Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

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Book SynopsisFocuses on the California Gothic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Book Synopsis H.C. Bailey''s detective Reggie Fortune was one of the most popular protagonists of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Fortune appeared in nine novels yet it was in a series of 84 short stories that were published from 1920 to 1940 where he truly shone, combining elements of several popular archetypes--the eccentric logician, the forensic investigator, the hard-boiled interrogator, the psychological profiler, the defender of justice. This critical study examines the Fortune stories in the context of other popular detective fiction of the era. Bailey''s classics are distinguished by well-clued puzzles, brilliant sleuthing, vivid description and social critique, with Fortune evoking images of Don Quixote and the Arthurian Knights in his pursuit of truth and justice in an uncaring world.

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Book Synopsis Many scholars recognize the importance of Harry Potter as a vehicle for discussions about society--from race relations and gender studies to economic, political, religious and educational applications of the texts. This interdisciplinary collection of new essays brings to the forefront a critique of modern Western society, using Harry''s world as a mirror to our own. Covering issues surrounding parenting and family relations, social class, life and death, the link between identity and morality and even the risks of time travel, this collection provides many jumping-off points for scholars and nonscholars alike to spark discussions about both Harry''s world and our own.

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Book Synopsis Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) was--with his partner Manfred Lee--the creator of the Ellery Queen detective novels and short stories. Dannay was also a literary historian and critic, and the editor of the renowned Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Queen--both a pen name and the fictional protagonist of the stories--was also a vital force behind the continuing popularity of crime fiction in the early to mid-20th century, after the deaths of Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post, and other Old Masters of the genre. This book presents the first critical study of Ellery Queen''s role in the preservation of the detective short story. Many of the writers, characters and stories EQMM championed are covered, including such celebrated authors as Allingham, Ambler, Ellin, Innes, Vickers, and even William Butler Yeats.

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Book SynopsisWinner, 2021 NACCS Book Award, given by the National Association for Chicano and Chicana StudiesExplores the how, why, and what of contemporary Chicanx culture, including punk rock, literary fiction, photography, mass graves, and digital and experimental installation artRacial Immanence attempts to unravel a Gordian knot at the center of the study of race and discourse: it seeks to loosen the constraints that the politics of racial representation put on interpretive methods and on our understanding of race itself. Marissa K. López argues that reading Chicanx literary and cultural texts primarily for the ways they represent Chicanxness only reinscribes the very racial logic that such texts ostensibly set out to undo. Racial Immanence proposes to read differently; instead of focusing on representation, it asks what Chicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and specifically how they produce access to the ineffable but material experience of race. Intrigued by the attention to diTrade Review"López staunchly debunks the idea that Chicanx identity can be thoroughly known or interpreted. Rather, she demonstrates why literature for and by people of color matters: they eschew the neoliberal argument for multicultural representation, instead questioning structural violence, shared precarity, and human imbrication within the more-than-human world. This is a bold, refreshing book that demonstrates the urgency and importance of Chicanx literature while simultaneously challenging the reasons why we read it." -- Julie A. Minich, author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico "Racial Immanence sets out to tackle a seemingly intractable problem for the study of race and literature: the constraints that racial representation puts on both interpretive methods and our understanding of race itself . In expanding our horizon of Chicanx cultural production beyond literary works to such objects as the Aztec “sun stone,” contemporary art photography, and Latinx punk music , López proposes a new way to read this body of work, asking what Chicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and how they access the ineffable yet material experience of race. An urgent and necessary book." -- John Alba Cutler, author of Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature"López advocates for reconsidering space and time through reading and writing in order to reimagine the social and to create a place of radical hope." * Choice *

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Book SynopsisBarcelona, City of Margins studies the creation of a space of dissent in the 1950s and 1960s that became the pillar of the protest movements during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy. This space of dissent took shape in the margins of what is considered the official space of the city of Barcelona, revealing the interconnection of urbanism, literature, and photography in the formation of the political, social, and cultural movements to come in the 1970s. Olga Sendra Ferrer draws from theoretical readings on built environments, neighbourhoods, housing projects and developments, and everyday life within Spanish urban spaces. Literature and photography demonstrate the political value of cultural production and forms of cultural representation that occur from peripheral zones those pushed aside by exclusionary politics, fascist forms of control, surveillance, and homogenization. In search of the origins of the protest movemeTrade Review"Sendra Ferrer sees her work as a recovery project, and the findings are illuminating and intriguing. The book is not an easy read, but it includes extremely valuable information and arguments." -- E. H. Friedman, Vanderbilt University * CHOICE Connect *"Barcelona, City of Margins is an impressive piece of scholarship, uncovering the dialogic interaction between centre and margins, to provide new important insights into Barcelona’s urban and sociocultural history." -- John McCulloch, The Bulletin of Spanish Studies Trust * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Coming into Presence: Margin and Dissent in the Barcelona of Francoism 1. A Change of Pace: The Spatial Dimensions of the Franco Dictatorship 2. Breaking the Silence: The Cultural Mobilization of Francisco Candel 3. The Quiet Revolution of Photography: The Barcelona of Joan Colom 4. A Female City: Colita and the Conceptualization of Barcelona Conclusion: The Elusive Landscape Notes Works Cited

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Book SynopsisConversations with Madeleine L'Engle is the first collection of interviews with the beloved children's book author best known for her 1962 Newbery Award-winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. However, Madeleine L'Engle's accomplishments as a writer spread far beyond children's literature. Beginning her career as a literary novelist for adults, L'Engle (1918-2007) continued to write fiction for both young and old long after A Wrinkle in Time. In her sixties, she published personal memoirs and devotional texts that explored her relationship with religion. At the time of her death, L'Engle was mourned by fans of her children's books and the larger Christian community.L'Engle's books, as well as her life, were often marked by contradictions. A consummate storyteller, L'Engle carefully crafted and performed a public self-image via her interviews. Weaving through the documentable facts in these interviews are partial lies, misdirections, and w

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Book SynopsisModern poetry, at least according to the current consensus, is difficult and often depressing. But as Humor in Modern American Poetry shows, modern poetry is full of humorous moments, from comic verse published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. The essays in this collection show that humor is as essential to the serious work of William Carlos Williams as it is to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley. For the writers in this volume, the point of humor is not to provide comic relief, a brief counterpoint to the poem's more serious themes; humor is central to the poems' projects. These poets use humor to claim their own poetic authority; to re-define literary tradition; to show what audience they are writing for; to make political attacks; and, perhaps most surprisingly, to promote sympathy among their readers. The essays in this book include single-author studies, discussions of literary circles, and theories of form. Taken together, they help Trade ReviewThe eloquent and meticulously researched contributions are not only a joy to read but also expand our understanding of humor, ranging from sly reversals of convention to biting social satire and from assertions of superiority to joyful wordplay. * European Journal of American Studies *The essays focus on the different ways humor can connect, alienate, push boundaries, or demonstrate how a writer approaches a particular audience. * Poets & Writers *Humor in Modern American Poetry offers ample demonstration of what a conversation about humor can do … the collection’s multiplicity of voices itself acts as evidence for the book’s emphasis on humor as interpersonal … The volume … lays out an extremely readable account of how humor has been explained over the centuries, up through recent critiques by feminist theorists of comedy like Hélène Cixous and Regina Barreca. It would be an excellent overview for students new to studying humor and especially for those seeking a model of how to bring philosophy and literary studies together … In addition to putting forward a wealth of perceptions and points of departure, the writers of these essays are also often quietly funny in their own prose. Trousdale’s winningly straightforward prose itself has a sense of humor around its edges, as does Solomon’s quip about ‘comic metaphors’ as ‘epistemologically irresponsible’ (39) or Hill’s pointing out the élan in mélange (94). And as is apt for a book about dialogue and other voices, there is the sheer array of good quotations … Such references are pleasures in and of themselves, but they also attest to the energy of this book: in its breadth and imagination, Humor in Modern American Poetry helps span the gap between poetry and humor studies. -- Calista McRae * Studies in American Humor *The essays in this collection not only demonstrate how unexpectedly funny modern and contemporary American poetry can be, but persuasively show how humor is integral to the aesthetics and ethics of much 20th-century verse. Bolstered by consistently fine close readings, these essays invite one to rethink the priorities of key figures from Pound and Moore to Ashbery and Merrill, and refocus our attention on some writers, like Phyllis McGinley, who have largely been forgotten. In Rachel Trousdale’s cogent and wide-ranging introduction, and in the best of these pieces, this collection begins to challenge some of our basic premises about how comedy itself works. A useful and provocative book. * David Rosen, Professor of English, Trinity College, USA *It is often said that the last sense we lose is our sense of humor. We certainly laugh before we speak. While theories of laughter date back to Plato, no one theory can account for its importance to us and our repeated failure to treat it seriously. This collection of essays makes a giant leap in the right direction. It analyses humor not as a side effect from the so-called main business of modernist poetics, but as one of modern poetry's most significant concerns. Importantly, it suggests that humor has an ethical and political dimension, encouraging modern poets (and readers of modern poetry) to escape, ridicule and reject what Rachel Trousdale in the introduction rightly calls 'the humorless, realist pressure to arrive at a single answer to complex questions.' * Jonathan Ellis, Reader in American Literature, University of Sheffield, UK *The ten essays cover a lot of ground … In each case, the humor of the poetics challenges the philosophical and psychological assumptions about humor. The poetics of humor connects the individual, the interpersonal, and the collective, and serves as the basis of shared values, insight, and originality. The arrangement of the essays allows the reader to revisit a larger discussion of modern American poetry and its scope and range. The collection is also timely as it exposes the need for both humor and poetry in these humorless times. Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Theories of Humor and Modern Poetry Rachel Trousdale (Framingham State University, USA) 1. Humor and Authority in Pound’s Cantos Joel Elliot Slotkin (Towson University, USA) 2. Cummings' Erotic Humor William Solomon (SUNY Buffalo, USA) 3. Emotional Comedies: Lorine Niedecker’s “For Paul” Marta Figlerowicz (Yale University, USA) 4. Laughing in the Gallery: Melvin Tolson’s Refusal to Hush Lena Hill (University of Iowa, USA) 5. Poetry and Good Humour: Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop Hugh Haughton (University of York, UK) 6. Convention and Mysticism: Dickinson, Hardy, Williams Alan Shapiro (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA) 7. Phyllis McGinley: Defending Housewifery with a Laugh Megan Leroy (Independent Scholar, USA) 8. Tell Me the Truth: Humor, Love, and Community in Auden’s Late-Thirties Poetry Rachel Trousdale (Framingham State University, USA) 9. Merrill, Comedy, Conversation Stephen Burt (Harvard University, USA) 10. “This Comic Version of Myself”: Humor and Autobiography in John Ashbery’s Poetry and Prose Karin Roffman (West Point, USA) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisLee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of seven books, including Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury 2017), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.Trade ReviewMitchell's sustained insight pushes the literary beyond alphabetic letters by recovering punctuation as more than an interface between words and the grammar of their articulation. In its most telling deployments, punctuation marks the conversion of format to content, seam to semantic gesture. Reading gets closer than ever, and with new power, in this study's riveting cross section of examples. On both prose and poetry, it's a terrific book, period. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Value of Style in Fiction (2018) *Mark My Words is a remarkable work that shows that `what we take away from both powerful prose and poetry are not the words themselves . . . so much as the suasions that typographical marks induce in our readings.’ Citing a compelling concatenation of writers--Nabokov, Dickinson, Baldwin, Cummings--this book provides fresh analyses that will be of interest to writers and readers. * Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, Stanford University, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue: What Can Punctuation Do? 1. Silence: Hemingway’s Periods 2. Hesitation: Baldwin’s Commas 3. Interruption: James’s Dashes 4. Rupture: Dickinson’s Dashes 5. Expansion: Woolf’s Semicolons 6. Hemorrhage: Joyce, Morrison, Saramago, Sebald 7. Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni 8. Incarceration: Nabokov’s Parentheses 9. Plenitude: Faulkner’s Array Epilogue: Punctuation as Style Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisJohn Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, USA. He has practiced as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer, practices which have often intersected with his training in Chinese culture and language. In addition to his internationally recognized writing on networked and programmable media, he has written two printed books of poetic work, Ink Bamboo (1996) and Image Generation (2015).Trade ReviewAn essential book for many reasons. The quality of the author’s theoretical sharpness and reflection is of course one of them, and one will find in this book an in-depth but often somewhat polemic dialogue with all the major critics and theoreticians in the field ... One can only be admiring of the pioneering and visionary dimension of these essays, often much ahead of their times. * Leonardo Music Journal *John Cayley has been a respected figure in digital language art since his first works appeared in the 1970s. For decades, his distinctive creative approach has combined with careful, critical, erudition to continually chart new directions in the field of emerging literary practices. This collection of essays, many of which are now canonical references, tracks twenty years of Cayley’s thinking about poetics, code, and composition. As for this radical new concept–grammalepsy­– as a way to understand how language is “grasped and read”—it will no doubt have a long-term ripple effect through the multiple domains of linguistic discourse. * Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA, USA *John Cayley has already had a deep and lasting influence on the fields of new media studies, electronic literature, conceptual writing, and poetics – and this long-awaited volume elegantly frames his most important critical essays as well as his artistic practice. No one has done more to theorize, and translate, the philosophical and aesthetic complexity of digital language art, and this volume will endure as the definitive compilation of Cayley’s work. * Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA *Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Grammalepsy 01. Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext 02. Pressing the “Reveal Code” Key 03. Of Programmatology 04. The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text) 05. Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext 06. Writing on Complex Surfaces 07. Time Code Language 08. The Gravity of the Leaf 09. Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers 10. Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses 11. Terms of Reference & Vecotralist Transgressions 12. Reading and Giving / Voice and Language 13. Reconfiguration 14. An Instance of Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature Bibliography Notes

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Book SynopsisContrary to what their oppressive design would lead us to believe, might structures of imprisonment actually incite humour? Starting from the most obvious areas of imprisonment (war camps, prison cells) and moving to the less obvious (masks, bodies), Framing Literary Humour demonstrates how 20th-century humour in theory and in fiction cannot be fully understood without a careful look at its connection with the notion of imprisonment. Understanding imprisonment as a concrete spatial setting or a metaphorical image, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard analyses selected works of Romain Gary, Giovannino Guareschi, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Pirandello to reconfigure confinement as an essential structural condition for the emergence of humour.Trade ReviewStrong on theory, insightful in application, this study illuminates 20th-century literary humour, emphasising the vital duality of concepts of imprisonment and liberation. This is a book that emanates from deep literary understanding of its examples, chosen from several different Western cultures, and which successfully connects the lessons learned to the broader field of humour studies. A book not to be missed by scholars of humour and laughter, regardless of disciplinary background. * Jessica Milner Davis FRSN, Honorary Associate in the School of Literature, Art and Media, University of Sydney, Australia *At once rigorous and illuminating, Mathieu-Lessard's brilliant book poses major challenges to humor theories that celebrate laughter as pure transgression or liberation. She insightfully reveals the stakes of literary humor in representations of imprisonment, spanning diverse sites of confinement from the Nazi war camp to the social mask to the mortal body. With eloquence and imagination, she grounds the very idea of humor in structures of captivity. * Maggie Hennefeld, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, USA *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Humour and Imprisonment 2. Humour in the Cell: Prison Cells and War Camps 3. Social Entrapment: Humoristic Characters vs. the World 4. Humour in the Cells: Configurations of the Body as Prison Conclusion: A Geometry of Humour Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisThis open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In nine case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contextssuch as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, multilingual regions in Spain, West Africa, and the Caribbeanthe volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practiTrade ReviewAn important intervention in the current debate on world literature. This engaging volume, starting from the premise that the cosmopolitan and the vernacular are complementary rather than opposed to one another, studies how the often tangled relationship region/nation/world plays out in a number of literatures around the world. * Theo D'haen, Emeritus Professor of English & Comparative Literature, Leuven University, Belgium *The interaction of languages that travel and those that stay home, and the cultural choices that follow, have profoundly influenced literatures, from epics to novels; politics, from empires to nations; and much else. This rich collection of essays is the first to address these problems for global modernity. It deserves to be warmly welcomed and widely studied. * Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies, Columbia University, USA *Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Acknowledgements Series Introduction – The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature Helena Bodin (Stockholm University, Sweden), Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden), Christina Kulberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Paul Tenngart (Lund University, Sweden), and Helena Wulff (Stockholm University, Sweden) Introduction: Theorizing the Vernacular Christina Kullberg and David Watson (Uppsala University, Sweden) 1. Contextualizing the Vernacular: Signposts from African Language, Writing, and Literature Moradewun Adejunmobi (University of California Davis, USA) 2. Vernacular Resistance: Catalan, Basque, and Galician Opposition to Francoist Monolingualism Christian Claesson (Lund University, Sweden) 3. The Modern Adventures of Kanian Poongundranar, Classical Tamil Poet: Reflections on Literatures of the World, Vernacularly Speaking S. Shankar (University of Hawai’i, USA) 4. Vernacular Soundings: Poetry from the Lesser Antilles in the Aftermaths of Hurricanes Irma and Maria Christina Kullberg (Uppsala University, Sweden) 5. From Fesiten to Fesibuku: Shifting Priorities in the Saamaka Vernacular Richard Price and Sally Price (College of William and Mary, USA) 6. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in Modern Chinese Fiction and Lao She’s Satirical Novel Cat Country Lena Rydholm (Uppsala University, Sweden) 7. Worldly Themes and Vernacular Literature: Aino Kallas on Gender, Ethnicity, and Class Katarina Leppänen (Gothenburg University, Sweden) 8. Specters of the Vernacular: Neoliberalism, World Literature, and Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings David Watson (Uppsala University, Sweden) 9. Vernacular Imagination and Exophone Reconfiguration in Francophone Chinese Diasporic Literature Shuangyi Li (Lund University, Sweden) Vernacular Lessons: Dante, Cavafy, Gombrowicz (Instead of an Afterword) Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University, UK) Index

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Book SynopsisWith this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court's ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia. Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.Trade Review"In crisp and lucid prose, Palmer Rampell gives us new and compelling views of the ambitious genre writers who explored the rough edges of the postwar liberal consensus. Bolstered with rare finds from Rampell's original archival research, this book brilliantly shows the unnoted power of genre fiction."—Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling"This richly interdisciplinary book transforms our understanding of the relationship between privacy and literature, and Rampell's provocative readings of genre fiction mount a compelling case against literary and liberal truisms about the bourgeois private self."—Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges"Genres of Privacyis a brainy and painstaking literature review of a variety of postwar genre works and their relationship to contemporary privacy-related issues... Rampell's expansive definition of the right to privacy gives his book a wide sweep and provides a view into several different issues and genres, lending it an immediate relevance."—Harrison Blackman, Los Angeles Review of Books"Recommended."—G. Grieve-Carlson, CHOICE

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Book SynopsisIt had never been attempted before, and might never be done again. One man watching another man write a novel from beginning to end. On September 1, 2014, in an 11th floor apartment in New York, Lee Child embarked on the twentieth book in his globally successful Jack Reacher series. Andy Martin was there to see him do it, sitting a couple of yards behind him, peering over his shoulder as the writer took another drag of a Camel cigarette and tapped out the first sentence: “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.” Miraculously, Child and Martin stuck with it, in tandem, for the next 8 months, right through to the bitter-sweet end and the last word, “needle”. Reacher Said Nothing is a one-of-a-kind meta-book, an uncompromising account in real time of the genesis, evolution and completion of a single work, Make Me. While unveiling the art of writing a thriller Martin also gives us a unique insight into the everyday life of an exemplary writer. From beginning to end, Martin captures all the sublime confidence, stumbling uncertainty, omniscience, cluelessness, ecstasy, despair, and heart-thumping suspense that go into writing a number-one bestseller.Trade Review�Love Jack Reacher? You'll have to enjoy this... [Andy Martin] revels in the minutiae you didn't realize you wanted to know.� Shortlist �It's fascinating to watch the process of writing unfolding in real time... it shouldn't work - after all writing is a predominantly mental activity - and yet it does in a way that makes you wonder why no-one's thought of doing this before... Andy Martin has created something new here: a fusion of literary criticism, biography and fly-on-the-wall meta-novel which serves as a remarkable insight into the creative process.�Spectator �Very entertaining. Until Child can be persuaded to publish his own version of Stephen King's On Writing, I think it will be a wise investment for anybody who wants to write popular fiction.�Jake Kerridge, Daily TelegraphTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 Part 1: Politics and You 7 Part 2: Making Your Voice Heard 29 Part 3: Politics is a Team Sport 67 Part 4: It’s All Marketing 131 Part 5: Let the Campaigns Begin 189 Part 6: Presidential Politics 263 Part 7: The Part of Tens 311 Appendix: State ID Voting Requirements 331 Index 353

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Book SynopsisThis is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day. It considers a number of key authors and artists, rather than a single author from this period. The collection exposes the wide use of incest and sexual trauma, and the frequency this appears within contemporary literature and related arts. Incest in contemporary literature discusses the impact of this change in attitudes on literature and literary adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.Table of ContentsIntroduction, Miles Leeson with Emma V. MillerPart I: Behind closed doors1. Text, image, audience: Adaptation and reception of Andrea Newman’s A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969) – Frances Pheasant-Kelly2. Assuming a ‘manly position’: The crisis of masculinity in Ian McEwan’s early fiction – Justine Gieni3. ‘Waking in the dark’: Remembering incest in A Thousand Acres (1991), Exposure (1993) and Beautiful Kate (2009) – Rebecca WhitePart II: Incest and the child protagonist4. ‘The word is incest’: Narrative, affect and judgement in and across the Lolitas – Matthew Pateman5. Appropriate or anathema? The representation of incest in children’s literature – Alice Mills6. ‘[B]orn to make a real life, however it cracks your heart’: creative women and daydreaming in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008) – Emma V. MillerPart III: Incest as a political conceit7. The desire for power and the power of desire: The case of Pier Paolo Pasolini – Michael Mack8. ‘Our close but prohibited union’: Sibling incest, class and national identity in Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) – Robert Duggan9. Is posthuman incest possible? Science fiction and the futures of the body – Alistair BrownPart IV: The rhetoric of narrating incest10. ‘Is’t not a kind of incest?’ Metaphor and relation in the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – Charles Mundye11. ‘[T]he thing that makes us different from other people’: Narrating incest through ‘différance’ in the work of Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt and Doris Lessing – Emma V. Miller and Miles Leeson12. Avuncular ambiguity: Ethical virtue in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) – Miles LeesonIndex

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Book SynopsisSame old offers a rethinking of positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. Steeped in philosophical and political commitments to ‘difference’, queer theoretical frameworks have tended to assume that ideas related to ‘sameness’ only thwart and stymie queer forms of life. But this book takes a number of these ideas as its focus – uselessness, reproduction, normativity and reductionism – and reveals their unexpected formal and thematic importance to a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century: fin-de-siècle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the ‘stud file’ or record of serial sex. Demonstrating how queer cultural objects often stand at odds with the frameworks that have been meant to help interpret and comprehend them, Same old interrogates the genealogy of the aversion to sameness that has kept those frameworks in place.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Same old1. Useless2. Reproductive3. Normative4. ReductiveCoda: Same againReferences

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Book SynopsisCombining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy’s literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.Trade Review'In her foundational study of McCarthy’s engagement with complex adaptive systems, Cooper gracefully assimilates historical, economic, environmental, and complexity studies, archival documents, and previous scholarship to explore McCarthy’s cultural critique of the intersecting American systems of twentieth- and twenty-first-century economic imperialism, consumer capitalism, and criminal justice, and the disruption of complex ecological systems. Turning from problems to solutions in her later chapters, she shows how McCarthy’s works advance an ethic of care for humans, animals, and the environment, and she examines the roles that storytelling and nomadism can play in promoting such an ethic. Wide-ranging and rich in new insights, this book impresses with its confident perception of the overarching values that unify McCarthy’s body of work.' Dianne Luce, author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period'Lydia Cooper brilliantly reads McCarthy’s peripatetic novels to reveal a single focused vision, one that exposes the predations of capitalist excess against a fragile ecological balance. McCarthy’s very syntax and style, in all its experimental variations, everywhere fixes our gaze on what has been lost (or soon will be). In turn, Cooper’s triumph lies in her own ambulatory reading of fictional cars and horses, animate landscapes and insensible figures, Gothic loomings, climate crises, and food webs. One cannot help but leave this book eager to return to a McCarthy seen entirely anew.'Lee Clark Mitchell, Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres, Princeton University'Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature is a brilliant, elegant, and incisive inquiry into the scientific and philosophical ideas that inform McCarthy’s work. Rich with social and political implications in the realm of environmentalism and ecocriticism, the volume moves beyond general themes to advance McCarthy as both prophet and commentator, making his work relevant to a host of perennial and contemporary issues and concerns.' Steven Frye, Professor and Chair of English, California State University, Bakersfield'With this timely and fascinating book, Lydia Cooper draws together the three most recent and robust points of interest in McCarthy studies – economics, environmentalism, and complexity theory – an intersection of topics that is broadly applicable in our contemporary world as well.'Stacey Peebles, Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Humanities, Associate Professor of English at Centre College -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Cars, Trucks, and Horses. Man in the Age of the Machine2. War and the Wanderer. Epic Violence, Biblical Morality, and the Rise of Empire in Blood Meridian 3. Professionals. Late Capitalism and the Illegal Drug Trade in No Country for Old Men and The Counselor4. Prophets. Imagining the End of the Anthropocene in The Road5. Pilgrims. Nomadism and the Making and Unmaking of the World in The Border Trilogy6. Death and the Poet. Suttree and Art that SustainsIndex

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Book SynopsisThe heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of medievalist Arthur G. Brodeur. By considering Blaser’s and Spicer’s poetics as they were shaped by their encounter with Beowulf, the book is able to open up questions about the non-representational poetics of the poem, rebooting a mid-century approach to aesthetics on a new critical trajectory. The book considers the poem’s aesthetics through relationship translation theory, as well as early medieval discourses of sensory-affective experience and twentieth-century phenomenology. The heat of Beowulf reexamines the scholarship on Old English poetics from the mid-twentieth century as it intersected with post-war avant-garde poetics, and how understanding these critical histories can reshape how we read Beowulf now.Table of ContentsIntroduction: translative comparative poetics 1 The aesthetics of Beowulf in the middle of the twentieth century 2 ‘Heat’, early medieval aesthetics, and multisensory complexion in Beowulf 3 The heat of earmsceapen style: translatability and compound diction 4 ‘Real cliffs’: variation and lexical kinetics 5 Narrating heat in a hot world Afterword Appendix: catalog of ‘fire’ and ‘heat’ words in Beowulf Index

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Book SynopsisMid-Century Gothic defines a distinct post-war literary and cultural moment in Britain, lasting ten years from 1945-55. This was a decade haunted by the trauma of fascism and war, but equally uneasy about the new norms of peacetime and the resurgence of commodity culture. As old assumptions about the primacy of the human subject became increasingly uneasy, culture answered with gothic narratives that reflected two troubling qualities of the new objects of modernity: their uncannily autonomous agency, and their disquieting intimacy with the reified human body. The book offers fresh readings of novels, plays, essays and films of the period, unearthing neglected texts as well as reassessing canonical works. By bringing these into dialogue with the mid-century architecture, exhibitions and material culture, it provides a new perspective on a notoriously neglected historical moment and challenges previous accounts of the supposed timidity of post-war culture.Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘The world of things’: an introduction to mid-century gothicPart I: Agency1 Rubble, walls and murals: abstraction and materiality2 Seeing things: found objects and the eye of the beholder3 Machines and spectrality: the gothic potential of technology Part II: Intimacy4 Neophilia and nostalgia: the trouble with gentrification 5 Strange beauty: Costume, performance and power in the New Elizabethan age6 Bombs, Prosthetics and Madness: Incorporating the Intimacy of ThingsConclusion: Beyond the mid-century

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Book SynopsisOn the heels of the Great Depression and staring into the abyss of a global war, American writers took fiction and literature in a new direction that addressed the chaos that the nation—and the world—was facing. These authors spoke to the human condition in traumatic times, and their works reflected the dreams, aspirations, values, and hopes of people living in the World War II era. In From Native Son to King’s Men: The Literary Landscape of 1940s America, Robert McParland examines notable works published throughout the decade. Among the authors covered are James Baldwin, Pearl S. Buck, James Gould Cozzens, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Ann Petry, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. McParland explores how popular novels, literary fiction, and even short stories by these authors represented this pivotal period in American culture. By examining the creative output of these authors, this book reveals how the literature of the 1940s not only offered a pathway for that era’s readers but also provides a way of understanding the past and our own times. From Native Son to King’s Men will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural climate of the 1940s and how this period was depicted in American literature.Trade ReviewMcParland skillfully analyzes a wide range of American writers and their works and how they collectively displayed ‘the dreams, hopes, anxieties, and cultural imagination’ of the 1940s. Combining biography and criticism, McParland shows how American literature written between the Great Depression and the Cold War depicted a general age of ‘transition, recovery, and expectation’ but also addressed issues such as ‘war, the problem with racism, the struggles and dreams of daily life in a changing world.’ The heart of the book is five chapters covering authors and novels by theme: accounts of war by writers including Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck; a look at ‘home’ in the South by William Faulkner and Carson McCullers; depictions of American racial strife by Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright; novels of WWII by Normal Mailer and John Hersey; and studies of developing domestic issues by a new cadre of postwar writers such as Saul Bellow and John O’Hara. He also examines such books as Richard Wright’s Native Son (‘We still have Bigger Thomas among us… [he] could not easily embrace the American dream’). McParland delivers an insightful look at writers who help shape a decade. * Publishers Weekly *

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Book SynopsisThis book explores how the East German Writers Union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with consequences well beyond the literary community. In the German Democratic Republic words and ideas mattered, both for legitimizing and criticizing the regime. No wonder, then, that the ruling SED party created a Writers Union to mold what writers publicly wrote and said. Its chief task was ideological: creating a socialist and antifascist culture. But it was also supposed to advance its members' professional interests and enable them to act as public intellectuals with a say in the direction of socialism. Many writers demanded that it pursue this second function as well, which brought it into conflict with the SED. This book explores how the union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with consequences well beyond the literary community. Union leaders, pressured by the SED or the secret police, usually acquiesced in enforcing regime demands, but by the 1980s many authors had adapted to the rules of the game, exploiting theirunion membership to insulate themselves from reprisal for their carefully worded critiques and in so doing beginning to break down limitations on public speech. The book explores how and why in the 1970s the Writers Union helped normalize relations between writers and state, yet over the course of the 1980s inadvertently aided the expansion of permissible speech, ultimately helping destabilize the East German system. Thomas W. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri.Trade ReviewAn account of the complex and evolving relationship between the ruling party, the Stasi and the Writers Union. * EUROPEAN HISTORY QUARTERLY *Goldstein expertly picks apart the East German Writers Union during the GDR . . . . * H-NET SOCIALISMS *[A] strong contribution to our understanding of cultural politics in the GDR. . . . Goldstein's book is a nuanced addition to the scholarship on the role of intellectuals and everyday life in East Germany. A great resource for graduate students and, because of Goldstein's admirably declarative prose, undergraduate students trying to get a basic sense of current research. . . . [W]ell researched, thorough, and judicious . . . . -- Curtis Swope * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *An intriguing read. The diversity of perspectives is a commendable achievement, and the range of meaningful and fruitful discussions of mostly uncanonical materials proves that there is a lot still to discover even for an academic target audience that already has a substantial knowledge of the GDR and its cultural sphere. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Goldstein comes to the important and reasonable conclusion that it was not socialism that caused the collapse of East Germany, but governmental intolerance of voices suggesting how better to achieve a socialist state. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction German Writers Associations through 1970 Socioeconomic Functions The Era of No Taboos? 1971-75 A Disciplining Instrument, 1976-79 Defending Peace, Defining Participation, 1979-83 Years of Resignation, 1983-85 Glasnost in the GDR? 1985-89 Coming Full Circle, 1989-90 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis title includes in-depth critical discussions of Maya Angelou's novel. Maya Angelou's ""I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"" took the world by storm when it was published in 1969. As it shot to the top of best-seller lists, it made Angelou one of the most recognized black women in America. Despite controversy over its frank depiction of sexual abuse, the autobiography is still widely read in high schools and colleges across the country. Three decades after it was published, readers continue to admire Angelou's artistry, wit, and indomitable spirit. Edited by Mildred R. Mickle, Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Greater Allegheny, this volume brings together a variety of critical offerings on Angelou's famous autobiography. Mickle's introduction pays tribute to Angelou's achievement and examines the inspiration she drew from Phillis Wheatley's civil rights advocacy as well as the similarities between ""Caged Bird"" and Harriet Jacobs' ""Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"" and Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poetry. ""The Paris Review""'s Christopher Cox reminds readers of how revolutionary Angelou's autobiography was when it was published and recounts the comments Angelou made on her work in an interview with George Plimpton. Four original essays by Amy Sickels, Pamela Loos, Neil Heims, and Robert C. Evans provide valuable context for reader's new to Angelou's work. Sickels discusses the historical events that surround Angelou's life: the civil rights, black power, and black arts movements as well as the emergence of black women's literature with the first publications of Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, and Lucille Clifton. Loos provides a survey of the major pieces of criticism on ""Caged Bird"", paying special attention to the book's early reception and how it fits in the autobiographical genre and slave narratives, as well as issues of race, gender, aesthetics, and identity. Neil Heims discusses the struggle for a black identity through readings of both ""Caged Bird"" and James Baldwin's ""If Beale Street Could Talk"". Finally, Robert C. Evans examines the role that both formal and informal education play in the young Maya's maturation. The collection also includes ten previously published essays that examine ""Caged Bird"" through a variety of lenses. Critics examine the character of young Maya, noting how her rootlessness contributes to her perseverance and adaptability, as well as how Angelou's narrative technique allows her to recount the details of incredible life without being controlled by them. The book's treatment of sexual abuse is also investigated in the larger context of other black women's narratives of sexual abuse. Other critics attend to ""Caged Bird""'s place in the genre of ethnic autobiography and the particular challenges it presents to teachers seeking to expose students multicultural literature; the childhood roots of Angelou's political activism; the influence of blues music on the narrative's structure; and, the young Maya's relationships with the black community, literature, and the women in her life.

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Book SynopsisIn My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat''s book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of 'the devil in history.' 'It was then,' Wat writes, 'that I began to be a believer.'

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Book SynopsisBringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this edited volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between U.S. and Soviet forces. Shining a spotlight on writers from the war's numerous fronts and applying lenses of race, gender, and decolonization, the essayists present several new angles from which to view the tense global showdown that lasted roughly a half-century. Ultimately, they reframe the Cold War not merely as a divide between the Soviet Union and the United States, but between nations rich and poor, and mostly white and mostly not. By emphasizing the global dimensions of the Cold War, this innovative collection reveals emergent forms of post-WWII empire that continue to shape our world today, thereby raising the question of whether the Cold War has ever fully ended.

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Book SynopsisFor the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books, Everett has established himself as one of America's--and arguably the world's--premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his many honors since 2000 are Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded--the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize. Interviews collected in this volume--several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time--display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work's being described as ""characteristically uncharacteristic."" At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about ""Jim Crow,"" a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more.

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Book SynopsisThis volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

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Book SynopsisEthics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness. Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"The Art of Time is anchored in thorough mastery of primary and secondary work in Levinas studies, and it displays capacious knowledge of 1990's Spanish literature and culture. This study goes beyond earlier work that brings Levinasian ethical philosophy to bear upon literary criticism...and will be an impetus and aspiration for future work by other scholars." -- Donald Wehrs * Auburn University *"Molinaro recuperates underappreciated works, by authors all too easily dismissed as immature or irrelevantly counter-cultural, that speak to us all. As such, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in ethics in literature or contemporary Spanish literature and culture." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Art of Time is anchored in thorough mastery of primary and secondary work in Levinas studies, and it displays capacious knowledge of 1990's Spanish literature and culture. This study goes beyond earlier work that brings Levinasian ethical philosophy to bear upon literary criticism...and will be an impetus and aspiration for future work by other scholars." -- Donald Wehrs * Auburn University *"Molinaro recuperates underappreciated works, by authors all too easily dismissed as immature or irrelevantly counter-cultural, that speak to us all. As such, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in ethics in literature or contemporary Spanish literature and culture." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *Table of ContentsA Note on Translations ... iv One - Ethics, Alterity, and Levinas ... 1 Two - Spain’s Generación X ... 49 Three - Repeating the Same Violence or the Failure of Synchrony: Veo Veo, El frío, and Mensaka ... 99 Four - The Betrayal of Diachrony: El secreto de Sara, Anatol y dos más, and Tocarnos la cara ... 143 Five - Diachrony and Saying: Arde lo que será, Sentimental, and La fiebre amarilla ... 186 Afterword ... 220 Acknowledgments ... 225 Bibliography ... 227 Index ... 251 About the Author ... 252

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Book SynopsisLiterature not only represents Canada as "our home and native land" but has been used as evidence of the civilization needed to claim and rule that land. Indigenous people have long been represented as roaming "savages" without land title and without literature. Literary Land Claims: From Pontiac's War to Attawapiskat analyzes works produced between 1832 and the late 1970s by writers who resisted these dominant notions. Margery Fee examines John Richardson's novels about Pontiac's War and the War of 1812 that document the breaking of British promises to Indigenous nations. She provides a close reading of Louis Riel's addresses to the court at the end of his trial in 1885, showing that his vision for sharing the land derives from the Indigenous value of respect. Fee argues that both Grey Owl and E. Pauline Johnson's visions are obscured by challenges to their authenticity. Finally, she shows how storyteller Harry Robinson uses a contemporary Okanagan framework to explain how white refusal to share the land meant that Coyote himself had to make a deal with the King of England. Fee concludes that despite support in social media for Theresa Spence's hunger strike, Idle No More, and the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the story about "savage Indians" and "civilized Canadians" and the latter group's superior claim to "develop" the lands and resources of Canada still circulates widely. If the land is to be respected and shared as it should be, literary studies needs a new critical narrative, one that engages with the ideas of Indigenous writers and intellectuals.Trade ReviewFee contributes to the decolonization of literary studies in Canada and readers will benefit from Fee's contextualization of Indigenous notions of land rights and language. ... scholars interested in issues related to decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty will find this work especially useful. -- Lianne Leddy -- H-Envirnoment, 2016Literary Land Claims is an extremely important contribution to conversations about literature in Canada. ... At a time when universities across Canada are endeavouring to heed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's "Calls to Action," Fee points readers toward a goal of consensus building, one that is predicated on muddying the binary and hierarchical logics through which we have tended to understand identity and, indeed, colonialism itself. She opens up an engaging and necessary conversation, offering a model for rich, ethical scholarly engagement with a literary landscape that is extends far beyond this book, and beyond the confines of "Canlit." -- Sarah Krotz -- English Studies in Canada... Literary Land Claims is timely reading. ... a rich and thoughtful book which will appeal to anyone writing or teaching in fields relating to settler-colonial, Canadian, and Indigenous studies. Historians in particular will find Fee's chapters a valuable complement to the original texts she discusses. -- Megan Harvey -- BC Studies, 2017Fee's argument is a compelling reframing of Indigenous literatures and Canadian cultural nationalism. Her case that literature and storytelling are powerful decolonial tools arrives at a crucial time for Indigenous literature and theory as well as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to decolonize the academy and public school systems, both of which are bound up within Canada's literary canon. Thus, I wholeheartedly endorse Fee's text as an important addition to our decolonial theoretical toolkit. -- Joshua Whitehead -- ariel, 2018Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Literary Land Claims: The âIndian Land Questionâ from Pontiac's War to Attawapiskat by Margery Fee Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction 1 Imagining "The Indian Land Question" from Here 2 "Why have they taken our hunting grounds?": John Richardson's Lament for a Nation 3 "That 'ere Ingian's one of us!": Richardson Rewrites the Burkean Savage 4 "We have to walk on the ground": Constitutive Rhetoric in Riel's Addresses to the Court 5 "We Indians own these lands": Performance, Authenticity, Disidentification, and E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake 6 "They taught me much": Imposture, Animism, Ecosystem and Archibald Belaney / Grey Owl 7 "They never even sent us a letter": Literacy and Land in Harry Robinson's Origin Story Conclusion: Attawapiskat v. #Ottawapiskat Notes Works Cited Index

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Book Synopsis The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.Trade Review “Harry Craver’s rich and nuanced study revisits Kracauer’s nonconformist views and underscores the religious context in which they emerged… In portraying Kracauer’s reflections on religious concepts as emblematic of post–World War I German intellectual life, Craver sets the stage for a novel, intriguing discussion of Weimar modernity and its crisis.” • American Historical Review “Reluctant Skeptic opens a window into a moment and a place in time through in-depth analysisof Kracauer’s polyphonic engagement with pressing contemporary questions and the role of the critic in assessing them. It makes no claim that Kracauer’s perceptions of secularization and religion offer the paramount vantage point from which to take the measure of the crises we associate with Weimar, and it acknowledges that Kracauer’s attentiveness to religion ebbed in the later 1920s. It succeeds admirably in creating an intellectual milieu analogous to the socio-cultural or socio-denominational milieus explored in studies of Weimar political culture It also offers a fresh perspective on the intellectual uncertainties of the post-war era.” • German History “In great and fascinating detail, Craver guides his readers through the confused intellectual landscape that was Weimar Germany and the confusing currents that swirled through Kracauer’s deeply fissured consciousness.” • Journal of European Studies “Unpretentiously written and based on a judicious interpretation of a wide range of materials, Reluctant Skeptic contributes to our understanding not only of Siegfried Kracauer’s intellectual development, but also of Weimar culture as a whole.” • Martin Jay, University of California, BerkeleyTable of Contents Preface Introduction: Kracauer on and in Weimar Modernity Chapter 1. “Location Suggests Content”: Kracauer on the Fringe of Religious Revival Chapter 2. Reading the War, Writing Crisis Chapter 3. From Copenhagen to Baker Street: Kracauer, Kierkegaard and the Detective Novel Chapter 4. Religion on the Street: Kracauer and Religious Flânerie Conclusion: Criticism in the Negative Church Afterword: From Don Quixote to Sancho Panza Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAs an independent publisher, Jeremy Robson always punched above his weight with a roster of authors that have been the envy of many large publishers. As a poet, he has been at the centre of the poetry scene since the 1960s, with a number of highly praised volumes to his credit and the friendship of many leading poets and musicians. In this engrossing memoir, Robson looks back at both his publishing career and life as a poet. Stories abound; whether it be driving Muhammad Ali around Britain, coping with Michael Winner or working in the desert with David Ben-Gurion. Time spent joyously laughing with Maureen Lipman and Alan Coren while undertaking an exciting poetry reading tour with Ted Hughes, and packing the Royal Festival Hall for a historic poetry and jazz concert. Jeremy recounts treasured and life-long friendships with the poets and writers; Dannie Abse, Alan Sillitoe, Vernon Scannell, Laurie Lee, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Elie Wiesel and Frederic Raphael. Well known and celebrated as both publisher and poet, Jeremy Robson has produced a delicious memoir that will delight the reader.

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Book SynopsisWithin the Euro-American literary tradition, Gothic stories of childhood and adolescence have often served as a tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. This book turns our attention to modern and contemporary Gothic texts by hemispheric American writers who have refigured uncanny youth in ways that invert these cultural scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Conde to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado, Gothic conventions become a means of critiquing pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. As fictional children and adolescents confront persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, grapple with the everyday ramifications of white supremacist thinking, navigate rigged systems of socioeconomic power, and attempt to frustrate patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, the uncanny and the nightmarish in their lives force readers to reckon affectively as well as intellectually with these intersecting forms of injustice.Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1 - Haunted Perennial Girlhoods Chapter 2 - Cursed Pregnancies and Uncanny Children Chapter 3 - Gothic Boyhoods and Adult Betrayals Chapter 4 - The Teen Girls Aren't Alright Chapter 5 - Writing Gothic Scenes for Kids Conclusion - Resistance, Resilience, and the Gothic Happy Ending

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman.Trade ReviewReviews 'A very significant intervention in the field, likely to be a major point of reference for future work'Margaret Atack, University of Leeds'Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing provides a thoughtful and substantive analysis of a wide range of authors, texts, and major debates as it explores the traces of war found in literary works that do not explicitly mention World War II. ... It would make a useful introductory text because of the wide range of key figures and canonical texts addressed, as well as its overview of major debates and key issues present in both areas of study. At the same time, Davis’s discussions on ethics are particularly relevant to scholars in trauma studies, and his integration of archival material and unpublished documents offer thought-provoking ways of reframing texts for scholars in twentieth century French studies.' Heidi Brown, H-France Review'Reading Davis is like having secrets revealed by an expert analyst who, simultaneously, casts doubt on whether secrets can be fully revealed and on the truths that they contain. His readings of Sempru´n and Sarah Kofman at the end are fascinating: the relations between writer and text, and history and story, are handled in such a nuanced way that one gets both a profound picture of their lives and works and a sense that any picture is necessarily fictional and incomplete. This book is ‘traumatic hermeneutics’ at its most stimulating.' Max Silverman, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Don’t Mention the War Section A: Ethics, Trauma and Interpretation Chapter 1. Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story Chapter 2. Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain of Others Section B: Writing the War: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus Chapter 3. Sartre and Beauvoir: A Very Gentle Occupation? Chapter 4. Camus’s War: L’Etranger and Lettres à un ami allemand Chapter 5. Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute Section C: Prisoners of War Give Philosophy Lessons Chapter 6. Life Stories: Ricoeur Chapter 7. Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas Chapter 8. Levinas the Novelist Section D: Surviving, Witnessing and Telling Tales Chapter 9. Testimony/Literature/Fiction: Jorge Semprun Chapter 10. Elie Wiesel: Witnessing, Telling and Knowing Chapter 11. Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory Conclusion: Whose War, Which War? Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe authoritative biography of George Orwell, written with the cooperation of Orwell's widow.‘In its thoroughness, and its mastery of a considerable volume of material, this is the definitive biography of Orwell.’ Sunday Times‘It is hardly worth using up space to declare just how good it is. Different readers will come away from its seventeen pungent and packed chapters with diverse memories of its excellence.’ GuardianTrade ReviewBernard Crick’s book is a triumph of the first order. It is an absorbing, scrupulous, original record… -- Michael Foot * New Standard *It is hardly worth using up space to declare just how good it is. Different readers will come away from its seventeen pungent and packed chapters with diverse memories of its excellence. -- Peter Sedgwick * Guardian *No one interested in its great subject, or indeed the social, political and cultural fate of this country from 1903 to 1950 and beyond, will fail to enjoy most of it very much indeed. -- Michael Ratcliffe * The Times *He has built up a personality – seen, yes, resolutely from ‘outside’, but still close up – which other, more interpretative or internal, methods could not give so convincingly. -- Richard Hoggart * Listener *In its thoroughness, and its mastery of a considerable volume of material, this is the definitive biography of Orwell. -- Julian Symons * Sunday Times *Crick’s analytical mind, combined with his mastery of the historical background and context, make him the ideal guide… -- Arthur Koestler * Observer *One finishes the book thinking more highly of him, not less, as with so many contemporary biographies. The overall picture strikes me as being remarkably true. -- Anthony Powell * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisDon Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain's major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Table of ContentsBiographical OutlinePrologue1. For the Hell of It: Nil Nil (1993)2. Which Man I Am: God's Gift to Women (1997)3. Not Your Name, Not Mine: The Eyes (1999)4. Shrewd Obliquity of Speech: Landing Light (2003)5. Breath, You Invisible Poem: Orpheus (2006)6. None of This Matters: Rain (2009)Coda: 40 Sonnets (2015) and Zonal (2020)

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Book SynopsisSubjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations reconceptualises Friedrich Nietzsche’s position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes – eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism – it challenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most 'Nietzschean' of these Irish modernists. While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more 'Nietzschean' than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Nietzschean Modernism1. Foundational Systems and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same2. Aesthetic Potentiality and the Übermensch Ideal3. Cultural Paralysis and the Transnational State of Being4. Consciousness and the Ethics of AlterityConclusion: Nietzschean Constellations

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Book SynopsisOurs is an age of precarity, with fear and anxiety coming to define the twenty-first century; politically, economically and socially, neoliberal systems and policies dominate globally. Traditional frameworks of protection have consequently been dismantled, and existential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals. Against this backdrop, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode to address this age of precarity. Examining twenty-first-century Gothic fiction's engagement with the most pressing issues of our age, the readers of this volume will consider the oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s, and observe a modern-day Frankenstein's creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War. They will also discover vampires (representatives of a voracious, toxic economic model) in an alternate Mexico City, encounter a nomadic group traversing the only remaining wilderness in a near-future North America devastated as a result of the climate crisis, and be haunted by a spectral migrant who died in their efforts to flee political oppression in Vietnam.

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Book SynopsisClever, beautiful. Observant, and better than that, brave - The Scotsman

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Book SynopsisLimited edition of 100 numbered copies, signed by the author, clothbound and slipcased with a 1904 penny inset on the cover. In 1904, the sending, receiving and collecting of postcards had become an essential part of life in Edwardian Dublin. In an age of few private telephones, the postcard was a popular and reliable form of communication – in Dublin there were six mail deliveries a day, and one on Sunday. To celebrate James Joyce and the centenary of Bloomsday, Niall Murphy has assembled a dazzling selection of 240 postcards, all of them posted in the Dublin area during 1904, four of them sent on 16 June that year. Here are the messages of ordinary people who walked the streets of Dublin side-by-side with the characters of Ulysses, with their words eerily mirroring the novel’s events. There is a rescue from drowning in Kingston; crime and punishment in Grafton Street; the Great Storm of 1903; King Edward’s visit; and memories of a ‘departed day’ spent in Howth. Among the many tales of love, three are enacted in varying degrees of intimacy: Millicent and Francisque de Boissieu, Jack Miller and Maud Tighe, and Ina and John McGregor – echoing Joyce’s use of postcards to establish the blossoming romance between Milly Bloom and Alec Bannon. Published in association with the National Library of Ireland, ‘A Bloomsday Postcard’ features the work of the legendary postcard artists – Louis Wain’s strange human cats; Lance Thackery’s satires of upper-class life; and C. Dana Gibson’s exquisite drawings of beautiful women. Here also are cards depicting the Russo-Japanese War, Yukon gold miners, the Dublin Horse Show, and life in Connemara – creating a mesmerizing full-colour mosaic that brings to life the world of Bloomsday, 1904 like never before.

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite's religious outlook through the inner journeys of five female characters. For Martín Gaite, a truly religious, or spiritual, perspective requires conscious attention to the products of the unconscious (dreams, images, memories, premonitions), followed by reflection and action, as well as a similar attentiveness and responsiveness to external events both large and small. This reconnection of the supernatural and day-to-day worlds also involves descent to the unconscious - the way to wholeness - as depicted in so many myths and fairy tales, including those which Martín Gaite used to retell or enhance the works analysed in this book: Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Amor and Psyche, Demeter and Persephone, and the Descent of the Goddess Inanna. Looking at the extent to which these female characters attend to, reflect on, and respond to their dreams, images, memories and events, the analysis suggests that Martín Gaite uses her stories to try to communicate both the road to her own enlightenment and warnings about paths that lead away from this.Table of ContentsChapter 1: In Spirit and Truth Chapter 2: The Link has Broken: Matilde's Dream in El balneario Chapter 3: When the Meaning is Lost: Death and Life in Lo raro es vivir and Irse de casa Chapter 4: ¡Oh Inanna! No investigues los ritos del mundo inferior: Mariana's Descent to the Underworld in Nubosidad variable Chapter 5: Looking for the Lost Daughter: Sofía's Search in Nubosidad variable Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In "Object Lessons" Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose, the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as Wordsworth's "Prelude" does in his, though Boland does not allow herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in "Object Lessons", an enabling document of our time.Unease with Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it encounters.Trade Review'This is essential reading for any woman interested in poetry.' - Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. 'Object Lessons is a record of a learning process. In a time when poetry by women is coming out of the shadows in Irish literature, such records need to be written and read, in "turning and returnings" repeated and re-stated.' - Poetry Ireland Review.

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