Literary studies: fiction Books

Book SynopsisCo-winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century, its influence and prominence increasing ever since. From its Victorian and literary roots to film and television, video games, music, and even fashion, this subgenre of science fiction reaches far and wide within current culture. Here Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present cutting-edge essays on steampunk: its rise in popularity, its many manifestations, and why we should pay attention. Like Clockwork offers wide-ranging perspectives on steampunk’s history and its place in contemporary culture, all while speaking to the “why” and “why now” of the genre. In her essay, Catherine Siemann draws on authors such as William Gibson and China Miéville to analyze steampunk cities; Kathryn Crowther turns to disability studies to examine the role of prosthetics within steampunk as well as the contemporary culture of access; and Diana M. Pho reviews the racial and national identities of steampunk, bringing in discussions of British chap-hop artists, African American steamfunk practitioners, and multicultural steampunk fan cultures.From disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities, Like Clockwork explores the intriguing history of steampunk to evaluate the influence of the genre from the 1970s through the twenty-first century. Contributors: Kathryn Crowther, Perimeter College at Georgia State University; Shaun Duke, University of Florida; Stefania Forlini, University of Calgary (Canada); Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin–Waukesha; Mike Perschon, MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta; Diana M. Pho; David Pike, American University; Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Joseph Weakland, Georgia Institute of Technology; Roger Whitson, Washington State University. Trade Review"A lively, engaging collection of essays about the past, present, future (and alternate versions thereof) of steampunk culture, literature and meaning, ranging from disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities."—Boing Boing"Covering an impressive range of topics, from steampunk cities to how steampunk addresses disabilities and identity, the essays are scholarly and full of solid examples and research yet remain accessible."—CHOICE"There are layers of irony and of ironic irony here that would keep a critical Lyell occupied for decades."—Science Fiction ReviewsTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction. It’s about Time: Reading Steampunk’s Rise and Roots Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall I. Steampunk Spaces and Things 1. Steampunk and the Victorian City: Time Machines, Bryan Talbot, and the Center of the Multiverse David Pike 2. How to Theorize With a Hammer; or, Making and Baking Things in Steampunk and the Digital Humanities Roger Whitson 3. The Steampunk City in Crisis Catherine Siemann II. Steampunk Bodies and Identities 4. From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses and Disability Kathryn Crowther 5. The Aesthete, the Dandy, and the Steampunk; or Things as They are Now Stefania Forlini 6. Punking the Other: On the Performance of Racial and National Identities in Steampunk Diana M. Pho III. Steampunk Reading and Revising 7. Seminal Steampunk: Proper and True Mike Perschon 8. The Alchemy of Aether: Steampunk as Reading Practice in Karina Cooper’s Tarnished and Gilded Lisa Hager 9. Out of Control: Disrupting Technological Mastery in Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air and K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices Joseph Weakland and Shaun Duke Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisCo-winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century, its influence and prominence increasing ever since. From its Victorian and literary roots to film and television, video games, music, and even fashion, this subgenre of science fiction reaches far and wide within current culture. Here Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present cutting-edge essays on steampunk: its rise in popularity, its many manifestations, and why we should pay attention. Like Clockwork offers wide-ranging perspectives on steampunk’s history and its place in contemporary culture, all while speaking to the “why” and “why now” of the genre. In her essay, Catherine Siemann draws on authors such as William Gibson and China Miéville to analyze steampunk cities; Kathryn Crowther turns to disability studies to examine the role of prosthetics within steampunk as well as the contemporary culture of access; and Diana M. Pho reviews the racial and national identities of steampunk, bringing in discussions of British chap-hop artists, African American steamfunk practitioners, and multicultural steampunk fan cultures.From disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities, Like Clockwork explores the intriguing history of steampunk to evaluate the influence of the genre from the 1970s through the twenty-first century. Contributors: Kathryn Crowther, Perimeter College at Georgia State University; Shaun Duke, University of Florida; Stefania Forlini, University of Calgary (Canada); Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin–Waukesha; Mike Perschon, MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta; Diana M. Pho; David Pike, American University; Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Joseph Weakland, Georgia Institute of Technology; Roger Whitson, Washington State University. Trade Review"A lively, engaging collection of essays about the past, present, future (and alternate versions thereof) of steampunk culture, literature and meaning, ranging from disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities."—Boing Boing"Covering an impressive range of topics, from steampunk cities to how steampunk addresses disabilities and identity, the essays are scholarly and full of solid examples and research yet remain accessible."—CHOICE"There are layers of irony and of ironic irony here that would keep a critical Lyell occupied for decades."—Science Fiction ReviewsTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction. It’s about Time: Reading Steampunk’s Rise and Roots Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall I. Steampunk Spaces and Things 1. Steampunk and the Victorian City: Time Machines, Bryan Talbot, and the Center of the Multiverse David Pike 2. How to Theorize With a Hammer; or, Making and Baking Things in Steampunk and the Digital Humanities Roger Whitson 3. The Steampunk City in Crisis Catherine Siemann II. Steampunk Bodies and Identities 4. From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses and Disability Kathryn Crowther 5. The Aesthete, the Dandy, and the Steampunk; or Things as They are Now Stefania Forlini 6. Punking the Other: On the Performance of Racial and National Identities in Steampunk Diana M. Pho III. Steampunk Reading and Revising 7. Seminal Steampunk: Proper and True Mike Perschon 8. The Alchemy of Aether: Steampunk as Reading Practice in Karina Cooper’s Tarnished and Gilded Lisa Hager 9. Out of Control: Disrupting Technological Mastery in Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air and K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices Joseph Weakland and Shaun Duke Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisExploring how the figure of the “wild child” in contemporary fiction grapples with contemporary cultural anxieties about reproductive ethics and the future of humanity In the eighteenth century, Western philosophy positioned the figure of “the child” at the border between untamed nature and rational adulthood. Contemporary cultural anxieties about the ethics and politics of reproductive choice and the crisis of parental responsibility have freighted this liminal figure with new meaning in twenty-first-century narratives.In Wild Child, Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and their adult caregivers in extreme situations—ranging from the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death, mass murder, torture, and global apocalypse—in such works as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Denis Villeneuve’s film Prisoners. Morgenstern shows how, in such narratives, “wild” children function as symptoms of new ethical crises and existential fears raised by transformations in the technology and politics of reproduction and by increased ethical questions about the very decision to reproduce. In the face of an uncertain future that no longer confirms the confidence of patriarchal humanism, such narratives displace or project present-day apprehensions about maternal sacrifice and paternal protection onto the wildness of children in a series of hyperbolically violent scenes.Urgent and engaging, Wild Child offers the only extended consideration of how twenty-first-century fiction has begun to imagine the decision to reproduce and the ethical challenges of posthumanist parenting.Trade Review"Your child isn’t civilized. Neither are you. Expect the child to be more productively destructive and survivalist than you imagined, showing us to be the techno-relational-vulnerable animals that we are, strange to the core in crisis and change. Also expect that you won’t find a smarter, more forthright, and beautifully nuanced guide to these thoughts than Naomi Morgenstern. Impressive and persuasive."—Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century"Wild Child is a brilliant and thoroughly engaging study of reproductive ethics and the ethics of parenting in narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Naomi Morgenstern's command of theoretical texts, both philosophical and psychoanalytic, is prodigious, and her writing style is vibrant—at once theoretically complex and alive with personal twists and turns of language."—Jean Wyatt, author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later NovelsTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Posthumanist Wild Child1. Is There a Space of Maternal Ethics? Emma Donoghue’s Room2. Postapocalyptic Responsibility: Patriarchy at the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road3. Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy4. “Monstrous Decision”: Destruction and Relation in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin5. “Dis-ap-peared”: Endangered Children in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana”Afterword: The Pretense of the Human from Victor of Aveyron to Nim ChimpskyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring how the figure of the “wild child” in contemporary fiction grapples with contemporary cultural anxieties about reproductive ethics and the future of humanity In the eighteenth century, Western philosophy positioned the figure of “the child” at the border between untamed nature and rational adulthood. Contemporary cultural anxieties about the ethics and politics of reproductive choice and the crisis of parental responsibility have freighted this liminal figure with new meaning in twenty-first-century narratives.In Wild Child, Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and their adult caregivers in extreme situations—ranging from the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death, mass murder, torture, and global apocalypse—in such works as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Denis Villeneuve’s film Prisoners. Morgenstern shows how, in such narratives, “wild” children function as symptoms of new ethical crises and existential fears raised by transformations in the technology and politics of reproduction and by increased ethical questions about the very decision to reproduce. In the face of an uncertain future that no longer confirms the confidence of patriarchal humanism, such narratives displace or project present-day apprehensions about maternal sacrifice and paternal protection onto the wildness of children in a series of hyperbolically violent scenes.Urgent and engaging, Wild Child offers the only extended consideration of how twenty-first-century fiction has begun to imagine the decision to reproduce and the ethical challenges of posthumanist parenting.Trade Review"Your child isn’t civilized. Neither are you. Expect the child to be more productively destructive and survivalist than you imagined, showing us to be the techno-relational-vulnerable animals that we are, strange to the core in crisis and change. Also expect that you won’t find a smarter, more forthright, and beautifully nuanced guide to these thoughts than Naomi Morgenstern. Impressive and persuasive."—Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century"Wild Child is a brilliant and thoroughly engaging study of reproductive ethics and the ethics of parenting in narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Naomi Morgenstern's command of theoretical texts, both philosophical and psychoanalytic, is prodigious, and her writing style is vibrant—at once theoretically complex and alive with personal twists and turns of language."—Jean Wyatt, author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later NovelsTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Posthumanist Wild Child1. Is There a Space of Maternal Ethics? Emma Donoghue’s Room2. Postapocalyptic Responsibility: Patriarchy at the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road3. Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy4. “Monstrous Decision”: Destruction and Relation in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin5. “Dis-ap-peared”: Endangered Children in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana”Afterword: The Pretense of the Human from Victor of Aveyron to Nim ChimpskyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisNobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset’s life at Bjerkebæk, her retreat in Lillehammer, NorwayInside the Gate offers readers a rare glimpse into Sigrid Undset’s life at her home, Bjerkebæk, now a museum and national landmark in Lillehammer, Norway. Immensely protective of her privacy, Undset filled the timbered house with books and created a writing space where she authored many of her famous works, including Kristin Lavransdatter. There she also raised her three children, tended to her beloved garden, and welcomed close friends and family members during three decades of personal joys, sorrows, and hard work.Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, Nan Bentzen Skille’s lively narrative presents an intimate portrait of Sigrid Undset’s intense emotional life and creative endeavors, with Bjerkebæk at the center of it all. Many photographs vividly illustrate the text. For readers who have long admired Undset’s literature, Inside the Gate provides new insight into the life and work of the Nobel Prize winner.Trade Review"A refreshing new look at the personal side of Sigrid Undset."—Bergens Tidende"Easy to read, richly illustrated, and at the same time written with great professional expertise."—Aftenposten"A lavish edition in every sense of the word, brimming with materials that have never been seen before."—VG"One of the joys of Inside the Gate is the many photographs and drawings of Undset, her children, the property at Bjerkebæk, and various memorabilia. The author reconstructs several key events in Undset’s life, such as a child’s confirmation party, detailing who likely attended, what they ate, and what Undset was writing about at the time."—Scandinavian HourTable of ContentsContents Foreword Lillehammer Station – Disembark on the right Sigrid Undset makes herself a home With an office in “Norway’s most beautiful home” The “guesthouse” that became the “priest’s house” The garden – “the third loveliest” in the world The children at Bjerkebæk Mathea Mortenstuen Miniature theaters and other sorts of drama The Nobel Prize comes to Lillehammer The difficult thirties “Fight for all that you hold dear” The curtain falls Epilogue Notes Chronology Photo credits

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Book SynopsisReviving a lost classic of American fairy–tale literature Charles Godfrey Leland was one of the most popular American writers and artists of the nineteenth century, publishing more than twenty books of legends, fairy tales, humor, and essays. Today, however, he is a woefully underappreciated writer. Written, designed, and illustrated by Leland in 1892, The Book of One Hundred Riddles of the Fairy Bellaria is a forgotten classic and a small sample of his influential and experimental work. The Book of One Hundred Riddles of the Fairy Bellaria features the Scheherazade-like fairy goddess Bellaria: powerful and mysterious, courageous and clever, goddess of spring, flowers, love, fate, and death. In this story, Bellaria engages in a duel of wits with an evil king, a death match of one hundred riddles. Each riddle is spoken as a rhyme and illustrated by an original engraving in the arts and crafts style. This book is a beautiful reintroduction to Leland and his pioneering design.

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Book SynopsisNew perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer “Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel. Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White. Trade Review"The seventeen essays resulted from a conference after the opening of Isherwood’s vast archive at The Huntington, and approach Isherwood in light of his peripatetic days and his continuing spiritual, Vedantic explorations of the spirit. Be sure to read Christopher Bram’s excellent foreword."—Lavender Magazine"The book does not try to dissimulate Isherwood’s hesitations and occasional mistakes, related to issues of class (for instance in his perhaps somewhat exploitative relationships with working class, that is unemployed and hungry hustlers in his Berlin years) or race (for instance in his contacts with Mishima). This is a very courageous and mature approach, and I think a very healthy stance in the current context of revenge culture."—Leonardo Reviews"Anyone with an interest in Isherwood or in Japanese culture and sexual patterns will find this book a worthwhile acquisition."—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Table of ContentsContentsForeword: A Fan’s NotesChristopher BramIntroduction: Christopher’s KindChris Freeman and James J. Berg1. Christopher Isherwood and the California Dream Sara S. Hodson2. “Rejecting the Real World Outright”: The Shared Fantasy of Mortmere Katherine Stevenson3. “A Faith of Personal Sincerity”: Christopher Isherwood’s Debt to the Individualism of E. M. ForsterXenobe Purvis4. The Archival “I”: Forster, Isherwood, and the Future of Queer Biography Wendy Moffat5. A Queer Progress: Christopher Isherwood, Sexual Exceptionalism, and Thirties’ Berlin Lois Cucullu6. Fellow Travelers James J. Berg and Chris Freeman7. Isherwood as Travel Writer Lisa Colletta8.The World in the Evening: Character in TransitRobert L. Caserio9. Isherwood’s “Jolly Corner” in Down There on a Visit: The Christopher Who Was Encounters the Christopher Who Might Have Been Carola M. Kaplan10. Grumbling in Eldorado: A Single Man in the American Utopia Calvin W. Keogh11. Pacific Rimming: Queer Expatriatism, Transpacific Los Angeles, and Christopher Isherwood’s Queer SixtiesJaime Harker12. Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man Edmund White13. We Can See the Hilld from Our Bed: Christopher and His Nonfictions Barrie Jean Borich14. In Search of a Spiritual Home: Christopher Isherwood, the Perennial Philosophy, and Vedanta Bidhan Chandra Roy15. “Enlarging Their Clearing in the Jungle”: The Political Significance of Christopher Isherwood’s My Guru and His Disciple Victor Marsh16. “The Aim of Art is to Transcend Art”: Writing Spirituality in My Guru and His Disciple Jamie Carr17. A Conversation with Christopher Isherwood, 1979 Dennis BartelAcknowledgmentsIndex

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Book SynopsisNew perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer “Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel. Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White. Trade Review"The seventeen essays resulted from a conference after the opening of Isherwood’s vast archive at The Huntington, and approach Isherwood in light of his peripatetic days and his continuing spiritual, Vedantic explorations of the spirit. Be sure to read Christopher Bram’s excellent foreword."—Lavender Magazine"The book does not try to dissimulate Isherwood’s hesitations and occasional mistakes, related to issues of class (for instance in his perhaps somewhat exploitative relationships with working class, that is unemployed and hungry hustlers in his Berlin years) or race (for instance in his contacts with Mishima). This is a very courageous and mature approach, and I think a very healthy stance in the current context of revenge culture."—Leonardo Reviews"Anyone with an interest in Isherwood or in Japanese culture and sexual patterns will find this book a worthwhile acquisition."—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Table of ContentsContentsForeword: A Fan’s NotesChristopher BramIntroduction: Christopher’s KindChris Freeman and James J. Berg1. Christopher Isherwood and the California Dream Sara S. Hodson2. “Rejecting the Real World Outright”: The Shared Fantasy of Mortmere Katherine Stevenson3. “A Faith of Personal Sincerity”: Christopher Isherwood’s Debt to the Individualism of E. M. ForsterXenobe Purvis4. The Archival “I”: Forster, Isherwood, and the Future of Queer Biography Wendy Moffat5. A Queer Progress: Christopher Isherwood, Sexual Exceptionalism, and Thirties’ Berlin Lois Cucullu6. Fellow Travelers James J. Berg and Chris Freeman7. Isherwood as Travel Writer Lisa Colletta8.The World in the Evening: Character in TransitRobert L. Caserio9. Isherwood’s “Jolly Corner” in Down There on a Visit: The Christopher Who Was Encounters the Christopher Who Might Have Been Carola M. Kaplan10. Grumbling in Eldorado: A Single Man in the American Utopia Calvin W. Keogh11. Pacific Rimming: Queer Expatriatism, Transpacific Los Angeles, and Christopher Isherwood’s Queer SixtiesJaime Harker12. Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man Edmund White13. We Can See the Hilld from Our Bed: Christopher and His Nonfictions Barrie Jean Borich14. In Search of a Spiritual Home: Christopher Isherwood, the Perennial Philosophy, and Vedanta Bidhan Chandra Roy15. “Enlarging Their Clearing in the Jungle”: The Political Significance of Christopher Isherwood’s My Guru and His Disciple Victor Marsh16. “The Aim of Art is to Transcend Art”: Writing Spirituality in My Guru and His Disciple Jamie Carr17. A Conversation with Christopher Isherwood, 1979 Dennis BartelAcknowledgmentsIndex

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.Trade Review "Across a wide range of genres and authors, Sarah Wasserman argues that material artifacts—a poster, a dropped cotton bale, a collection of postage stamps, a dubious antique, a roll of blueprints, or a sign in a shop window—provide crucial plot points and also serve to signify emerging cultural forces. Tracking the structural transformations of post-World War II modernity, Wasserman calls attention to the ways these apparently trivial objects embody potent and latent energies. Whole histories reside in the clutter and stuff of small things deployed, she asserts, not as inert objects, but as agents of memory and imagination enacting the tension between what vanishes and what remains."—Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist "As in person, so in print: Sarah Wasserman is a witty conversationalist and infallible guide to postwar American literature. Her writers are known for largesse of form, ambition of argument, and fascination for quirky objects, and it is an elective affinity, for that is her own mode. The things we least regard may be the things that most tell us who we are. Such is the wisdom found in this book. Transience, like books about it, makes things glow."—John Durham Peters, Yale University "Sarah Wasserman adds an important new chapter to our understanding of how narrative prose fiction represents the object world—not just the life of things, but also their dying, their death, and their unsettling, uncanny afterlife. She persuasively shows how integral the object world became to the American novel of the post-war era. Indeed, the great range here—from Doctorow to Marilyn Robinson, Chester Himes to Pynchon and DeLillo—demonstrates the persistence of things as a focus of the American literary imagination, and the insistence of things as a force in the human world, both individual and collective. To apprehend that insistence she offers an expanded definition of ephemera that will be useful to readers across fields, and to anyone trying to understand the dynamics by which objects form and transform human subjects."—Bill Brown, author of Other Things "The Death of Things manages to show us quite a lot about how fiction can serve as its own kind of cache—one that doesn’t preserve ephemera, exactly, but creates its own kind of afterlives for fading things... Wasserman’s incisive book considers what fiction can tell us about living among things that are so frequently disposable."—The Nation "The Death of Things is a phenomenal and fundamental book. It investigates what it means to be a human being. "—ASAP Journal "Wasserman offers not only an innovative approach to literary criticism but also a literary critical method, one that understands the inevitability and incompleteness of loss."—Winterthur Portfolio Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Death of Things1. Yesterday’s Tomorrowland: E. L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon, and the 1939 World’s Fair2. Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philp K. Dick, Philip Roth, and the Second World War3. Zoned Out: Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Urban Infrastructure4. Time, Stamped: Thomas Pynchon’s Media Systems5. The Disorder of Things: Marilynne Robinson’s Transient Women6. Ephemeral Gods, Billboard Saints: Don DeLillo’s ApparitionsCoda: The Afterlife of Things: Ephemera in the Digital AgeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.Trade Review "Across a wide range of genres and authors, Sarah Wasserman argues that material artifacts—a poster, a dropped cotton bale, a collection of postage stamps, a dubious antique, a roll of blueprints, or a sign in a shop window—provide crucial plot points and also serve to signify emerging cultural forces. Tracking the structural transformations of post-World War II modernity, Wasserman calls attention to the ways these apparently trivial objects embody potent and latent energies. Whole histories reside in the clutter and stuff of small things deployed, she asserts, not as inert objects, but as agents of memory and imagination enacting the tension between what vanishes and what remains."—Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist "As in person, so in print: Sarah Wasserman is a witty conversationalist and infallible guide to postwar American literature. Her writers are known for largesse of form, ambition of argument, and fascination for quirky objects, and it is an elective affinity, for that is her own mode. The things we least regard may be the things that most tell us who we are. Such is the wisdom found in this book. Transience, like books about it, makes things glow."—John Durham Peters, Yale University "Sarah Wasserman adds an important new chapter to our understanding of how narrative prose fiction represents the object world—not just the life of things, but also their dying, their death, and their unsettling, uncanny afterlife. She persuasively shows how integral the object world became to the American novel of the post-war era. Indeed, the great range here—from Doctorow to Marilyn Robinson, Chester Himes to Pynchon and DeLillo—demonstrates the persistence of things as a focus of the American literary imagination, and the insistence of things as a force in the human world, both individual and collective. To apprehend that insistence she offers an expanded definition of ephemera that will be useful to readers across fields, and to anyone trying to understand the dynamics by which objects form and transform human subjects."—Bill Brown, author of Other Things "The Death of Things manages to show us quite a lot about how fiction can serve as its own kind of cache—one that doesn’t preserve ephemera, exactly, but creates its own kind of afterlives for fading things... Wasserman’s incisive book considers what fiction can tell us about living among things that are so frequently disposable."—The Nation "The Death of Things is a phenomenal and fundamental book. It investigates what it means to be a human being. "—ASAP Journal "Wasserman offers not only an innovative approach to literary criticism but also a literary critical method, one that understands the inevitability and incompleteness of loss."—Winterthur Portfolio Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Death of Things1. Yesterday’s Tomorrowland: E. L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon, and the 1939 World’s Fair2. Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philp K. Dick, Philip Roth, and the Second World War3. Zoned Out: Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Urban Infrastructure4. Time, Stamped: Thomas Pynchon’s Media Systems5. The Disorder of Things: Marilynne Robinson’s Transient Women6. Ephemeral Gods, Billboard Saints: Don DeLillo’s ApparitionsCoda: The Afterlife of Things: Ephemera in the Digital AgeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era What can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a vibrant, emergent perspective on the Anthropocene. In this volume, more than a dozen scholars move beyond longstanding perspectives on the Anthropocene—such as science fiction and apocalyptic narratives—to show that the Gothic offers a unique (and dark) interpretation of events like climate change, diminished ecosystems, and mass extinction.Embracing pop cultural phenomena like True Detective, Jaws, and Twin Peaks, as well as topics from the New Weird and prehistoric shark fiction to ruin porn and the “monstroscene,” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Gothic while opening important new paths of inquiry. These essays map a genealogy of the Gothic while providing fresh perspectives on the ongoing climate chaos, the North/South divide, issues of racialization, dark ecology, questions surrounding environmental justice, and much more.Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Timothy Clark, U of Durham; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Fuchs, U of Oldenburg, Germany; Esthie Hugo, U of Warwick; Dawn Keetley, Lehigh U; Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Barry Murnane, U of Oxford; Jennifer Schell, U of Alaska Fairbanks; Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth U; Sara Wasson, Lancaster U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.Trade Review"All of the essays connect the subjective potency of the texts under discussion — the affects and moods that they inspire in the reader or viewer — to the ways that such works also give us a deeper understanding of the ongoing ecological transactions that are putting our very existence at risk. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth both reclaims the gothic as an urgently relevant mode of fiction-making and suggests that aesthetic approaches are able to bring us a kind of understanding that scientific studies on their own could not."—Los Angeles Review of Books"It is impossible for me to do complete justice to this book in a review, but I will say that the sixteen essays included in it are all illuminating, thoughtful, and interesting."—Gothic WandererTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Gothic in the AnthropocenePart I. Anthropocene1. The AnthropoceneJeffrey Andrew Weinstock2. De-extinction: A Gothic Masternarrative for the AnthropoceneMichael Fuchs3. Lovecraft vs. VanderMeer: Posthuman Horror (and Hope?) in the Zone of ExceptionRune Graulund4. Monstrous Megalodons of the Anthropocene: Extinction and Adaptation in Prehistoric Shark Fiction, 1974–2018Jennifer Schell5. A Violence “Just below the Skin”: Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African AnthropoceneEsthie HugoPart II. Plantationocene6. Horrors of the Horticultural: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Landscapes of the AnthropoceneLisa M. Vetere7. True Detective’s Folk GothicDawn Keetley8. Beyond the Slaughterhouse: Anthropocene, Animals, and GothicJustin D. EdwardsPart III. Capitalocene9. Gothic in the Capitalocene: World-Ecological Crisis, Decolonial Horror, and the South African PostcolonyRebecca Duncan10. Overpopulation: The Human as InhumanTimothy Clark11. Digging Up Dirt: Reading the Anthropocene through German RomanticismBarry Murnane12. Got a Light? The Dark Currents of Energy in Twin Peaks: The ReturnTimothy Morton and Rune GraulundPart IV. Chthulucene13. The Anthropocene Within: Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the BridgeJohan Höglund14. Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-burialLaura R. Kremmel15. Erotics and Annihilation: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the “Anthropocene”Sara Wasson16. MonstroceneFred BottingContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisA bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present Long seen as a realm of mystery and possibility, the subsurface beneath our feet has taken on all-too-real import in the era of climate change. Can reading narratives of the past that take imaginative leaps under the surface better attune us to our present knowledge of a warming planet?In Subsurface, Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth. Putting such texts into conversation with narrative theory, critical theory, geology, and climate policy, she shows that the subsurface has been, in our past, a place of myth and stories of male voyages down to gain knowledge—but it is also now the realm of fossil fuels. How do these two modes intertwine?A highly original take on evocative terms such as extraction, burial, fossils, deep time, and speculative futurity, Subsurface questions the certainty of comfortable narrative arcs. It asks us to read literature with and against the figure of the geological column, with and against fossil fuels and the emissions warming our planet. As we see our former selves move into the distance, what new modes of imagination might we summon?Trade Review "Considering a renewal of life that would begin in the subsurface of the earth, Karen Pinkus deftly navigates between nineteenth-century literature and current issues in geology, critical theory, and philosophy. Digging into the past to imagine a sustainable future, written with spark and wit, Subsurface is a welcome contribution to the environmental humanities."—Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University "A truly geologic, stratigraphic criticism of and for the multiple layers and ages of climate change. Karen Pinkus’s work forms the critical bedrock of environmental and energy humanities. Here, she goes underground, surveying a classic range of subterranean narratives and their striated formations across time and space, fusing with other realms of knowledge that climate challenges literature to uncover. Pinkus's critical alchemy mines novel seams, peels back undiscovered layers of texts and meaning, and cracks open new possibilities for reading narrative within and against the challenges of climate's unfolding futures. Tunneling back and forth from the crucial century of Verne and the rise of geology to contemporary debates over geoengineering, carbon sequestration, and extractivism, she explores carbonizing economic theory and assesses the strange formations of climate finance en route. Subsurface reassesses the grounds of and for literature and literary criticism as resource and method to confront our age of earthbound and atmospheric crisis, mapping its unruly domains, its shifting terrain and hidden impacts. This is exactly the kind of nonconformist analysis we need to navigate climate's deep and complex resonances."—Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick

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Book SynopsisTopothesia reads urban planning as a mode of speculative fiction, one inextricably linked to histories of British colonialism and liberalism through a particular understanding of place. The book focuses on town planning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, showing how the contemporary geography of Britain—sharply unequal and marked by racial division—continues ideologies of place established in colonial contexts. Specifically, planning allows for the speculative construction of future places that are both utopian in their ability to resolve political disagreement and at the same tantalizingly realizable, able to be produced in concrete reality. This speculative imaginary, I argue, is only possible within the ideological framework of colonialism and the history of empire within which it developed. Topothesia refers to a rhetorical device employing the vivid depiction of an often-imaginary place. This device, Vijay shows, helps us understand urban planning as a narrative genre, one that, even in its most mundane documents, is compelled to produce elaborate fantasies of future places. The book examines specific planning movements over time to understand the form and the stakes of their speculative worlds. In building these worlds, the book shows, planners continually coopted literary critiques of the present and reveries of the future, retaining literature's aesthetics while eschewing its politics. At the same time, Vijay shows, writers and artists have dwelled within and against these colonial imaginaries to seek other means of representing place.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 Part I: Improving Places: Liberal Colonialism and the Speculative Imaginary of Early Planning 1. Garden Cities: The Art and Craft of Making Place in Edwardian Britain | 31 2. Planning as Imperial Cultivation in the Work of Patrick Geddes | 60 Part II: Diminishing Horizons: The Ambivalent Temporalities of Development 3. Capturing the City: Regeneration, Policing, and the Ghosts of Postcolonial Britain | 95 4. The End of London: Temporalities of the Gentrified City | 126 5. Level Up: Zadie Smith’s NW and the Promise of Progression | 158 6. Geographies of Discontent: Brexit and the Politics of Abandonment | 185 Coda | 215 Acknowledgments | 221 Notes | 225 Bibliography | 285 Index | 308

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Book SynopsisTopothesia reads urban planning as a mode of speculative fiction, one inextricably linked to histories of British colonialism and liberalism through a particular understanding of place. The book focuses on town planning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, showing how the contemporary geography of Britain—sharply unequal and marked by racial division—continues ideologies of place established in colonial contexts. Specifically, planning allows for the speculative construction of future places that are both utopian in their ability to resolve political disagreement and at the same tantalizingly realizable, able to be produced in concrete reality. This speculative imaginary, I argue, is only possible within the ideological framework of colonialism and the history of empire within which it developed. Topothesia refers to a rhetorical device employing the vivid depiction of an often-imaginary place. This device, Vijay shows, helps us understand urban planning as a narrative genre, one that, even in its most mundane documents, is compelled to produce elaborate fantasies of future places. The book examines specific planning movements over time to understand the form and the stakes of their speculative worlds. In building these worlds, the book shows, planners continually coopted literary critiques of the present and reveries of the future, retaining literature's aesthetics while eschewing its politics. At the same time, Vijay shows, writers and artists have dwelled within and against these colonial imaginaries to seek other means of representing place.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 Part I: Improving Places: Liberal Colonialism and the Speculative Imaginary of Early Planning 1. Garden Cities: The Art and Craft of Making Place in Edwardian Britain | 31 2. Planning as Imperial Cultivation in the Work of Patrick Geddes | 60 Part II: Diminishing Horizons: The Ambivalent Temporalities of Development 3. Capturing the City: Regeneration, Policing, and the Ghosts of Postcolonial Britain | 95 4. The End of London: Temporalities of the Gentrified City | 126 5. Level Up: Zadie Smith’s NW and the Promise of Progression | 158 6. Geographies of Discontent: Brexit and the Politics of Abandonment | 185 Coda | 215 Acknowledgments | 221 Notes | 225 Bibliography | 285 Index | 308

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Book SynopsisOffering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others. In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.Table of ContentsPreface: Three Beginnings | vii Introduction: Ominous Matter | 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory | 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism | 41 3 Body-as-Thing | 72 4 Thing-as- Body | 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words | 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside | 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life | 171 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 175 Works Cited | 181 Index | 195

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Book SynopsisOffering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others. In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.Table of ContentsPreface: Three Beginnings | vii Introduction: Ominous Matter | 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory | 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism | 41 3 Body-as-Thing | 72 4 Thing-as- Body | 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words | 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside | 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life | 171 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 175 Works Cited | 181 Index | 195

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Book SynopsisStartling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction, which shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence while also making connections between the widely acknowledged twentieth-century masters of the form and their twenty-first-century counterparts. This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and on the effect the story has on the reader. One recurring theme that is central to both is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, O’Connell argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Phil Klay and Kirstin Valdez Quade.Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Surprise Me”: Going inside the “Black Box” of Catholic Fiction | 1 1 The “Blasting Annihilating Light” of Flannery O’Connor’s Art | 17 2 Disorientation and Reorientation in J. F. Powers’s Fiction | 34 3 Walker Percy and the End of the Modern World | 53 4 Tim Gautreaux and a Postconciliar Approach to Violence | 73 5 Belief and Ambiguity in the Fiction of Alice McDermott | 92 6 “Life Is Rough and Death Is Coming”: George Saunders and the Catholic Literary Tradition | 112 Epilogue: Phil Klay, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and the State of Contemporary Catholic Literature | 133 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 151 Works Cited | 165 Index | 173

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Book SynopsisStartling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction, which shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence while also making connections between the widely acknowledged twentieth-century masters of the form and their twenty-first-century counterparts. This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and on the effect the story has on the reader. One recurring theme that is central to both is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, O’Connell argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Phil Klay and Kirstin Valdez Quade.Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Surprise Me”: Going inside the “Black Box” of Catholic Fiction | 1 1 The “Blasting Annihilating Light” of Flannery O’Connor’s Art | 17 2 Disorientation and Reorientation in J. F. Powers’s Fiction | 34 3 Walker Percy and the End of the Modern World | 53 4 Tim Gautreaux and a Postconciliar Approach to Violence | 73 5 Belief and Ambiguity in the Fiction of Alice McDermott | 92 6 “Life Is Rough and Death Is Coming”: George Saunders and the Catholic Literary Tradition | 112 Epilogue: Phil Klay, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and the State of Contemporary Catholic Literature | 133 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 151 Works Cited | 165 Index | 173

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Book SynopsisA micro-biography of horror fiction’s most influential author and his love–hate relationship with New York City. By the end of his life and near financial ruin, pulp horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft resigned himself to the likelihood that his writing would be forgotten. Today, Lovecraft stands alongside J. R. R. Tolkien as the most influential genre writer of the twentieth century. His reputation as an unreformed racist and bigot, however, leaves readers to grapple with his legacy. Midnight Rambles explores Lovecraft’s time in New York City, a crucial yet often overlooked chapter in his life that shaped his literary career and the inextricable racism in his work. Initially, New York stood as a place of liberation for Lovecraft. During the brief period between 1924 and 1926 when he lived there, Lovecraft joined a creative community and experimented with bohemian living in the publishing and cultural capital of the United States. He also married fellow writer Sonia H. Greene, a Ukrainian-Jewish émigré in the fashion industry. However, cascading personal setbacks and his own professional ineptitude soured him on New York. As Lovecraft became more frustrated, his xenophobia and racism became more pronounced. New York’s large immigrant population and minority communities disgusted him, and this mindset soon became evident in his writing. Many of his stories from this era are infused with racial and ethnic stereotypes and nativist themes, most notably his overtly racist short story, “The Horror at Red Hook,” set in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His personal letters reveal an even darker bigotry. Author David J. Goodwin presents a chronological micro-biography of Lovecraft’s New York years, emphasizing Lovecraft’s exploration of the city environment, the greater metropolitan region, and other locales and how they molded him as a writer and as an individual. Drawing from primary sources (letters, memoirs, and published personal reflections) and secondary sources (biographies and scholarship), Midnight Rambles develops a portrait of a talented and troubled author and offers insights into his unsettling beliefs on race, ethnicity, and immigration.Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Age Brings Reminiscences” | 1 1 “A Person of the Most Admirable Qualities” | 17 2 “An Eastern City of Wonder” | 32 3 “It Is a Myth; A Dream” | 51 4 “Brigham Young Annexing His 27th” | 67 5 “The Somewhat Disastrous Collapse” | 80 6 “A Maze of Poverty & Uncertainty” | 96 7 “A Pleasing Hermitage” | 114 8 “Circle of Aesthetic Dilettante” | 131 9 “Long Live the State of Rhode- Island” | 154 Conclusion: “The Merest Vague Dream” | 169 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 185 Bibliography | 251 Index | 269

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Book SynopsisOffers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.Table of ContentsForeword by Patrick Porter | vii Introduction 1 1 Revelations and Comedy: The Combat Novel | 25 2 Camera Men: Postwar Japan-Bashing | 55 3 Captive Memories: Internment North and South | 81 4 The Poetics of Apology: FEPOW Narratives | 106 5 Scientists and Hibakusha: Project Novels | 132 Coda | 163 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 177 Bibliography | 217 Index | 243

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Book SynopsisOffers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.Table of ContentsForeword by Patrick Porter | vii Introduction 1 1 Revelations and Comedy: The Combat Novel | 25 2 Camera Men: Postwar Japan-Bashing | 55 3 Captive Memories: Internment North and South | 81 4 The Poetics of Apology: FEPOW Narratives | 106 5 Scientists and Hibakusha: Project Novels | 132 Coda | 163 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 177 Bibliography | 217 Index | 243

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Book SynopsisHumanitarianism has a narrative problem. Far too often, aid to Africa is envisioned through a tale of Western heroes saving African sufferers. While labeling white savior narratives has become a familiar gesture, it doesn’t tell us much about the story as story. Humanitarian Fictions aims to understand the workings of humanitarian literature, as they engage with and critique narratives of Africa. Overlapping with but distinct from human rights, humanitarianism centers on a relationship of assistance, focusing less on rights than on needs, less on legal frameworks than moral ones, less on the problem than on the nonstate solution. Tracing the white savior narrative back to religious missionaries of the nineteenth century, Humanitarian Fiction reveals the influence of religious thought on seemingly secular institutions and uncovers a spiritual, collectivist streak in the discourse of humanity. Because the humanitarian model of care transcends the boundaries of the state, and its networks touch much of the globe, Humanitarian Fictions redraws the boundaries of literary classification based on a shared problem space rather than a shared national space. The book maps a transnational vein of Anglophone literature about Africa that features missionaries, humanitarians, and their so-called beneficiaries. Putting humanitarian thought in conversation with postcolonial critique, this book brings together African, British, and U.S. writers typically read within separate traditions. Paustian shows how the novel—with its profound sensitivity to narrative—can enrich the critique of white saviorism while also imagining alternatives that give African agency its due.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The White Savior Narrative and the Third Sector Novel | 1 1. The Moral Cause | 33 2. The Emancipated African | 67 3. The Universal Human | 101 4. The Benevolent Gift | 134 5. The Nongovernmental Organization | 169 Epilogue: Rearticulating the Humanitarian Atlantic | 207 Acknowledgments | 215 Notes | 219 Works Cited | 251 Index | 267

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Book SynopsisThe first serious book-length study of crime writing in Canada, Detecting Canada contains thirteen essays on many of Canada's most popular crime writers, including Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Gail Bowen, Thomas King, Michael Slade, Margaret Atwood, and Anthony Bidulka. Genres examined range from the well-loved police procedural and the amateur sleuth to those less well known, such as anti-detection and contemporary noir novels. The book looks critically at the esteemed sixties' television show Wojeck, as well as the more recent series Da Vinci's Inquest, Da Vinci's City Hall, and Intelligence, and the controversial Durham County, a critically acclaimed but violent television series that ran successfully in both Canada and the United States. The essays in Detecting Canada look at texts from a variety of perspectives, including postcolonial studies, gender and queer studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, and critical race and class studies. Crime fiction, enjoyed by so many around the world, speaks to all of us about justice, citizenship, and important social issues in an uncertain world.Trade Review"Writers of Canadian crime fiction have learned to gird our loins when we are asked a question that is as irritating as it is inevitable: When are you going to write a real novel? By offering not simply an overview of the history of crime fiction in Canada but thoughtful essays on the themes Canadian crime writers explore and on the roles played by landscape, gender, class, race, and community in our works, 'Detecting Canada' answers that question decisively. Canadian crime writers are writing real novels, and 'Detecting Canada' offers solid evidence to prove the point." -- Gail Bowen, author of 'The Gifted', the latest in the Joanne Kilbourn mystery series"'Detecting Canada' is an indispensable landmark in the study of Canadian crime narratives. Its range is remarkable, with the essays covering not only the major practitioners of Canadian crime fiction but also television crime shows and films. This collection will remain a standard resource for many years to come." -- David Schmid, Department of English, University at Buffalo, author of 'Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture'Table of Contents Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film, edited by Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose Introduction Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose History and Theory 1. Coca-Colonialists Write Back: Localizing the Global in Canadian Crime Fiction Beryl Langer 2. Canadian Crime Writing in English David Skene-Melvin Essays on Fiction 3. Canadian Psycho: Genre, Nation, and Colonial Violence in Michael Slade's Gothic RCMP Procedurals Brian Johnson 4. Northern Procedures: Policing the Nation in Giles Blunt's The Delicate Storm Manina Jones 5. Revisioning the Dick: Reading Thomas King's Thumps DreadfulWater Mysteries Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton 6. Generic Play and Gender Trouble in Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season Jeannette Sloniowski 7. A Colder Kind of Gender Politics: Intersections of Feminism and Detection in Gail Bowen's Joanne Kilbourn Series Pamela Bedore 8. Queer Eye for the Private Eye: Homonationalism and the Regulation of Queer Difference in Anthony Bidulka's Russell Quant Mystery Series Péter Balogh 9. Under/Cover: Strategies of Detection and Evasion in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace Marilyn Rose Essays on Television 10. Televising Toronto in the 1960s: Wojeck and the Urban Crime Genre Sarah A. Matheson 11. North of Quality? ""Quality"" Television and the Suburban Crimeworld of Durham County Lindsay Steenberg and Yvonne Tasker 12. Mounties and Metaphysics in Canadian Film and Television Patricia Gruben Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisIn Naciones intelectuales, Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on a period that goes from the signing of the Constitution in 1917 to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959, Sanchez Prado centers his analysis on the way in which four elements of Mexican cultural practice - the notion of literature, the figure of the intellectual, the creation of academic institutions and the definition of national identity - emerged through the various debates held by leading figures of the period. Through an appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'literary field', the book analyzes different key moments, controversies, and cultural interventions, which ultimately led the diverse aesthetic spectrum created by the Revolution into becoming a highly institutional system of literature. Sanchez Prado's work deals with a wide range of writers, including Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Cuesta, Manuel Maples Arce, Ramon Lopez Velarde, Francisco Monterde, Jose Gaos, the Hiperion philosophers, and Octavio Paz. As a result, this books offers a cartography of Mexican literary institutions unprecedented in scope, which will allow readers, students, and scholars to understand the construction of modern Mexican literature in a clear, rigorous, and systematic way.

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Book SynopsisWriting from a feminist perspective, the author examines what is it about the ""Little House Series"" that accounts for its enduring commercial success. It examines both the content of the novels, the process of their creation, and what it demonstrates about the current trends of American culture.

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Book SynopsisRalph Ellison has long been admired as the author of one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man. Yet he has also been dismissed by some critics as a writer who only published one major work of fiction and a black intellectual out of touch with his times. In this book, Timothy Parrish offers a fundamentally different assessment of Ellison’s legacy, describing him as the most important American writer since William Faulkner and someone whose political and cultural achievements have not been fully recognised. Embracing jazz artist Wynton Marsalis’s characterisation of Ellison as the unacknowledged “political theorist” of the civil rights movement, Parrish argues that the defining event of Ellison’s career was not Invisible Man but the 1954 Supreme Court decision that set his country on the road to racial integration. In Parrish’s view, no other American intellectual, black or white, better grasped the cultural implications of the new era than Ellison did; no other major American writer has been so misunderstood. Drawing on Ellison’s recently published “unfinished” novel, newly released archival materials, and unpublished correspondence, Parrish provides a sustained reconsideration of the writer’s crucial friendships with Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward to show how his life was dedicated to creating an American society in which all could participate equally. By resituating Ellison’s career in the historical context of its making, Parrish challenges the premises that distorted the writer’s reception in his own lifetime to make the case for Ellison as the essential visionary of post–Civil War America.

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Book SynopsisTender is the Night, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald worked longest and hardest on, has not achieved its proper recognition because the text is peppered with errors and chronological inconsistencies. Moreover, the novel has a concentration of references to people, places and events that most readers no longer recognize. In this guide to the novel, Matthew J. Bruccoli corrects those errors and explains the factual details. He also offers maps, photos, correspondence and notes that demystify the writing of one of literature's most misunderstood - and underrated - masterpieces.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Jill McCorkle introduces readers to the novels and short story collections of Jill McCorkle's growing canon. Since 1984 McCorkle has written five novels and two books of short stories, entering the publishing world, as one reviewer noted, ""with the literary equivalent of a rebel yell"". Filling the gap of critical study on McCorkle, Barbara Bennett analyzes the widely read and admired output of this prolific southern woman writer. Bennett identifies and discusses the diverse characters, thematic concerns and keen sense of language that distinguish McCorkle's work. Bennett offers a brief overview of McCorkle's life, traces the influence on her work, and places her decisively in the ""third generation"" of 20th-century southern writers. While noting McCorkle's links to such prominent southern women writers as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Bennett explains how McCorkle's characterizations, attitude of affirmation and references to popular culture distance her from her predecessors. Bennett devotes individual chapters to each of McCorkle's novels and story collections. She discusses the themes that unify these diverse works, including the tension between independence and dependence, the imbuing presence of strength in femininity, the direct conflict between the nurturing of others and the preservation of self, and the opposition of purity and virginity to sexual freedom and expression. Bennett explores McCorkle's development of characters ranging from a young white girl approaching womanhood to a troubled middle-aged man reviewing his life's choices, from an elderly black woman on the verge of retirement to a yound minister struggling with his career path. She finds that in such rich and varied voices, McCorkle crafts stories of a region no longer burdened by the past but now grappling with ordinary family problems.

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Book SynopsisThis is a discussion of the work of one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists and the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. David Malcolm places Ian McEwan's work in the context of British literature's particular dynamism in the last decades of the 20th century. He also examines McEwan's relationship to feminism, concern with rationalism and science, use of moral perspective, and proclivity toward fragmentation. Malcolm offers close readings of McEwan's early short stories, which he recognizes as traditional and conservative in technique despite their shocking subject matter, and all of McEwan's novels. Employing the third novel, ""The Child in Time"", as the fulcrum for his discussion, Malcolm explores the themes of incest, espionage, moral self-flagellation, sexual fixation, political dysfunction, and personal antipathy evident in the other fiction. He illuminates the continuities obscured by the conventional approach to McEwan's fiction and raises the question whether McEwan is a novelist of brilliant fragments or of overall coherence.

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Book SynopsisThe standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.Trade ReviewMatthew J. Bruccoli is always able to look through the events themselves to the essential fact about Fitzgerald: his existence as an artist, and not only to how it came about, but what it came to. Some sort of epic grandeur is exactly what Fitzgerald had. It is a perfect title for this book, for the grandeur is there, in the struggle to create memorable work. I fully expect that this will be the indispensable biography of a very great American writer, for the spirit of the man is in the facts, and these, as gathered and marshaled by Bruccoli over thirty years, are all we will ever need. But more important, they are what we need. - James Dickey; ""Impeccably researched...both comprehensive and judicious... Bruccoli brings Fitzgerald vividly alive."" - Newsweek; ""This masterpiece contains exactly what we need to know about this dazzling figure."" - Publishers Weekly; ""It is difficult to imagine any work on Fitzgerald and his literary product that will supplant this one."" - The New Yorker; ""Indispensable and definitive."" - The Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisThis volume provides a dissection of W.G. Sebald's fiction and his acclaim. A German writer who taught in England for 30 years, he published four novels, first in German and then in English. His work gained even greater acclaim after his death in 2001, just months after the publication of his title ""Austerlitz"". This companion to his fiction investigates the secret behind his universal appeal and explores themes, issues, and influences that dominate the writer's oeuvre. It suggests that Sebald essentially had two literary careers - as his works appeared in German-speaking Europe and then in the English speaking world. It outlines the writer's reception in his homeland and in translation. It illuminates the vast knowledge of European literatures that Sebald drew upon in composing his narratives and also sheds light on the interconnections that lurk beneath the surface of the writer's landscapes and memoirs.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories and non-fiction by one of Britain's most highly acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition, of 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews and criticism to map the distinctive features of Martin Amis's imaginative landscape - the sociosexual satire of ""Money"" and ""Yellow Dog"", the bold experimentation of ""Time's Arrow"" and ""Night Train"", and the provocative blend of autobiography and cultural analysis in ""Experience"" and ""Koba the Dread"". Diedrick illustrates how Amis has reshaped the British literary landscape, expanding its stylistic and thematic range while creating forms adequate to the experience of postmodernity. Diedrick analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis's work, rooted in Amis's relationship with his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. During his early career, the younger Amis opposed his father's political and aesthetic conservatism. But his opposition has given way to frequent expressions of political and literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship continues to shape the son's outlook and writing. Diedrick also identifies two complementary impulses in Amis's work. The first is journalistic and satirical, expressed in an incisive wit aimed at contemporary social realities. The second is aesthetic, manifesting a Nabokovian love of verbal play and formal experimentation. Besides analyzing the ways Amis's fiction forges the topical into the literary, Diedrick argues for the importance of Amis's considerable journalistic oeuvre and provides close readings of his non-fiction collection and his uncollected essays and reviews.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Thomas Mann offers a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction of one of the most renowned and prolific German writers. In addition to analyzing Mann's most famous works, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Hannelore Mundt introduces readers to lesser-known works, among them Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and The Black Swan. In close readings, Mundt illustrates how Mann's masterly prose captures both his time and the complexities of human existence with a unique blend of humor, compassion, irony, and ambiguity. Mundt takes readers chronologically from Mann's literary beginnings in 1894 to his last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. She considers the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the emergence of Mann's literary voice, his conflicted feelings about his bourgeois background, and his life as Germany's representative writer in the Weimar Republic and in exile. Mundt places Mann's works in the realistic and modern traditions and discusses his recurring thematic concerns - the individual's rebellion against oppressive bourgeois conventions and antihumanistic principles, the need for an unremitting questioning of authority and ostensibly absolute truths, and the antagonism between individualistic freedom and social responsibility. In light of the recent publication of Mann's diaries, disclosing his homosexual inclinations, Mundt also identifies the textual strategies he adopted for revealing and simultaneously masking his secret sexuality. Mann emerges from Mundt's analysis as a writer who plays with opposing perspectives in his fictional renderings of both the alienated individual and Germany's cultural and political history. Mundt suggests that the openness of his works, paired with his deep insights into human existence, explains his stature as a literary figure whose importance extends worldwide.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides a descriptive inventory of the major components in the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The collection documents the literary career and thought of one of America's greatest novelists. The catalogue includes a listing of editions of all English-language printings of books by Fitzgerald including proof and review copies and the collection's many books inscribed by the author. Fitzgerald manuscripts, revised typescripts, correspondence, and business documents are also cited, as well as Fitzgerald screenplays and Princetoniana. There is a separate section on Zelda Fitzgerald. Highlights of the collection include the only set of unrevised galleys for The Great Gatsby, titled Trimalchio; one of the two existing acting scripts for Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!; Fitzgerald's annotated copy of James Joyce's Ulysses; a copy of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls inscribed to Fitzgerald; and Fitzgerald memorabilia such as his engraved whiskey flask, a briefcase, and other family materials. Each item is described in detail - including title, publication information, and call number, where relevant, and explanatory notes. Many items in the collection, including all Fitzgerald inscriptions, are illustrated. The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina provides a valuable resource not only for Fitzgerald scholars, but also for those interested in Fitzgerald's friends and literary associates (including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ring Lardner, John Dos Passos, and Maxwell Perkins) and in American culture between the world wars.

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Book SynopsisPeter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a subtle, ongoing process. He maintains that the novels, though plain and rambling at first glance, grow fuller, stranger, and more stirring the more we invest in them. He details Fitzgerald's skill at sequencing events so as to unsettle readers and her ability to enhance motifs by not leaning too hard on them. Wolfe suggests that Fitzgerald's refusal to overplay effects and emotions, while at first puzzling in its disdain for drama, turns out to be one of her chief virtues, for she enables larger associations to emerge as she keeps big dramatic scenes from interfering with wider patterns. While enumerating Fitzgerald's many talents, Wolfe ultimately attributes much of her success to her style. He concludes that her exceptionally disciplined prose, which gives voice to her candor and compassion, imbues her work with a sense of mood, place, and character.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. He identifies influences and events central to the genre's growth, including the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

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Book SynopsisIn the closing decade of the twentieth century, Don DeLillo emerged from the privileged status of a writer's writer to become by any measure - productivity, influence, scope, gravitas - the dominant novelist of fin-de-millennium America. Beginning in 1982 with ""The Names and continuing with White Noise and Underworld"", DeLillo defined himself as a provocative, articulate anatomist of American culture. Dewey offers an astute assessment of this daunting yet important writer's four-decade cultural critique. Dewey finds DeLillo's concerns to be organized around three rubrics that mark the writer's own creative evolution: the love of the street, the embrace of the word, and the celebration of the soul. Dewey takes the reader through the novelist's hip avant-garde satires of the mid-1960s, his dense interrogations of the power of language and the spell of narrative in the 1980s and 1990s, and his recent efforts to transcend the immediate. Dewey explores DeLillo's fascination with Eastern philosophies, interest in Native American traditions, passion for jazz, and deep roots in Catholicism.

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Book SynopsisThis book offers original inroads to understanding the life and works of the celebrated novelist and poet. In ""The Way We Read James Dickey"" editors William B. Thesing and Theda Wrede have assembled an outstanding collection of current critical responses to the works of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and teacher, including essays by Dickey's former colleagues at the University of South Carolina and a piece by his most famous student, novelist Pat Conroy. The volume breaks new ground in the application of innovative critical approaches and restores Dickey to his rightful place in the literary canon as a remarkable writer who crafted some of the best poetry and fiction of the twentieth century. A decade after Dickey's death and thirty-five years after the release of the film version of his famous novel Deliverance, Dickey remains a controversial figure in the American literary landscape. He was an intellectual maverick who was often ahead of his time, and yet he responded intensely, almost obsessively, to his own changing times. Thesing and Wrede argue that, although he appeared to conform to poetic conventions, his writing was a visionary reinterpretation and extension of preexisting traditions. This tension between a poet's intellectual precursors and the radical innovation of his work is the inspiration behind the fresh approaches taken by the contributors in this volume, just as it energized Dickey's own endeavors. The essays offer original insights through emerging scholarly perspectives as well as through established methods of critique. The contributors address a range of themes in Dickey's works, including gender, religion, humanity's relationship to nature, and the writer's cultural context. This landmark reappraisal of Dickey's legacy offers readers a coherent forum that addresses why his writings remain relevant today, thus restoring and revaluing the rising significance of Dickey's literary achievement for twenty-first-century audiences.

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Book SynopsisThis is a critical survey of the complete body of work by the author of ""Catch-22"". In this revised edition, Sanford Pinsker explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Heller's writings, as he maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle and the uncompromising outrage of the classical satirist. This updated edition includes new chapters on Closing Time, the sequel to ""Catch-22""; ""Now and Then"", Heller's memoir of growing up in Brooklyn; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his posthumously published novel; and ""Catch as Catch Can"", a collection of assorted short stories and sketches.Trade ReviewNicely balancing description with discovery, Pinsker's lively and wide-ranging study not only examines the themes and rhetorical strategies through which Heller projects his satiric vision but also locates them within the cultural context that both shapes our literature and determines, in part, what it is capable of. - Modern Fiction Studies

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Book SynopsisThis is a 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. It is a compelling study of O'Connor's fiction as illuminated by the teaching of the desert monastics. 'Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist', Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the final thirteen years of her life on her isolated family farm in rural Georgia. During this productive time she developed a fascination with fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment and whose isolation, suffering, and faith mirrored her own. In ""Flannery O'Connor"", Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics and the ways in which she infused her fiction with their teachings. Surveying the influences of the desert fathers on O'Connor's protagonists, Giannone shows how her characters are moved toward a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of confronting both internal and worldly evils while being drawn closer to God. Artfully bridging literary analysis, O'Connor's biography, and monastic writings, Giannone's study explores O'Connor's advocacy of self-denial and self-scrutiny as vital spiritual weapons that might be brought to bear against the antagonistic forces she found rampant in modern American life.

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Book SynopsisA dominant figure of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) wrote more than twenty-five novels, a collection of poems, and a half-dozen philosophical studies..In Understanding Iris Murdoch, Cheryl Bove divides Murdoch's work into two broad categories--the ironic tragedy and the bittersweet comedy--to examine the reasons why her work continues to attract such a large following. A writer of consistently readable novels who fashions gripping narratives and vivid characters, Murdoch presents readers with moral problems upon which she allows her audience to pass judgment. Bove summarizes Murdoch's work not as an effort to advance a cause, expand a philosophy, or portray a society, but to present human relationships and solve fictional problems of plot and theme.

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Book SynopsisExplores the historical and philosophical contexts of Cormac McCarthy's early works to demonstrate he integrates literary realism with the imagery and myths of Platonic, gnostic, and existentialist philosophies to create a unique vision of the world.

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Book SynopsisA handbook to Hemingway's famous collection of short stories that emphasizes its status as a modernist masterwork. The volume of collected short stories and vignettes In Our Time was Ernest Hemingway's first commercial publication. Its appearance in 1925 launched the full-fledged literary career of this century's most famous American fiction writer. And while other later works of Hemingway have eclipsed In Our Time's fame, none of Hemingway's subsequent works would again carry the degree of experimentation found in this distinctly modernist masterwork. Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers is a well-paced, lucidly written handbook intended to guide university students and teaching faculty towards a better understanding of this complex work. It provides a reading of each story and vignette, while simultaneously stressing the status of In Our Time as a discrete volume. Included are discussions of the book's biographical and historical background, and considerations of Hemingway's prose style, theories of writing, formal achievements, his literary mentors and influences, and the relation between In Our Time and his later works. Matthew C. Stewart isAssociate Professor of Humanities and Rhetoric at Boston University.

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Book SynopsisThe first anthology of critical interpretations of major Canadian short stories. Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. Itcontinues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genreand the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This book redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain completes it. Geared both to specialists in and students of Canadian literature, the volume is of particular benefit to the latter because it provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Contributors: Reingard M. Nischik, Martina Seifert, Heinz Antor, Julia Breitbach, Konrad Gross, Paul Goetsch, Dieter Meindl, Nina Kück, Stefan Ferguson, Rudolf Bader, Fabienne C. Quennet, Martin Kuester, Jutta Zimmermann, Sylvia Mergenthal, Caroline Rosenthal, Wolfgang Klooss, Lothar Hönnighausen, Heinz Ickstadt, Heinz Ickstadt, Gordon Bölling, Christina Strobel, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Nadja Gernalzick, Eva Gruber, Brigitte Glaser, Georgiana Banita. Reingard M. Nischik is Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany.Trade ReviewRemarkably accessible, ... generally shies away from unnecessary verbosity or jargon.... ideal for scholars interested in introductory overviews ... and for undergraduate courses... though it also extends beyond introductions....Shows the breadth and depth of the Canadian short story from a wide range of perspectives, theories, and approaches. * H-NET REVIEWS *Canadian critics ... should welcome ... a big, handsomely produced book, [evidence of the international appreciation of the Canadian short story, appreciation that has often been touted but never demonstrated].... Impressive throughout is each contributor's knowledge of the writer and the amount of research done in secondary criticism.... * AMERICAN REVIEW OF CANADIAN STUDIES *The interpretations ... are careful, compelling, accessible, and attentive to previous critics. * CHOICE *A welcome addition to any library and a good point-of-departure for any student interested in one of the authors it includes. * ANGLISTIK *With this thoughtfully designed and researched collection, Reingard M. Nischik and her CanLit team from the European German-speaking countries make a major contribution to the undeservedly small canon of literary criticism on Canadian short fiction. * DALHOUSIE REVIEW *A magisterial, formidable volume . . . a milestone in Canadian Studies worldwide. * ZEITSCHRIFT FUER KANADA-STUDIEN *[W]ill help students and scholars to refresh and complete their knowledge of the stories as well as discover their originality. Offers a panoramic view . . . highly welcome as a reference book. . . Very useful as a truly informative overview gifted with extremely perceptive approaches to the stories which make us 'feel the road' as we read on. * CANADIAN LITERATURE *Table of ContentsThe Canadian Short Story: Status, Criticism, Historical Survey - Reingard M. Nischik Canadian Animal Stories: Charles G.D. Roberts, "Do Seek Their Meat from God" (1892) - Martina Seifert Tory Humanism, Ironic Humor, and Satire: Stephen Leacock, "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" (1912) - Heinz Antor The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism: Raymond Knister, "The First Day of Spring" (written 1924/25) - Julia Breitbach From Old World Aestheticist Immoralist to Prairie Moral Realist: Frederick Philip Grove, "Snow" (1926/32) - Konrad Gross Psychological Realism, Immigration, and City Fiction: Morley Callaghan, "Last Spring They Came Over" (1927) - Paul Goetsch Modernism, Prairie Fiction, and Gender: Sinclair Ross, "The Lamp at Noon" (1938) - Dieter Meindl "An Artful Artlessness": Ethel Wilson, "We Have to Sit Opposite" (1945) - Nina Kuck Social Realism and Compassion for the Underdog: Hugh Garner, "One-Two-Three Little Indians" (1950) - Stefan Ferguson The Perils of Human Relationships: Joyce Marshall, "The Old Woman" (1952) - Rudolf Bader The Social Critic at Work: Mordecai Richler, "Benny, the War in Europe, and Myerson's Daughter Bella" (1956) - Fabienne C. Quennet Myth and the Postmodernist Turn in Canadian Short Fiction: Sheila Watson, "Antigone" (1959) - Martin Kuester The Modernist Aesthetic: Hugh Hood, "Flying a Red Kite" (1962) - Jutta Zimmermann Doing Well in the International Thing?: Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" (1963) - Silvia Mergenthal (Un-) Doing Gender: Alice Munro, "Boys and Girls" (1964) - Reingard M. Nischik Collective Memory and Personal Identity in the Prairie Town of Manawaka: Margaret Laurence, "The Loons" (1966) - Caroline Rosenthal "Out of Place": Clark Blaise, "A Class of New Canadians" (1970) - Wolfgang Klooss Realsim and Parodic Postmodernism: Audrey Thomas, "Aquarius" (1971) - Lothar Honnighausen "The Problem Is to Make the Story": Rudy Wiebe, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1971) - Heinz Ickstadt The Canadian Writer as Expatriate: Norman Levine, "We All Begin in a Little Magazine" (1972) - Gordon Bolling Canadian Artist Stories: John Metcalf, "The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe" (1973) - Reingard M. Nischik "A Literature of a Whole World and of a Real World": Jane Rule, "Lilian" (1977) - Christina Strobel Failure as Liberation: Jack Hodgins, "The Concert Stages of Europe" (1978) - Waldemar Zacharasiewicz Figures in a Landscape: William Dempsey Valgardson, "A Matter of Balance" (1982) - Maria Loschnigg Figures in a Landscape: William Dempsey Valgardson, "A Matter of Balance" (1982) - Martin Loschnigg "The Translation of the World into Words" and the Female Tradition: Margaret Atwood, "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother" (1983) - Reingard M. Nischik "Southern Preacher": Leon Rooke, "The Woman Who Talked to Horses" (1984) - Nadja Gernalzick Nativeness as Third Space: Thomas King, "Borders" (1991) - Eva Gruber Digressing to Inner Worlds: Carol Shields, "Our Men and Women" (1999) - Brigitte Glaser A Sentimental Journey: Janice Kulyk Keefer, "Dreams:Storms:Dogs" (1999) - Georgiana Banita Further Reading on the Canadian Short Story Time Chart: The Short Story in the USA, Canada, and Great Britain Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe first book in English on the German Gothic in over thirty years, consisting of new essays investigating the internationality of the Gothic mode. The literary mode of the Gothic is well established in English Studies, and there is growing interest in its internationality. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly -- for instance, in the form of plagiarized texts or pseudo-translations of nonexistent sources. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. Thisfirst book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years is aimed at students and researchers in German Studies and English Studies, and redresses deficiencies in existing sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies. The book examines the international reception of German Gothic since the 1790s heyday of the Gothic novel in Britain and Germany; traces a line of Gothic writing in German to thepresent day; and inquires into the extraliterary impact of German Gothic. Thus the essays do full justice to the Gothic as a site of conflict and exchange -- both between cultures and between discourses. Contributors:Peter Arnds, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Jürgen Barkhoff, Matthias Bickenbach, Andrew Cusack, Mario Grizelj, Jörg Kreienbrock, Barry Murnane, Victor Sage, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Catherine Smale, Andrew Webber Andrew Cusack is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Barry Murnane is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.Trade ReviewThe collection as a whole points to the demand for a broader critical discourse on the Gothic within Germanistik and to some of the main questions that derive from here: how to trace the 'birth' of the German Gothic from the affect-based spirit of the late Enlightenment; how to chart its strategies of production and dissemination against terminological confusions, gaps, and silences in its international reception; and how to construct its diverse cultural genealogies beyond the framework of literary romanticism. * SEMINAR *[A] splendid collection of critical essays in the field of reception theory. . . . [A]n impressive assembly of critical voices, whose first-rate scholarly contribution is meant to last. * BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR ROMANTIC STUDIES BULLETIN AND REVIEW *[T]he volume shows in a convincing and highly interesting way the legacy of the German Schauerroman, not only in other literatures but also in German from the early nineteenth century to the present. * YEAR'S WORK IN MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *[P]rovides concrete evidence of Slavoj Zizek's claim, in Paul A. Taylor's words, that 'a full understanding of what it is to experience reality as a human being requires acknowledgment that the spectral has a very real effect. -- Michael Minden * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[A] polished, cohesive body of work . . . . Overall Cusack and Murnane have succeeded in assembling an important volume that addresses a significant lack in German Studies scholarship. . . . With its useful methodology and rich body of research, Popular Revenants will hopefully pave the way for future studies into the influence of German gothic 'revenants' . . . . * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *[The editors] gather 13 essays that plumb the production of writers like Schiller, Heine, Schumann, Poe, Walter Scott, Hoffmann, and Raabe. . . . A worthy reentry into a forgotten field, this study with its fine index, footnotes, and comprehensive bibliography fills an egregious lacuna. . . . Recommended. * CHOICE *[A]n indispensable, highly relevant guide that clearly shows the strong influence of the Germanic strain of horror on the genre we know today. * RUE MORGUE MAGAZINE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Andrew Cusack Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction toGerman Gothic - Barry Murnane "The echo of the question, as if it had merely resoundedin a tomb": The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher - Jürgen Barkhoff Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794) - Silke Arnold-de Simine Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic - Victor Sage Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic - Andrew Cusack In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 - Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe - Mario Grizelj Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichteas Gothic Novel - Jorg Kreienbrock The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature onSchumann's Writings - Monika Schmitz-Emans About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and theTechnological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy - Andrew J. Webber Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenantand Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder - Peter Arnds The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm - Matthias Bickenbach On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism - Barry Murnane "Ein Gespenst geht um": Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic - Catherine Smale Works Cited Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe first study to propose a unifying logic underlying the many and varied representations of the vampire in literature and culture. For the last three hundred years, fictions of the vampire have fed off anxieties about cultural continuity. Though commonly represented as a parasitic aggressor from without, the vampire is in fact a native of Europe, and its "metamorphoses," to quote Baudelaire, a distorted image of social transformation. Because the vampire grows strong whenever and wherever traditions weaken, its representations have multiplied with every political, economic, and technological revolution from the eighteenth century on. Today, in the age of globalization, vampire fictions are more virulent than ever, and the monster enjoys hunting grounds as vast as the international market. Metamorphoses of the Vampire explains why representations of vampirism began in the eighteenth century, flourished in the nineteenth, and came to eclipse nearly all other forms of monstrosity in the early twentieth century. Many of the works by French and German authors discussed here have never been presented to students and scholars in the English-speaking world. While there are many excellent studies that examine Victorian vampires, the undead in cinema, contemporary vampire fictions, and the vampire in folklore, until now no work has attempted to account for the unifying logic that underlies the vampire's many and often apparently contradictory forms. Erik Butler holds a PhDfrom Yale University and has taught at Emory University and Swarthmore College. His publications include The Bellum Gramaticale and the Rise of European Literature (2010) and a translation with commentary of Regrowth (Vidervuks) by the Soviet Jewish author Der Nister (2011).Trade Review[S]ucceeds in bringing a wealth of new voices from French and German scholarship to a field mostly dominated by English-language research. . . . [B]rings together a wealth of exciting literary, biographical, and filmic material . . . . [S]cholars and students interested in the monster will no doubt enjoy reading this book, and its individual chapters on the likes of Dracula and Nosferatu are a highly recommended read for courses on the subject. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[C]overs a lot of ground. . . . [E]specially informative for classroom use. * MONATSHEFTE *Butler brings to the feast . . . a rare cross-cultural perspective. . . . He also, and very convincingly, calls attention to the instability of genre that haunts vampire narratives . . . . Not merely a contribution to the cultural explication of the vampire, [this book] also touches on . . . broader . . . social transformations of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe . . . with elegance and intelligence. * VICTORIAN STUDIES *Butler's analyses of the development of vampire literature in the European tradition - most notably in France and Germany - are the most distinctive. . . A valuable contribution. * CHOICE *Butler's study shows conclusively that the term 'vampire' represents a construct that has been exposed over the centuries to semantic and medial processes of change while mirroring and intensifying them in a cultural sense. . . . [T]he work [also] shows that vampires as a popular export of the Hollywood film industry are returning above all to the place from which they emerged in the eighteenth century to conquer the world: to Europe. * LITERATURKRITIK.DE *Butler, one of the most promising American comparatists of the last generation, has written an extremely enjoyable book. . . . [He] uses the tools of history and geography to read the figure of the vampire. His study might also be called: 'The Vampire: A Political History. * ILSOLE24ORE.COM *Provides interesting analyses of the . . . discourses shaping the vampire, and uncovers fascinating cross currents. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Cultural Teratology Vampire Country: Borders of Culture and Power in Central Europe Vampires and Satire in the Enlightenment and Romanticism The Bourgeois Vampire and Nineteenth-Century Identity Theft Dracula: Vampiric Contagion in the Late Nineteenth Century Vampirism, the Writing Cure, and Realpolitik: Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness Vampires in Weimar: Shades of History Conclusion: The Vampire in the Americas and Beyond Works Cited Filmography Index

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Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR and the literariness of its literature. The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature,but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.Trade Review[An] intriguing and thought-provoking study . . . -- Stephen Brockmann * MONATSHEFTE *From the starting-point of Honecker's Taboo speech in December 1971, Blankenship demonstrates how Plenzdorf, Heiduczek, Wolf, Müller, Muthesius, and Hein use the subversive potential of intertextual references to portrayals of suicide by authors who belong, according to culture-political doctrine, to the 'classical heritage' (Goethe, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare) or are excluded from it (Günderrode, Kleist). . . . Indicates the potential that the topic 'suicide' still holds in GDR literature. -- Paul Onasch * GERMANISTIK *Blankenship's exclusive focus on the literariness of GDR fiction and his dedication to appreciating this literature for its aesthetic value not only offer new insights into the texts he examines, but foster a better understanding of GDR literary history more generally. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Blankenship's thesis that fictional suicides enable the transmission of a cultural counter-memory in East German literature is suggestive and produces some provocative insights . . . . * GERMAN QUARTERLY *The outcomes of Blankenship's sequence of analyses are, for the most part, very impressive. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *[A] valuable book. Blankenship is extremely knowledgeable, both on modern and older literature, as well as in the area of literary theory. His major aim to point to the literary qualities of GDR literature, or at least of selected works, is laudable as a counter to the tendency to dismiss every aspect of that now vanished country. * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES] *[I]ntellectually stimulating . . . . This study serves as a welcome complement to the understanding of fictional suicides as a realistic response to the dilemmas of everyday life under a Communist dictatorship. * SLAVONIC AND EASTERN EUROPEAN REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Rhetoric of Suicide in East Germany Suicide as an Anti-Fascist Literary Trope: 1945-71 Suicide and the Fluidity of Literary Heritage: Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Remembering to Death: Werner Heiduczek's Tod am Meer Suicide and the Reevaluation of Classicism: Christa Wolf's Kein Ort. Nirgends Suicidal Voices: Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken Specters of Suicide: Christoph Hein's Horns Ende Conclusion: The Reality of Fictional Suicides Epilogue: The Literariness of East German Literature Notes Bibliography Index

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