Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books
Edinburgh University Press The Beats
Book SynopsisThis book pairs close readings with a strong overview of the movement and ranges from Women's Beat Writing to African American Beats.
£24.69
Edinburgh University Press Virginia Woolf
Book SynopsisThis book includes essays, unpublished sketches, Woolf's social realist 1919 novel Night and Day, and her final, visionary novel Between the Acts. This approach to Woolf's writing takes an integrated view, incorporating her juvenilia and foregrounding Woolf's critically neglected early novels.
£22.79
Edinburgh University Press TwentiethCentury Victorian
Book SynopsisTells of the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, the aftermath of the success of Sherlock Holmes and the impact of that on both author and publication as they moved into the early twentieth century.
£27.54
Edinburgh University Press Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
Book SynopsisThis volume examines the cultural importance of the coastline in Britain during a time of vast change.
£21.84
Edinburgh University Press Literature of the 1900s
Book SynopsisIn this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism.
£22.79
Edinburgh University Press The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy
Book SynopsisAidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.
£19.94
Edinburgh University Press Sentencing Orlando
Book SynopsisThe present collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf's sentences.
£22.79
University of Toronto Press The Pedagogy of Images
Book SynopsisThis collection offers a variety of scholarly views on illustrated books for Soviet children, covering everything from artistic innovation to state propaganda.Trade Review"One reason this book makes a significant contribution to studies on children’s literature and culture is its remarkable interdisciplinary approach. A persuasive picture of the complicated conditions in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and their influence on children’s literature can only be conveyed if the political, social, historical, and cultural circumstances are considered and related to one another –which this collection has succeeded in doing to a convincing degree." -- Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, University of Tübingen * International Research in Children's Literature *"This magnificent, beautifully produced volume contains over 250 period illustrations, bringing the object of its important and innovative scholarship to life… The enduring value of this edited volume will be both its scholarship and its stunning visuality and ‘gaze-appeal’" -- Megan Swift, University of Victoria * The Russian Review *"For decades to come, The Pedagogy of Images will remain a go-to resource on the early Soviet picture books for literature scholars, historians of public education, researchers of totalitarian art, librarians, and graphic artists." -- Olga Voronina, Bard College * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Primers of Soviet Modernity: Depicting Communism for Children in Early Soviet Russia Serguei Alex. Oushakine and Marina Balina Part One: Mediation 1. Three Degrees of Exemplary Boyhood in Boris Kustodiev’s Soviet Paradise Helena Goscilo 2. How the Revolution Triumphed: Alisa Poret’s Textbook of Cultural Iconography Yuri Leving 3. Foto-glaz: Children as Photo-Correspondents in Early Soviet Periodicals Erika Wolf 4. Autonomous Animals Animated: Samozveri as a Constructivist Do It Yourself Book Aleksandar Bošković 5. The Fragile Power of Paper and Projection Birgitte Beck Pristed Part Two: Technology 6. From Nature to “Second Nature” and Back Larissa Rudova 7. The Production of the Man-Machine: The Child as Instrument of Futurity Sara Pankenier Weld 8. Spells of Materialist Magic, or Soviet Children and Electric Power Kirill Chunikin 9. “Do It Yourself!”: Teaching Technological Creativity at the Time of Soviet Industrialization Maria Litovskaia 10. The Camel and the Caboose: Viktor Shklovsky’s Turksib and the Pedagogy of Uneven Development Michael Kunichika 11. Aero-plane, Aero-boat, Aero-sleigh: Propelling Everywhere in Soviet Transportation Katherine M. N. Reischl Part Three: Power 12. Spatializing Revolutionary Temporality: From Montage and Dynamism to Map and Plan Kevin M. F. Platt 13. “Poor, Poor Il’ich”: Visualizing Lenin’s Death for Children Marina Sokolovskaia and Daniil Leiderman 14. Young Soldiers at Play: The Red Army Solder as Icon Stephen M. Norris 15. The Working Body and Its Prostheses: Inventing the Aesthetics and Anatomy of Class for Soviet Children Alexey Golubev 16. Amerikanizm: The Brave New World of Soviet Civilization Thomas Keenan List of Illustrations Contributors
£59.40
Stanford University Press Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being
Book SynopsisFrantz Fanon may be most known for his more obviously political writings, but in the first instance, he was a clinician, a black Caribbean psychiatrist who had the improbable task of treating disturbed and traumatized North African patients during the wars of decolonization. Investigating and foregrounding the clinical system that Fanon devised in an attempt to intervene against negrophobia and anti-blackness, this book rereads his clinical and political work together, arguing that the two are mutually imbricated. For the first time, Fanon's therapeutic innovations are considered along with his more overtly political and cultural writings to ask how the crises of war affected his practice, informed his politics, and shaped his subsequent ideas. As David Marriott suggests, this combination of the clinical and political involves a psychopolitics that is, by definition, complex, difficult, and perpetually challenging. He details this psychopolitics from two points of view, focusing first on Fanon's sociotherapy, its diagnostic methods and concepts, and second, on Fanon's cultural theory more generally. In our present climate of fear and terror over black presence and the violence to which it gives rise, Whither Fanon? reminds us of Fanon's scandalous actuality and of the continued urgency of his message.Trade Review"This book is a clarifying event amid recent readings of Fanon and a radical intervention in the conventional ones. Writing with an intensity and momentum unparalleled by other scholars in the field, David Marriott is Frantz Fanon's first reader." -- Frank B. Wilderson III * University of California, Irvine *"Whither Fanon? is one of the most original and significant works of theory of this generation. Drawing deeply from Fanon's clinical psychoanalytic work, David Marriott shows in labyrinthine precision how Fanon's colonial racial interiority is both far more unfree than has been imagined and open to an ungrounded revolution without reserve. Perhaps alone among Fanon's readers, Marriott keeps up with Fanon's own complexity, radical negativity, and creative criticality." -- Rei Terada * University of California, Irvine *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction considers recent responses to what has become known as "critical Fanonism." Is Fanonism reducible to a narrative of liberation in which national and human liberation remains both telos and eschatology? Or does his work offer a different way of thinking about the relationship between time and event, law and violence, sovereignty and subject? Taking its cue from Fanon's meditation on the revolutionary moment as a tabula rasa, this introduction considers two broad ways of dealing with critical Fanonism: as a dialectical phenomenology and as a politics of redemption and/or liberation. Along the way, it asks why "narrative" and "experience" continue to be more or less the principal terms for engaging with Fanon's thought and attempts to show how Fanon escapes the teleological and phenomenological hold of both terms in a way that suggests differing theoretical possibilities. 1Psychodramas chapter abstractThis chapter presents an overview of the development and genealogy of Fanon's socialthérapie, showing how this innovation in clinical method followed from a radically new approach to the colony as both group idea and praxis. Drawing on Fanon's clinical papers, it pursues the following questions: how does politics inform Fanon's therapeutics? And what of psychoanalysis in the colony? What is the relation between Fanonian socialthérapie and François Tosquelles's thérapeutiques institutionnelles? And why did Fanon describe group therapy as a "transvaluation"? In the course of the discussion, Fanon's notions of madness and alienation are presented—including his view of the clinic itself as a form of psychodrama and psychic life as a form of occupation. 2The Clinic as Praxis chapter abstractThis chapter compares Fanon's critiques of colonial neuropsychiatry and, in particular, its diagnostic use of racial heredity to the institutional innovations of his own therapeutic practices, including his use of psychoanalytic therapies. The chapter charts the complex evolution of that usage from 1952 to 1958, a period in which the notion of therapy changes from that of a mirror of disalienation to that of a more unnameable n'est pas in which resolution is no longer seen as a move towards egoic reintegration. It becomes clear that identification is conceived no longer in specular terms as an imaginary misrecognition but more in terms of something foreclosed, lost, or missing; in other words, the experience of colonial racism is compared to that of an unconscious content that is irreversible, nontransferable, and inexplicable and yet is coextensive with the feeling of an uncanny wretchedness. 3Negrophobogenesis chapter abstractThis brief chapter outlines the main diagnostic terms of Fanon's socialthérapie—epidermalization, petrification, and sociogeny. The question of how racism comes to be embodied, or how the body comes to acquire a racial signifiance, for example, is shown to be a key element of Fanon's conception of le vécu noir, or black lived experience. What that conception shows is the dilemma of becoming black when becoming is established via a certain historicity of hatred that fails to go beyond the level of affect, which remains tied to the various episodes of its racialization. 4Historicity and Guilt chapter abstractThe chapter begins with a reconsideration of the relation between institutional therapy and the entire problem of the semblable, then moving on to discuss Fanon's struggle, in his clinical writings, to understand the resistance to treatment by the colonisé. The starting point for this discussion is Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation and Fanon's critique of its oedipalization of cultural conflict. It is here, in this critique, that Fanon begins his alternative investigations of guilt, truth, historicity, and reason—defined and elaborated via Jaspers's notion of Grenzsituationen, language and cultural translation in the colony, and the cultural conflict over signs, signification, and media. In the course of the discussion, Fanon's alternative ideology of the sign—which indicates a new psycho-political message—is elaborated. 5Racial Fetishism chapter abstractThis chapter presents Fanon's work on anxiety in relation to fetishism. The aim here is to show how negrophobia—as stereotype, fantasy, idea, and affect—functions as a source of traumatic energy in the psychic life of the colonized. The chapter begins with a detailed survey of one of the longest case histories in Black Skin, White Masks in order to elicit Fanon's explanation of racial anxiety, before moving on to consider the stereotype as a type of fetishistic thinking and practice in the libidinal and political economies of the colony (and postcolony). The stereotype-as-fetish is integral to Fanon's discussion of disguised or repressed representations and what he calls the overdetermination of blackness as phobic object. What is also clear is that representation itself does not allow us to accurately recognize the differences between Vorstellung and Darstellung in Fanon's analyses, nor the question of racial capitalism more generally. 6Desire and Law chapter abstractThough the initial hypothesis of this chapter—that Oedipus as colonus must be distinguished from its classical version—has met with little if any discussion, it is nonetheless fundamental for understanding the way in which the colonisé experiences both its desire and its inhibition as a form of guilty indebtedness. The chapter explores this guilt as arising from a flaw that is both de facto and de jure subject to a command that can neither be forsworn nor borne. The chapter also discusses Fanon's analyses of dispossession together with his clinical study of subjects who have succumbed to an absolute depersonalization during total war. Accordingly, the following questions are discussed: how is this flaw experienced as Erlebnis? How can blackness appear to itself other than as guilt and expiation? What is the role of this anti-Oedipus in colonial war, torture, and state violence? 7The Condemned chapter abstractThis chapter discusses Fanon's refusal, in contrast to the supporters of cultural nationalism, to advocate a black conception of the world, ethics, and politics, alongside his rejection of any teleological view of time, emancipation, or freedom. The chapter looks at Fanon's call for a blackness that is n'est pas and that cannot be put to work either dialectically, speculatively, progressively, or fugitively. Only the n'est pas is capable of expressing the temporal sensibility of Fanonism and its struggle to make known the pathologies of blackness and its reactionary culture of ressentiment. The chapter charts this struggle via afro-pessimism, which it uses to illustrate the central antinomies of what are, by definition, the blackest characteristics of Fanon's thought. 8Invention chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the various notions of invention in Fanon's work. Fanon invokes invention as a descent that is also a surpassing, a leap, that allows the colonisé to grasp the non-permanent nature of colonial historic truth. This is why, politically, Fanon's thinking of invention criticizes traditional notions of political organization, or sovereign will, and argues overtly for a revolutionary violence that is separated from the institutions of politics. In this chapter, Fanon's notion of invention is compared to that of Georges Sorel and C. L. R. James—two thinkers who make invention synonymous with class struggle and who thereby oppose spontaneity to certain forms of bureaucracy and the values of the bourgeois order as such. While James situates invention in a Marxist milieu, the chapter argues that the form in which Fanonian invention manifests itself cannot be plotted according to the preestablished forms of Marxist philosophy or dialectics. 9Existence chapter abstractThis chapter examines invention not as a figure of history, scientific method, anthropology, or politics but as a question of existence. It shows how invention cannot be limited to knowledge, narrative, or even the political command for a greater awareness of illusion or reality. These paths—which continue to dominate readings of Fanonism—are shown to be simplifications of what Fanon expresses as the sociogenic truths of colonialism. In a reading of sociogeny that engages with the psychoanalytic genealogy of the term, the chapter argues that modern readings of sociogeny need remedying in order to link sociogeny to trauma, repetition, and neurosis. 10The Abyssal chapter abstractThis chapter revisits Fanon's complex relationship to negritude and, in particular, to the poetry of Aimé Césaire. On the one hand, it establishes a clear link between Césaire's abyssal theory of negritude and Fanon's no less poetic attempt to rethink the relation between the universal and the particular at the point where either becomes the abyssal mediation of the other in the conjoined sphere of an enriching saturation. The abyssal, for its part, indicates a profoundly original approach to black writing and thought and designates a perpetual opening that is, by definition, oblique and singular. This opening is pursued via the interrelated figures of corpsing, social death, and orphic descent.
£26.99
Pan Macmillan How Proust Can Change Your Life
Book SynopsisWith an introduction by comedian and novelist David BaddielA novel in seven volumes, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is considered a major literary work of the twentieth century. And even more crucially, one that you should have read by now. However, as one of its most distinguishing features is its staggering length, many of us feel intimidated and perhaps, even, fatigued at the thought of diving in. Alain de Botton’s hilarious and unexpected Proustian manual, is then, the perfect antidote to this problem.In How Proust Can Change Your Life, de Botton masterfully distils what Proust says about friendship, reading, being alive and taking your time, and mixes it with his own, no less nourishing commentary. As de Botton rereads Proust for our collective benefit, we see the continued relevance of his work and the rich and varied insights he can offer us, from how to reinvigorate your relationship to being a good host. This is Proust as you’ve never seen him before. He may even change your life.Trade ReviewIt contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction . . . de Botton, in emphasizing Proust's healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation -- John Updike * New Yorker *
£10.44
Fordham University Press Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship
Book SynopsisMoroccan Other-Archives investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners. The book shows how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-archive: a set of textual, sonic, embodied, and visual sites that recover real or reimagined voices of these formerly suppressed and silenced constituencies of Moroccan society. Combining theoretical discussions with close reading of literary works, the book reenvisions both archives and the nation in postcolonial Morocco. By producing other-archives, Moroccan cultural creators transform the losses state violence inflicted on society during the years of lead into a source of civic engagement and historiographical agency, enabling the writing of histories about those Moroccans who have been excluded from official documentation and state-sanctioned histories. The book is multilingual and interdisciplinary, examining primary sources in Amazigh/Berber, Arabic, Darija, and French, and drawing on memory studies, literary theory, archival studies, anthropology, and historiography. In addition to showing how other-archives are created and operate, El Guabli elaborates how language, gender, class, race, and geographical distribution are co-constitutive of a historical and archival unsilencing that is foundational to citizenship in Morocco today.Table of ContentsPreface | ix Note on Transliteration | xiii List of Abbreviations | xv Introduction | 1 1. (Re)Invented Tradition and the Performance of Amazigh Other- Archives in Public Life | 26 2. Emplaced Memories of Jewish- Muslim Morocco | 63 3. Jewish- Muslim Intimacy and the History of a Lost Citizenship | 89 4. Making Tazmamart a Transnational Other- Archive | 115 5. Other- Archives Transform Moroccan Historiography | 150 Conclusion | 177 Acknowledgments | 189 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 253 Index | 281
£26.99
Bucknell University Press,U.S. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across
Book SynopsisPublished in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review"Rewriting Crusoe offers invigorating re-examinations of a timeless and timely genre. The broad scope of texts examined and the international profile of its authors makes this book an important contribution to studies of the Robinsonade and testament that this genre still holds power."— Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, author of Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest in Post/Colonial Island N "Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media assembles an international group of scholars who present exciting new approaches to the cultural afterlives of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel. Robinson Crusoe is one of the most successful books of all time, ubiquitous first in Europe and then around the world. Novel historians credit it with transforming prose fiction with psychological realism. It has been translated into dozens of languages and it has directly and indirectly inspired a plenitude of adaptations and appropriations in that time. The essays in Rewriting Crusoe follow the Robinsonades themselves across genres and media—fiction, film, plays, and TV—and they respond to a range of works, from immediate, direct responses in Britain to more distant and looser echoes across the globe. What is original and distinctive about the volume is its demonstration of how Robinsonades not only challenge key aspects of the archetypal castaway narrative—masculine individualism, literary realism, and ecological and colonial domination—but that these ideologies have always been in a process of contestation. Together the essays illuminate what editor Jakub Lipski calls 'the potential of the Robinsonade to adapt to changing circumstances, in terms of content and genre, and … its continuous relevance in new contexts.' The book provides a model for the potential of collaborative approaches to diffuse literary afterlives, and it is essential reading for those interested in the impact of eighteenth-century ideas through the ages."— Nicholas Seager, Co-editor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction "An impressively ambitious and comprehensive collection of essays on Robinsonades."— John Richetti, editor of the Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe “Rewriting Crusoe collects a wide range of international scholars to look at the Robinsonade tradition in various media across three centuries. The collection exhibits the range of responses to Robinson Crusoe and considers how they reflect various cultural and literary concerns.”— Leah Orr, author of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730Table of ContentsNote on the Edition Used Foreword by Robert Mayer Introduction Jakub Lipski Part I: Exploring and Transcending the GenreMushrooms, Capers, and other sorts of Pickles”: Remaking Genre in Peter Longueville’s The Hermit (1727)Rivka Swenson“If I had …”: Counterfactuals, Imaginary Realities and the Poetics of the Postmodern RobinsonadePatrick Gill Part II: National ContextsCastaways and Colonialism: Dislocating Cultural Encounter in The Female American (1767)Przemysław UścińskiSetting the Scene for the Polish Robinsonade: The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom (1776) by Ignacy Krasicki and the Early Reception of Robinson Crusoe in Poland, 1769-1775Jakub LipskiThe Rise and Fall of Robinson Crusoe on the London StageFrederick BurwickIslands in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886): A Counter-RobinsonadeMárta Pellérdi Part III: Ecocritical ReadingsStormy Weather and the Gentle Isle: Apprehending the Environment of Three RobinsonadesLora E. GeriguisRobinson’s Becoming-Earth in Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967)Krzysztof Skonieczny Part IV: The Robinsonade and the Present Condition“The True State of Our Condition”: The Twenty-First-Century Worker as CastawayJennifer Preston Wilson Gilligan’s Wake, Gilligan’s Island, and Historiographizing American Popular CultureIan Kinane Coda: Rewriting the Robinsonade Daniel Cook Acknowledgements Bibliography About the Contributors Index
£28.90
Bucknell University Press,U.S. Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction
Book SynopsisSince the appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960—a book that undermined the nation’s ideal of innocent and pious Irish girlhood—Edna O’Brien has provoked controversy in her native Ireland and abroad. Indeed, several of her early novels were condemned by church authorities and banned by the Irish government for their frank portrayals of sexual matters and the inner lives of women. Now an internationally acclaimed writer, O’Brien must be critically reassessed for a twenty-first century audience. Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking world’s best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. Drawing on O’Brien’s fiction as well as archival material, and applying new theoretical approaches—including ecocritical and feminist new materialist readings—this study considers the pioneering and enduring ways O’Brien represents women’s experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her work’s long anticipation of contemporary movements such as #metoo.Trade Review"In this meticulous, forensic, and illuminating work of scholarship, Dr. O'Connor sets the benchmark for all future studies of one of Ireland's greatest writers. In what amounts to a powerful work of restorative justice, she establishes once and for all the high and deliberate guiding intelligence that animates O'Brien's work." -- Theo Dorgan * author of Orpheus *"This is a scholarly, sensitive, balanced exploration of the work of a great writer. It is beautifully written and very accessible. Maureen O’Connor has left no stone unturned in her painstaking research and the result is a wonderful book, indispensable for anyone with an interest in Edna O’Brien or contemporary Irish literature. Thank you, Maureen O’Connor!" -- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne * author of Little Red and Other Stories *"Readable yet theoretically sophisticated, this welcome new study offers an authoritative look at one of Ireland’s greatest—and historically most underappreciated—writers. O’Connor ranges comprehensively through O’Brien’s canon to trace her career-long feminist critique of Irish society's patriarchal mores. Both a history of O’Brien criticism and an examination of her work, O’Connor’s exciting study offers a forceful defense of O’Brien’s craft and an unapologetic critique of the social forces hampering the reception and interpretation of her canon. This study is destined to become required reading in O’Brien studies." -- Kathleen Costello-Sullivan * author of Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel *“Maureen O’Connor nails once and (one hopes) for all the myth of Edna O’Brien as wailing Irish banshee. Instead O’Connor makes a scholarly and at the same time impassioned case for O’Brien as a serious, creative artist thoroughly cognizant of what she is about and decades ahead of her fellow Irish in her analysis of political, social, and environmental ills.” -- Heather Ingman * author of Irish Women's Fiction: From Edgeworth to Enright *“O’Connor’s close readings, coupled with a deft use of theory, nimbly move between texts in O’Brien’s oeuvre, highlighting recurring images and preoccupations, resulting in a valuable critical account that firmly illustrates O’Brien’s mastery as a writer; and asserts her as a figure in Irish literary culture deserving of continued attention.” * Irish University Review *"This is a scholarly, sensitive, balanced exploration of the work of a great writer. It is beautifully written and very accessible. Maureen O’Connor has left no stone unturned in her painstaking research and the result is a wonderful book, indispensable for anyone with an interest in Edna O’Brien or contemporary Irish literature. Thank you, Maureen O’Connor!" -- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne * author of Little Red and Other Stories *"Readable yet theoretically sophisticated, this welcome new study offers an authoritative look at one of Ireland’s greatest—and historically most underappreciated—writers. O’Connor ranges comprehensively through O’Brien’s canon to trace her career-long feminist critique of Irish society's patriarchal mores. Both a history of O’Brien criticism and an examination of her work, O’Connor’s exciting study offers a forceful defense of O’Brien’s craft and an unapologetic critique of the social forces hampering the reception and interpretation of her canon. This study is destined to become required reading in O’Brien studies." -- Kathleen Costello-Sullivan * author of Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel *“Maureen O’Connor nails once and (one hopes) for all the myth of Edna O’Brien as wailing Irish banshee. Instead O’Connor makes a scholarly and at the same time impassioned case for O’Brien as a serious, creative artist thoroughly cognizant of what she is about and decades ahead of her fellow Irish in her analysis of political, social, and environmental ills.” -- Heather Ingman * author of Irish Women's Fiction: From Edgeworth to Enright *"In this meticulous, forensic, and illuminating work of scholarship, Dr. O'Connor sets the benchmark for all future studies of one of Ireland's greatest writers. In what amounts to a powerful work of restorative justice, she establishes once and for all the high and deliberate guiding intelligence that animates O'Brien's work." -- Theo Dorgan * author of Orpheus *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Edna O’Brien, Leader of the Banned 1 Anti-Oedipal Desires 2 The Liberating Sadomasochism of Things 3 The Ungrammatical Sublime 4 Otherworldly Possessions 5 Myth and Mutation 6 Disorder, Dirt, and Death Notes Bibliography Index
£25.19
Allen & Unwin Manderley Forever: The Life of Daphne du Maurier
Book SynopsisBestselling novelist Tatiana de Rosnay pays homage to Daphne du Maurier, the writer who influenced her deeply, in this startling and immersive new biography. A portrait of one writer by another, Manderley Forever meticulously recounts a life as mysterious and dramatic as the work it produced, and highlights du Maurier's consuming passion for Cornwall.De Rosnay seamlessly recreates Daphne's childhood, rebellious teens and early years as a writer before exploring the complexities of her marriage and, finally, her cantankerous old age. With a rhythm and intimacy to its prose characteristic of all de Rosnay's works, Manderley Forever is a vividly compelling portrait and celebration of an intriguing, hugely popular and (in her time) critically underrated writer.Trade ReviewVivid, dreamlike...the strength of de Rosnay's biography is that it makes me want to visit (or revisit) her subject's books. * Daily Mail *Ms. de Rosnay has written a biography that does justice to its heroine. * Wall Street Journal *immersive, as thrilling as any of du Maurier's plots...brilliant * Irish Independent *Clever and highly original...insightful and endearing * The Lady *It's impressive how Tatiana was able to recreate the personality of my mother, including her sense of humour. It is very well written and very moving. I'm sure my mother would have loved this book. * Tessa Montgomery d’Alamein, daughter of Daphne du Maurier *A fascinating, in-depth portrait...Through de Rosnay's novel-like narrative, exhaustive research and unbridled imagination, du Maurier's spirit comes alive on the page. * Publishers Weekly *
£11.69
Quarto Publishing PLC The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr
Book Synopsis'A fine biography...Rogers has done a wonderful job' Daily Telegraph J. L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, cricket enthusiast and campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen utterly unique novels, including his masterpiece, A Month in the Country, and a publisher of some of the most eccentric - and smallest - books ever printed. Byron Roger's acclaimed biography reveals an elusive, quixotic and civic-minded individual with an unswerving sympathy for the underdog, who led his schoolchildren through the streets to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees and paved his garden path with the printing plates for his hand-drawn maps, and whose fiction is quite remarkably autobiographical. Much more than the life of a thoroughly decent man, The Last Englishman is a comic and touching anatomy of the best kind of Englishness. 'Conveying the significance of the author of Carr's Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers to anyone unfamiliar with his books, or what may now fairly be called his myth, was always going to be difficult. Somehow, Roger's has managed it' D. J. Taylor, Sunday Times 'A great success, and more life-affirming than F. R. Leavis's entire output' Independent on Sunday
£16.20
Oneworld Publications Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet
Book SynopsisKahlil Gibran’s bestselling poetic masterpiece, The Prophet, originally published in 1923, continues to inspire millions worldwide with its timeless words of love and mystical longing. Yet Gibran’s genius went much further than this, to produce over twenty literary works, in both English and Arabic, as well as over 500 works of art, all characterized by an otherworldly beauty. Going beyond the many myths that surround Gibran, this incisive biography charts his colourful life, his dramatic love affairs, and his artistic achievements, to present a fascinating and unique portrait of this remarkable man.Trade Review"If you enjoy Gibran’s style, you will relish that of Bushrui and Jenkins." * The Daily Telegraph *"Breaks new ground" * The New York Times *Table of ContentsBeginnings (1883-1895); the new world (1895-1898); returning to the roots (1898-1902); overcoming tragedy (1902-1908); the city of light (1908-1910); the poet-painter in search (1910-1914); the madman (1914-1920); a literary movement is born (1920); a strange little book (1921-1923); the master poet (1923-1928); the return of the wanderer (1929-1931).
£11.69
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery
Book SynopsisElizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When she died in 1979, she had only published four collections, yet had won virtually every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize. She maintained close friendships with poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and her work has always been highly regarded by other writers. In surveys of British poets carried out in 1984 and 1994 she emerged as a surprising major choice or influence for many, from Andrew Motion and Craig Raine to Kathleen Jamie and Lavinia Greenlaw. A virtual orphan from an early age, Elizabeth Bishop was brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life - from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women - nourished an outsider's poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. She once described a feeling that 'everything is interstitial' and reminds us in her poetry - in a way that is both radical and subdued - that understanding is at best provisional and that most vision is peripheral. Since her death, a definitive edition of Elizabeth Bishop's "Complete Poems" (1983) has been published, along with "The Collected Prose" (1984), her letters in "One Art" (1994), her paintings in "Exchanging Hats" (1996) and Brett C. Millier's important biography (1993). In America, there have been numerous critical studies and books of academic essays, but in Britain only studies by Victoria Harrison (1995) and Anne Stevenson (1998) have done anything to raise Bishop's critical profile. "Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery" was the first collection of essays on Bishop to be published in Britain, and draws on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop conference, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Jamie McKendrick, Deryn Rees-Jones and Anne Stevenson. Academic contributors include Professor Barbara Page of Vassar College, home of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers.
£10.80
Peepal Tree Press Ltd New World Adams: Interviews with West Indian
Book SynopsisIn these interviews, held in the early 1980s, with twenty-two of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, Daryl Dance brings together what is much more than just a valuable source book for readers of West Indian writing. The interviews are highly readable - by turns probing, combative and reflective and always absorbing. Daryl Dance brings to the interviews a rare breadth of knowledge and empathy with the work of the writers interviewed and the openly avowed insights of an African-American woman.The writers interviewed include Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, Jan Carew, Martin Carter and Denis Williams, Austin Clarke, Wilson Harris, John Hearne, C.L.R. James, Ismith Khan, George Lamming, Earl Lovelace, Tony McNeill, Pam Mordecai and Velma Pollard, Mervyn Morris, Orlando Patterson, Vic Reid, Dennis Scott, Sam Selvon, Michael Thelwell, Derek Walcott and Sylvia Wynter. This second edition contains updated bibliographies for all the writers.Daryl Dance is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
£13.49
Between the Lines Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy
Book Synopsis
£10.44
September Publishing The Perfect Stranger
Book SynopsisThe Perfect Stranger was first published in the '60s and since then has continued to find a select group of passionate admirers. Evocative and engaging, and ultimately deeply emotional, The Perfect Stranger is the story of a soldier, a poet and a husband. The author describes it as the story of a rescue -of a young man who emerges from the bleak playing fields of school onto the battlefields of Korea, from the heady chaos of Barcelona into an intense and tragic relationship with a girl called Sally Lehmann. Brutally sad, sharp and wise, this is a classic of the genre.Trade ReviewThe writing remains vivid and detailed, full of concise pen portraits ... it's hard to think of a memoir by a male author that describes the experience [of love] with as much honesty, passion and precision.' --David Nicholls 'A fine memorial to love and youth.' --Michael Frayn 'One of the best memoirs I have read ... humorous and poetic.' --Richard Ingrams 'I've re-read The Perfect Stranger many times and still think it, though unique, a model "of its kind."' --Derek Mahon 'To hear the truth so devastatingly and yet so joyfully encountered is rare in an age where autobiography has been flattened by the massed weight of political and public reminiscence. This autobiography, from its beginning to its bitter end, is a celebration of joy: joy in youth, in woman, in male camaraderie, in the struggle of art, in married love.' --The Times Literary Supplement '[A] remarkable work of prose ... It won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize, for in reality it was a testimony to the absence of the one person who could help him work out the puzzle of life, his wife, Sally' --The Independent 'A joyous yet unsentimental account of Kavanagh's early life and his few years with Sally. A story of love and tragic loss' -- The Guardian 'Not sentimental nor self-pitying but vivid, humorous and bent upon describing a world in which the one person who had seemed to make sense of it had been lost.' --The Telegraph 'A terrific book, vivid, funny and moving ... The account of his narrow escape from the great battle in Korea is brilliant, as is in a quite different way the elegiac conclusion to the book.' --David Lodge 'Patrick Kavanagh's memoir is a small masterpiece of its kind, reflecting all the wit, unabashed frankness and literary elegance of its author.' --Max Hastings
£10.63
Process Media Keef: A Story Of Intoxication, Love & Death
Book SynopsisA rare colour-enhanced example of Oriental Romanticism and psychotropic drug use in late 19th century American fiction.
£18.69
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Writing Life
Book SynopsisFor nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague. — Chicago TribuneFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a collection that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer''s life.In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.
£12.79
Random House USA Inc The Vonnegut Encyclopedia
Book SynopsisNow expanded and updated, this authorized compendium to Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, stories, essays, and plays is the most comprehensive and definitive edition to date.Over the course of five decades, Kurt Vonnegut created a complex and interconnected web of characters, settings, and concepts. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an exhaustive guide to this beloved author’s world, organized in a handy A-to-Z format. The first edition of this book covered Vonnegut’s work through 1991. This new and updated edition encompasses his writing through his death in 2007. Marc Leeds, co-founder and founding president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society and a longtime personal friend of the author’s, has devoted more than twenty-five years of his life to cataloging the Vonnegut cosmos—from the birthplace of Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut’s sci-fi writing alter ego) to the municipal landmarks of Midland City (the midwestern metropolis that is the setting for
£32.40
Random House USA Inc Sons and Lovers Everymans Library Contemporary
Book SynopsisOne of the world's most original works of fiction from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. • No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love. —Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning Author of The Golden Notebook Gertrude Morel is a refined woman who married beneath her and has come to loathe her brutal, working-class husband. She focuses her passion instead on her two sons, who return her love and despise their father. Trouble begins when Paul Morel, a budding artist, falls in love with a young woman who seems capable of rivaling his mother for possession of his soul. In the ensuing battle, he finds his path to adulthood tragically impeded by the enduring power of his mother’s grasp. SONS AND LOVERS confirmed Lawrence’s genius and inaugurated the controversy over his explicit writing about sexuality and human relationships that would follow him to the end of his career.
£22.40
Random House USA Inc Best Short Stories of OHenry Modern Library
Book SynopsisThe more than 600 stories written by O. Henry provided an embarrassment of riches for the compilers of this volume. The final selection of the thirty-eight stories in this collection offers for the reader's delight those tales honored almost unanimously by anthologists and those that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America's favorite storyteller. They are tales in his most mellow, humorous, and ironic moods. They give the full range and flavor of the man born William Sydney Porter but known throughout the world as O. Henry, one of the great masters of the short story.
£18.04
Beacon Press Our World
Book SynopsisMary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is one of the most celebrated poets in America. Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005, was Oliver's partner for many years, a pioneer gallery owner and photographer. Our World weaves forty-nine of Cook's photographs and selections from her journals with Oliver's extended writings, both reminiscence and reflection, in prose and in poetry. The result is an intimate revelation of their lives and art. Within the art world, Molly Malone Cook made her reputation as an early advocate of photography as an art form; she was a champion of the work of now-famous photographers, including Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, and W. Eugene Smith. There are famous faces here as well, captured by Cook's camera, among them Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum.Cook and Oliver also lived among
£30.75
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Real Work Interviews and Talks 196479
Book SynopsisAmerican poet Gary Snyder on poetics, tribalism, ecology, Zen Buddhism, meditation, the writing process, and more.
£13.29
Graywolf Press,U.S. Real Sofistikashun
Book SynopsisA conversational collection of essays on poetry, offering a highly entertaining analysis of poetic craft with insightful writings on poets like Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Louise Gluck. Hoagland has what could be called ''rock star status'' in the poetry world. His audience is ever-growing and includes major fans from the literary world, as well as contemporary musicians and radio talk-show hosts. Ani DiFranco reads a Tony Hoagland poem at every concert.
£14.45
Swan Isle Press Finding Duende: Duende: Play and Theory
Book SynopsisA new translation of Federico García Lorca’s captivating lecture on duende. For years, Federico García Lorca’s lecture on duende has been a source of insight for writers and performers, including Ted Hughes, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and Amanda Gorman.Duende: Play and Theory not only provides a path into Lorca’s poetics and the arts of Spain; it is one of the strangest, most compelling accounts of inspiration ever offered by a poet. Contrasting the demon called duende with the Angel and the Muse, Lorca describes a mysterious telluric, diabolical current, an irreducible “it,” that can draw the best from both performer and audience. This new translation by Christopher Maurer, based on a thoroughly revised edition of the Spanish original of 1933, also included in this volume, offers a more accurate and fully annotated version of the lecture, with an introduction by eminent philologist José Javier León. Drawing on a deep knowledge of flamenco, and correcting decades of discussion about duende and its supposed origins in Spanish folklore and popular speech, León shows to what extent the concept of duende—understood as the imp of artistic inspiration—was the playful, yet deadly serious, invention of Lorca himself. Lorca’s bravura performance of duende is foreshadowed here with a bilingual version—the most complete ever—of his other major text on inspiration, “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion,” in which he calls for greater freedom in poetry as if searching for duende and its “constant baptism of newly created things.”Trade Review"For many of my generation of poets & readers (& beyond), Lorca was & remains a radical & necessary voice—the poems foremost but linked by him to the creation or extension of a new/old poetics, drawing from a presumed folk & popular tradition, centered on the word 'duende' as a poetry of 'black sounds' & 'demonic' energies, both in writing & performance. It is this yearning to have duende, or be possessed by it, that this book allows us to view as Lorca presented it in several groundbreaking lectures: compact but rich enough to create a Spanish ethnopoetics or a still greater & deeper poetics for the world-at-large. What José Javier León & Christopher Maurer give us here is crucial to our renewed sense of where poetry, however made or enacted, can still take us. In that sense, remarkable." * Jerome Rothenberg, professor emeritus at the University of California-San Diego, renowned poet, anthologist, performance artist, critic, scholar, and author of Gematria Complete and Concealments & Caprichos *"In your hands is the definitive bilingual edition of what is perhaps the most enigmatic text of Federico García Lorca, the greatest poet of the 20th century in the Spanish language. Once again, the word of Christopher Maurer has illuminated the work of the great Federico, and José Javier León accompanies us on Lorca's path toward 'depths of the blood.' At a time when for many people the idea of poetry has become ever more banal, the recovery of this text, 'Juego y teoría del duende,' in this exquisite edition is cause for celebration for poetry lovers. The duende could not be in better hands." * Fernando Valverde, associate professor of Spanish and Poetry at University of Virginia, award-winning author of America *
£21.85
Verso Books Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality
Book SynopsisRaymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler's work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler's invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighborhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.Trade ReviewFredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry EagletonNot often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books *Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today . it can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him. -- Colin MacCabeThe most muscular of writers. * Times Literary Supplement *Even the most anti-Marxian among us, [will] find ourselves compelled, if not to accept the book's intricate hypotheses, at least to accord them an ungrudged admiration for the brilliance of their formulation and the serene and quietly convinced tone in which they are advanced. -- John Banville * New York Review of Books *The small length of Jameson's book adds a tightness to its arguments and the style is often Chandler-esque: words are not wasted, literary observations are pin-sharp and there are some wry aperçu. Winningly, Jameson occasionally employs the genre's rhetoric, so his theorising becomes the pursuing of "lines of enquiry", a "procedure", etc. It's touches like this that make Jameson such a joy to read -- Cornelius Fitz * 3AM Magazine *
£9.99
The Library of America Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (LOA #76):
Book SynopsisThomas Paine was the impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, and this volume brings together his best-known works: Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, along with a selection of letters, articles and pamphlets that emphasizes Paine''s American years. “I know not whether any man in the world,” wrote John Adams in 1805, “has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.” The impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, Paine wrote for his mass audience with vigor, clarity, and “common sense.” This Library of America volume is the first major new edition of his work in 50 years, and the most comprehensive single-volume collection of his writings available. Paine came to America in 1774 at age 37 after a life of obscurity and failure in England. Within fourteen months he published Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet for the American Revolution, and began a career that would see him prosecuted in England, imprisoned and nearly executed in France, and hailed and reviled in the American nation he helped create. In Common Sense, Paine set forth an inspiring vision of an independent America as an asylum for freedom and an example of popular self-government in a world oppressed by despotism and hereditary privilege. The American Crisis, begun during “the times that try men’s souls” in 1776, is a masterpiece of popular pamphleteering in which Paine vividly reports current developments, taunts and ridicules British adversaries, and enjoins his readers to remember the immense stakes of their struggle. Among the many other items included in the volume are the combative “Forester” letters, written in a reply to a Tory critic of Common Sense, and several pieces concerning the French Revolution, including an incisive argument against executing Louis XVI. Rights of Man (1791–1792), written in response to Edmund Burke’s attacks on the French Revolution, is a bold vision of an egalitarian society founded on natural rights and unbound by tradition. Paine’s detailed proposal for government assistance to the poor inspired generations of subsequent radicals and reformers. The Age of Reason (1794–1795), Paine’s most controversial work, is an unrestrained assault on the authority of the Bible and a fervent defense of the benevolent God of deism. Included in this volume are a detailed chronology of Paine’s life, informative notes, an essay on the complex printing history of Paine’s work, and an index.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
£28.00
Daimon Verlag C G Jung & Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two
Book Synopsis
£21.74
LUP - University of Michigan Press David Mamet in Conversation
Book Synopsis
£18.00
LUP - University of Michigan Press On SF
Book SynopsisSmart, funny, often irreverent observations on 150 years of science fiction writing, from a literary master. This book brings together, from a quarter century of writing, great essays by the celebrated writer Thomas Disch from such diverse places as ""The Nation"", ""New York Times Book Review"", ""Atlantic Monthly"", ""Fantasy"", and ""Twilight Zone"".
£22.75
MP-SIL Southern Illinois Uni Naked Lunch 50 Anniversary Essays
Book SynopsisNaked Lunch was banned, ridiculed, and castigated on publication in 1959. Tracing its origins from Texas to Tangier, from Mexico City to New York and Paris, crossing time zones and cultures, this book helps understands this most influential but elusive of texts.Trade ReviewI can think of no other work of literary criticism that brings together such a multiplicity of artists, practitioners, and critics in such a dynamic assembly of writing forms. The resulting symbiosis strikes me as a whole new critical form, utterly pertinent to Burroughs' milieu. - Michael Hrebeniak, author of Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form
£18.71
MP-KST Kent State Uni A Question of Time J.R.R. Tolkiens Road to
Book SynopsisTolkien's concern with time - past and present, real and ""faerie"" - captures the wonder of travel into other worlds and other times. This work shows that he was not just a mythmaker and writer of escapist fantasy but a man whose relationship to his own century was troubled and critical.
£32.26
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with James Baldwin
Book SynopsisThis collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961 to 1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.
£23.96
Purdue University Press Imre Kertesz and Holocaust Literature
Book SynopsisThe volume fills a gap in scholarship about Imre Kertesz, whose work to date is largely unknown in the English-speaking world. The papers' authors are scholars from the US, Canada, the UK, Hungary, Germany, and New Zealand. In addition to the papers, the volume contains a bibliography of Kertesz's works including translations, and a bibliography of studies in several languages about his work.
£26.96
Kent State University Press The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on
Book SynopsisExamining the mythic importance of wilderness in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earthA study of myth suggests that the stories we human beings tell ourselves about who we are make us who we are. Amber Lehning extends such discussion into the ecocritical realm, arguing that the stories we tell ourselves about our relationship to the natural world are at least as powerful as science or government policy as drivers of our behavior toward our planet. The destructive modern myths underlying today's environmental crises create a kind of intellectual separation between humanity and its environment that can end up justifying the worst of environmental excesses—and perhaps, she argues, the only way to counter these negative humans-versus-nature stories is to shift some of the deep belief they command into new, positive, restorative stories. The Map of Wilderland argues for the position of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium as one of those good stories. Using source critical and ecocritical perspectives, Lehning traces some of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and English mythic roots of Tolkien's work; examines how those roots influence Tolkien's own depictions of the wild natural world; and suggests ways that this wildly popular modern myth could serve to help counter today's destructive environmental ones. Through insightful close readings of Tolkien's texts, Lehning's work complements existing inquiries in ecocritical Tolkien studies and bolsters the general critical agreement that Tolkien's work presents positive environmental themes and a harmonious, inspiring vision.Trade Review"In this book, Amber Lehning shows herself to be an intelligent, sensitive, and courageous guide to Middle-earth. She ably explores Tolkien's ecological vision, including its cultural, historical, and literary dimensions, both in detail and in its broader contexts. The result is a triumph of both Tolkien studies and ecocritical scholarship." —Patrick Curry, author of Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity "Ecocriticism has evolved into a multidisciplinary approach that takes many forms, and Lehning's analysis provides an example of a productive blending of ecocriticism and mythological study. Her accessible, clearly written book makes a significant contribution to Tolkien studies, especially through its explorations of the broader cultural significance of Tolkien's conception of wilderness." —CHOICE "The Map of Wilderland contains a valuable analysis of some of the most important literary influences of Tolkien's fiction. Lehning's source analysis not only has worth in itself but enhances the reader's understanding of that vast and complex landscape known as Middle-earth. …. Lehning's take on the contemporary relevance of Tolkien's myth is an original and thought-provoking reflection on the power that mythopoetic art – literature in particular – has in shaping our understanding of who we are and what our place is on Earth." —Journal of Inklings Studies
£47.20
Kent State University Press Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth
Book SynopsisRuth Pitter (1897–1992) may not be widely known, but her credentials as a poet are extensive; in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s she maintained a loyal readership. In total she produced 17 volumes of new and collected verse. Her A Trophy of Arms (1936) won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937, and in 1954 she was awarded the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, she became the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955; this unprecedented event merited a personal audience with the queen.In addition, from 1946 to 1972 she was often a guest on BBC radio programs, and from 1956 to 1960 she appeared regularly on the BBC’s The Brains Trust, one of the first television talk shows; her thoughtful comments on the wide range of issues discussed by the panelists were a favorite among viewers. In 1974 the Royal Society of Literature elected her to its highest honor, a Companion of Literature, and in 1979 she received her last national award when she was appointed a Commander of the British Empire.Pitter’s many admirers included Owen Barfield, Hilaire Belloc, Lord David Cecil, Philip Larkin, C. S. Lewis, Kathleen Raine, May Sarton, and Siegfried Sassoon. At her death in 1992, one writer claimed, “She came to enjoy perhaps the highest reputation of any living English woman poet of her century.”Pitter’s best poems focus on nature and the human condition, taking us to hidden or secret places, just beyond the material, to the meaning of life. Her poems are often the result of a heightened sense of felt experience—intuitive and evocative. If human life is lived behind a veil faintly obscuring reality, Pitter’s poems often lift the edge of the veil.Sudden Heaven arranges Pitter’s poems in chronological order, allowing readers to follow her maturation as a poet, and it features a number of poems that have never before appeared in print.
£56.25
University of South Carolina Press Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy's Writing
Book SynopsisRevelations on craft from a foundational scholar of Cormac McCarthyDevotees of Cormac McCarthy's novels are legion, and deservedly so. Embracing Vocation, which tells the tale of his journey to become one of America's greatest living writers, will be invaluable to scholars and literary critics—and to the many fans—interested in his work.Dianne C. Luce, a foundational scholar of McCarthy's writing, through extensive archival research, examines the first fifteen years of his career and his earliest novels. Novel by novel, Luce traces each book's evolution. In the process she unveils McCarthy's working processes as well as his personal, literary, and professional influences, highlighting his ferocious devotion to both his craft and burgeoning art. Luce invites us to see the fascinating evolution of an American author with a unique vision all his own. Until there is a full-on biography, this study, along with Luce's previous, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period, is the finest available portrait of an American genius unfolding.
£81.00
Oxford University Press In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom
Book Synopsis''I was at one of those periods in youth--vacant, without any particular love object--when, like a lover seeing his beloved in all things, we desire, we seek, we see Beauty everywhere.''In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, the second volume of Proust''s In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), is a novel of exploration and (self-) discovery, continuing the story of the narrator''s youth and adolescence. From the enclosed spaces of the fin-de-siècle social world that revolves around Madame Swann, we move to the fictional town of Balbec on the Normandy coast, a place where the social classes intermingle with mutual fascination. Against the ever-changing backdrop of the sea--a constant reminder of beauty, mutability, and the vastness of the world beyond individual human affairs--the narrator encounters individuals who will shape his experience and indelibly colour his outlook on that world. He finds a friend in the aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup and is perplexed by his enigmatic uncle the Baron
£10.44
Manchester University Press Surrealist Women's Writing: A Critical
Book SynopsisSurrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers’ work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.Trade Review'This book does not attempt to impose a harmonious, all-encompassing feminist perspective that would gloss over the complexities of being a ‘woman writer’ within the grand scheme of surrealism, but looks, rather, to highlight differences and ambivalences, enriching the discourse surrounding this literature. An enthralling and intensely intellectual investigation into surrealist women’s writing, this study is of critical importance for literary scholars and admirers of surrealism as it offers a profound reconsideration of these ten authors.'French Studies'The 11 essays in the collection look at the work of Claude Cahun, Lenora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Colette Peignot, Kay Sage, and Unica Zürn, among others. Beyond examining the women’s literary work, the essays show how these writers’ work informs contemporary discussion of gender, sexuality, ecocriticism, the Other, and the Anthropocene. Wetz’s excellent introduction frames the questions and concerns surrealist women writers explored in their work.'CHOICE(Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.)'This book has much to offer to animal studies, queer studies, and ecocritical and ecofeminist studies... and it will enrich scholarship on auto/biography and confessional writing... It will expand and enliven the category of women’s modernism. In spite of its focus on text, the collection will leave its readers with some startling images. But mostly, in ways both serious and playful, Surrealist Women’s Writing will show the imaginative gains to be made by breaking down barriers—of both gender and genre—and daring to stand out.'Modern Language Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroductionAnna Watz1 ‘The dung beetle’s snowball’: the philosophic narcissism of Claude Cahun’s essay-poetryFelicity Gee2 Identity convulsed: Leonora Carrington’s The House of Fear and The Oval LadyAnna Watz3 Recasting the human: Leonora Carrington’s dark exilic imaginationJeannette Baxter4 Colette Peignot: the purity of revoltMichael Richardson5 Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism: tightrope of hope Kara M. Rabbitt6 Kay Sage alive in the worldKatharine Conley7 Outside-in: translating Unica ZürnPatricia Allmer8 Ithell Colquhoun’s experimental poetry: surrealism, occultism, and postwar poetryMark S. Morrisson9 Leonor Fini’s abhuman familyJonathan P. Eburne10 ‘Open sesame’: Dorothea Tanning’s critical writingCatriona McAra11 Magic language, esoteric nature: Rikki Ducornet’s surrealist ecologyKristoffer NohedenBibliographyIndex
£14.24
Pan Macmillan Isherwood
Book SynopsisBorn into the English landed gentry, the heir to a substantial country estate, Christopher Isherwood ended up in California, an American citizen and the disciple of a Hindu swami. En route, he became a leading writer of the 1930's generation, an unmatched chronicler of pre-Hitler Berlin, an experimental dramatist, a war reporter, a travel writer, a pacifist, a Hollywood screenwriter, a monk, and a grand old man of the emerging gay liberation movement. In this biography, the first to be written since Isherwood's death, and the only one with access to all Isherwood's papers, Peter Parker traces the long journey of a man who never felt at home wherever he lived. Isherwood's travels were a means of escape: from his family, his class, his country, and the dead weight of the past. Parker reveals the truth about Isherwood's relationship with his war-hero father, his strong-willed mother, and his disturbed younger brother, Richard, who was also homosexual. He also draws upon a vast number of letters to describe Isherwood's complicated relationships with such lifelong friends as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Edward Upward and John Lehmann. The result is a frank portrait of contradictions, a man searching for meaning in life, and one of the twentieth century's most significant writers.
£18.00
Oxford University Press Mrs Dalloway
Book Synopsis''For there she was.''Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman in London, in June 1923, as she prepares for a party. Clarissa''s thoughts and actions are interwoven with the trauma and bereavement of Septimus Smith, a poor young man suffering from shell-shock, in a contrasting narrative that provides poignant insights into the political, historical, and social issues of Woolf''s day. The novel brings memories and the present together, written and set in the uneasy years immediately after the First World War.This new edition, annotated and introduced by Trudi Tate, broadens and deepens key aspects of the historical context, including a fresh examination of Woolf''s representations of women in the wake of the first women in Britain winning the right to vote, the context of post-war politics, and the innovative aspects of the author''s writing style.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
£7.59
Pearson Education Selected Poems from Opened Ground York Notes
Book SynopsisYork Notes Advanced offers a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduces students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.
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Pearson Education Selected Poems of W B Yeats York Notes Advanced
Book Synopsis'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The poems Part 3: Critical approachs Part 4: Critical history Part 5: Background Further Reading Literacy Terms
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Pearson Education Heart of Darkness York Notes Advanced everything
Book SynopsisThe most supportive, easy-to-use and focussed literature guides to help your students understand the texts they are studying at GCSE and A LevelTable of Contents Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Text Part 3: Critical Approaches Part 4: Critical History Part 5: Background Further Reading Literacy Terms
£7.99