a wide range of topics-including Larsen’s short stories and letters. The relation between her writing and biography, and the novels; discussion of gender and sexuality.
£33.11
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de
Book SynopsisA central figure of Spanish culture and an author in many genres, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is less well known outside Spain. He was a surprising writer and thinker: a professor of Greek who embraced metafiction and modernist methods; a proponent of Castilian Spanish although born in the Basque country and influenced by many international writers; religious yet an early existentialist. He found himself in opposition to both King Alfonso XIII and the military dictatorship of José Primo de Rivera, then became involved in the political upheaval that led to the Spanish Civil War.Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works, on scholarly and critical secondary sources, and on Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer suggestions for introducing students to the range of his works--novels, essays, poetry, and philosophy--in Spanish language and literature and comparative literature classrooms.Trade ReviewThis is a very valuable tool for instructors at all levels of the Spanish curriculum . . . and is sure to be of use to scholars and teachers in other fields--comparative literature, philosophy, religion--who may be interested in including Unamuno in their classes." - Roberta Lee Johnson, University of Kansas
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers
Book SynopsisGlobal and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance.In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, Asia, and around the world.Trade ReviewThis is an expansive volume that will be useful to teachers of South Asian studies, gender studies, and postcolonial literature. Covering both widely known and noncanonical texts, the essays offer an exciting array of methods for teaching anglophone South Asian women's writing from a range of theoretical perspectives and cultural contexts." - Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University
£81.60
Modern Language Association of America Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers
Book SynopsisGlobal and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance.In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, Asia, and around the world.Trade ReviewThis is an expansive volume that will be useful to teachers of South Asian studies, gender studies, and postcolonial literature. Covering both widely known and noncanonical texts, the essays offer an exciting array of methods for teaching anglophone South Asian women's writing from a range of theoretical perspectives and cultural contexts." - Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University
£34.81
Modern Language Association of America La dame à la louve
Book SynopsisA collection of short stories by Renée Vivien (1877-1909). Reflects and challenges attitudes of the belle epoque, questions gender roles, and represents same-sex love and desire. Stories feature unreliable narrators and include rewritten fairy tales and ancient myths, adventure stories in the American West and at sea, and others.Trade ReviewMore than a century after their publication, Renée Vivien's short stories foreground issues that women continue to face: sexual violence, double standards, and social inequality." - Gayle Levy, University of Missouri, Kansas City "The editor's references to the Me Too movement . . . show how Vivien's stories anticipate issues women are grappling with today." - Tama Lea Engelking, Cleveland State University
£24.26
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei
Book SynopsisStructurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature.Addressing courses in American studies, contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and literary theory, the essays in this volume are written by undergraduate and graduate instructors from across the United States and around the globe. Part 1, “Materials,” outlines Yamashita’s novels and other texts, key works of criticism and theory, and resources for Asian American and Asian Brazilian literature and culture. Part 2, “Approaches,” provides options for exploring Yamashita’s works through teaching historical debates, outlining principles of environmental justice, mapping geographic boundaries to highlight power dynamics, and drawing personal connections to the texts. Additionally, an essay by Yamashita describes her own approaches to teaching creative writing.Trade Review“This book will be a vital resource for teachers, students, and scholars. . . . After reading it, I am doubly inspired to teach Yamashita’s works.”- Sue-Im Lee, Temple University;“The collection successfully conveys how Yamashita’s writing represents a ‘dynamic force’ for readers. . . . I would certainly recommend it.”- Bella Adams, Liverpool John Moores University.
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei
Book SynopsisStructurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature.Addressing courses in American studies, contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and literary theory, the essays in this volume are written by undergraduate and graduate instructors from across the United States and around the globe. Part 1, “Materials,” outlines Yamashita’s novels and other texts, key works of criticism and theory, and resources for Asian American and Asian Brazilian literature and culture. Part 2, “Approaches,” provides options for exploring Yamashita’s works through teaching historical debates, outlining principles of environmental justice, mapping geographic boundaries to highlight power dynamics, and drawing personal connections to the texts. Additionally, an essay by Yamashita describes her own approaches to teaching creative writing.Trade Review“This book will be a vital resource for teachers, students, and scholars. . . . After reading it, I am doubly inspired to teach Yamashita’s works.”- Sue-Im Lee, Temple University;“The collection successfully conveys how Yamashita’s writing represents a ‘dynamic force’ for readers. . . . I would certainly recommend it.”- Bella Adams, Liverpool John Moores University.
£33.11
Modern Language Association of America Teaching Asian North American Texts
Book SynopsisFrom the short stories and journalism of Sui Sin Far to Maxine Hong Kingston's pathbreaking The Woman Warrior to recent popular and critical successes such as Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, Asian North American literature and media encompass a long history and a diverse variety of genres and aesthetic approaches.The essays in this volume provide context for understanding the history of Asian immigrants to the United States and Canada and the experiences of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Contributors both address historical contexts, from the early enactment of Asian exclusion laws to the xenophobia following 9/11, and provide tools for textual analysis. The essays explore conventionally literary texts, genres such as mystery and speculative fiction, historical documents and legal texts, and visual media including films, photography, and graphic novels, emphasizing the ways that creators have crossed boundaries of genre and created innovative new forms.Trade ReviewShowcases the increasing diversity and visibility of this important literary tradition." —Tina Chen, Penn State University
£81.60
