Literary studies: fiction Books

Book SynopsisA collection of essays that perceive Updike's America through the eyes of Western and Eastern European readers and scholars, contributing to Updike scholarship while demonstrating his resonance across the Atlantic. From the publication in 1958 of his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages. He had a strong following in the United Kingdom, where his books were routinely reviewed in all the leading national newspapers. In Germany, France, Italy, and other countries too, his books were discussed in major publications. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his writing remains strong among European scholars. They are active in the John Updike Society and on the John Updike Review (which began publishing in 2011). During the past four decades, several Europeans have influenced the study of Updike worldwide. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on his oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike's renditions of America through the eyes of scholar-readers from both Western and Eastern Europe. Contributors: Kasia Boddy, Teresa Botelho, Biljana Dojcinovic, Brian Duffy, Karin Ikas, Ulla Kriebernegg, Sylvie Mathé, Judie Newman, Sue Norton, Andrew Tate, Aristi Trendel, Eva-Sabine Zehelein. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Sue Norton is a Lecturer in English at the Dublin Institute of Technology.Trade ReviewThis book doesn't just cover new critical ground - it's an eye-opening take on an author whose fiction has been associated with American pop culture as much as anyone's. Especially in this new climate of nationalism it's an important reminder that opinions can and do vary according to culture and geography, and that we can learn much about ourselves and our treasured authors through volumes such as this.- -- James Plath, Illinois Wesleyan UniversityThis is a timely and smart collection that wonderfully illuminates the diverse critical response that Updike's fiction has generated outside of the United States. The twelve essays in the book fruitfully revisit the themes (sex, mortality, aging, religion) that were most central to Updike's immense body of work while also shedding light on new avenues of inquiry that future scholars might pursue. Indeed, the volume offers a revealing overview of what made Updike one of the most important writers of his generation. A thoughtful and important collection for those interested in Updike and post-1945 American fiction. - -- Matthew Shipe, Washington University in St. Louis[This] well-edited collection provides further evidence of Updike's enduring popularity outside the US. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Updike as Europeans See Him - Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton Under His Skin: Reconstructing the Adolescent Longings of a Would-Be Terrorist - Teresa Botelho "At the other end of life's rainbow": Rabbit's Journey from Adolescence to Old Age and Other Transcendental Trajectories - Eva-Sabine Zehelein Intimations of Mortality: Death's Shadow in Updike's Oeuvre - Sylvie Mathé Back to the Garden: American Longing in John Updike's Couples - Sue Norton Women in John Updike's Villages: Back to the Madonna and Whore - Brian Duffy The Art of Love: Pierre Bourdieu, Cultural Production, and Seek My Face - Karin Ikas Psalmist of the Everyday: Late Updike, Aesthetics, and the Language of Praise - Andrew Tate Guilt, Shame, and Hope in Updike's Short Fiction: "The Music School," "Guilt-Gems," and "Deaths of Distant Friends" - Aristi Trendel Signs of Omission?: Socialist Erasure of Religion in John Updike's Work - Biljana Dojcinovic "Hey, Come on, We're All Americans Here": The Representation of Muslim-American Identity in John Updike's Terrorist - Ulla Kriebernegg Intertextual Updike: Gertrude and Claudius - Judie Newman Rabbit and the News - Kasia Boddy

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Book SynopsisArgues on the evidence of nine major German novels that literature and business have in common a reliance on language, understood in a creative, performative, and rhetorical sense. Throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, Germany has maintained its position as one of the world's largest economies. In the literature of this period, business is often depicted as a performance that requires great linguistic skill. This book is a study of the representation of business practices in nine German-language novels - published during the period from 1901 to 2013 - that explore how language is used rhetorically in pursuit of economic and political agendas. Taken up as case studies, in chronological order, the novels are by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, Bertolt Brecht, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hermann Kant, Friedrich Christian Delius, Kathrin Röggla, and Philipp Schönthaler, all of whom articulate cultural imaginaries and political ideologies at key moments in recent German history. In doing so, they challenge readers to refine their own interpretive skills. By considering business rhetoric in the novels, Ernest Schonfield shows how the formulation of language remains inseparable from the exercise of economic and political power. The central message of this book is that literature and business have something essential in common: they both rely on the persuasive use of language. Ernest Schonfield is Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow.Table of ContentsIntroduction Managing Appearances in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, 1901 Oratory and Publicity in Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan, 1914/18 Organizing Speech in Gabriele Tergit's Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, 1931 Seeing through the Rhetoric in Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenroman, 1934 Giving an Account of the Self in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, 1971 Managing Bureaucracy in Hermann Kant's Das Impressum, 1972 Corporate Discourse in Friedrich Christian Delius's Unsere Siemens-Welt, 1972 Producing Ethos in Kathrin Röggla's wir schlafen nicht, 2004 Communicative Contests in Philipp Schönthaler's Das Schiff das singend zieht auf seiner Bahn, 2013 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA contextualizing overview of the polarized critical reception of Willa Cather, one of the pre-eminent US authors of the twentieth-century. The ever-growing body of criticism on Willa Cather and her fiction is indicative of her enduring position as a pre-eminent figure of twentieth-century American literature. It has been spurred by the challenge of situating Cather in relation to established critical approaches. Since the 1920s, Cather's work has been praised by critics for its realism, innovative form, and diversity; simultaneously, it has been derided as nostalgic, anti-modern, and narrow. Drawing on monographs, edited collections, journal articles, and society publications, Willa Cather: The Critical Conversation provides Cather scholars and students at the graduate and undergraduate levels with an accessible overview of Cather's critical reception through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In addition to providing a valuable resource for research and teaching on Cather, the book also speaks to broader issues such as canon formation and historical trends in literary criticism that are relevant to American literature and culture as a whole. This book provides a solid understanding of the major issues in Cather criticism over time, with an eye toward how the conversation may continue for decades to come.Trade Review[T]his readable book will prove valuable for anyone interested in Cather and her work. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction Willa Cather's Mercurial Position Among the Critics, 1918-1949 The Author and the Archetype: Biographical and Thematic Approaches to Cather Critical Conversations on Gender and Sexuality The Sociohistorical Cather: Approaches to Race, War, and the Environment Cather in the Literary Marketplace: Authorial Criticism, Archival Studies, and Book-Historical Criticism Afterword: "Having It Out," or Continuing the Critical Conversation

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Book SynopsisThis book presents a sequence of interviews between Dikran Karagueuzian and prolific fiction writer John L'Heureux that investigate the nature of writing fiction and the writer's need to write. This conversation includes a discussion of contemporary fiction, its virtues and vices, and its distinguished practitioners, along with a personal perspective on writing novels as opposed to short stories. "Karagueuzian and L'Heureux" also explore L'Heureux's years as director of 'The Stanford Writing Program', detailing his relationship with some of his better-known students, and offering insight into what can and can't be taught in a creative writing program.

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Book SynopsisFrom the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote. In Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Darlene Harbour Unrue finds that Porter's deceptions were a screen for deep personal turmoil. With unprecedented access to archival and personal papers, Unrue brings much new information to light. Porter's maternal grandmother was institutionalized; Porter had more marriages than she acknowledged; she lost babies to miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth, and she grieved over her failed motherhood. Ever present were her fears of exile and insanity. Despite these constant fears, Porter (1890-1980) lived an extraordinary life that vaulted her from poverty and obscurity to wealth and the fame of being a best-selling author. She experienced or observed many of the major events of the twentieth century. So often on the move, she lived in Greenwich Village during its heyday as a hotbed of radical politics and experimental art, in Mexico during the cultural revolution of the 1920s, in Europe during the rise of Nazism, and in America during the Cold War. Thirteen years old when she first rode in an automobile and saw an airplane, she was invited in her last decade to observe and write about the launching of the final Apollo space ship. Asked to summarize her own life, Porter was fond of quoting Madame Du Barry: ""My life has been incredible. I don't believe a word of it!"" Darlene Harbour Unrue is a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has written several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Understanding Katherine Anne Porter and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction.

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Book SynopsisLooks back through the twentieth century in order to confront issues of self and community in veterans' literature, exploring how war and the military have shaped the identities of Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien, three of the twentieth century's most respected authors.Trade ReviewFrom time out of mind, war and art have reflected one another, and it is this intersection of war and art that Alex Vernon raptly illuminates. In Soldiers Once and Still, he has penned a probing and savvy book about three of our most haunting soldier-writers. - Donald Anderson, editor, War, Literature and the Arts

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Book SynopsisIn this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's ""Mason & Dixon"", Roth's ""American Pastoral"", Morrison's ""Paradise"", O'Brien's ""In the Lake of the Woods"", Didion's ""The Last Thing He Wanted"", Eugenides' ""Middlesex"", Lethem's ""Fortress of Solitude"", and DeLillo's ""Underworld"". Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation's past, ""After the End of History"" challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature. At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama's triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political 'end of history' claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, ""After the End of History"" offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.

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Book SynopsisWhy do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers’ leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions of viewers to read both contemporary works and classics, and novels have retained their devoted following within middlebrow communities.In Reading as Therapy, Timothy Aubry argues that contemporary fiction serves primarily as a therapeutic tool for lonely, dissatisfied middle-class American readers, one that validates their own private dysfunctions while supporting elusive communities of strangers unified by shared feelings. Aubry persuasively makes the case that contemporary literature’s persistent appeal depends upon its capacity to perform a therapeutic function.Aubry traces the growth and proliferation of psychological concepts focused on the subjective interior within mainstream, middle-class society and the impact this has had on contemporary fiction. The prevailing tendency among academic critics has been to decry the personal emphasis of contemporary fiction as complicit with the rise of a narcissistic culture, the ascendency of liberal individualism, and the breakdown of public life. Reading as Therapy, by contrast, underscores the varied ideological effects that therapeutic culture can foster.To uncover the many unpredictable ways in which contemporary literature answers the psychological needs of its readers, Aubry considers several different venues of reader-response—including Oprah’s Book Club and Amazon customer reviews—the promotional strategies of publishing houses, and a variety of contemporary texts, ranging from Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner to Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He concludes that, in the face of an atomistic social landscape, contemporary fiction gives readers a therapeutic vocabulary that both reinforces the private sphere and creates surprising forms of sympathy and solidarity among strangers.Trade Review“Is literature a form of therapy? Should it be? Tim Aubry takes the familiar complaint about literature’s therapeutic uses and patiently unfolds their hidden complexities in this lucid and eloquent book. Combining intellectual generosity with critical acumen, his argument offers fresh insight into contemporary fiction, middlebrow culture, and larger questions of how and why we read.”—Rita Felski, author, Uses of Literature“Therapy and the therapeutic: as soon as one has laid these loaded terms alongside recent literary history, their explanatory value becomes self-evident, and Tim Aubry deserves credit simply for staging this encounter. And yet, such is the force of his readings of some of the exemplary texts of our therapeutic postmodernity, this initial insight keeps on giving, yielding surprise after surprise. As I approached the end of this highly readable, unpretentiously learned text, I was asking myself if the author hadn’t in fact ‘broken the code’ of contemporary American literature, or at least one of them.” —Mark McGurl, author, The Program Era“This lively and intelligent study makes a timely contribution to a well-worn subfield of American studies: the intellectual defense of middlebrow culture. With a sharp sense of irony, Tim Aubry asks how fiction is used for therapeutic or self-help purposes by contemporary American readers. The paradox is that part of what distinguishes middlebrow audiences from academics like himself is their respect for literature, but Aubry’s own close readings of the works of contemporary writers are always sensitive and nuanced.” —Leah Price, author, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel

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Book SynopsisIn 1937 and 1938, Ernest Hemingway made four trips to Spain to cover its civil war for the North American News Alliance wire service and to help create the pro-Republican documentary film The Spanish Earth. Hemingway’s Second War is the first book-length scholarly work devoted to this subject.Drawing on primary sources, Alex Vernon provides a thorough account of Hemingway’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, a messy, complicated, brutal precursor to World War II that inspired Hemingway’s great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Vernon also offers the most sustained history and consideration to date of The Spanish Earth. Directed by Joris Ivens, this film was a landmark work in the development of war documentaries, for which Hemingway served as screenwriter and narrator.Contributing factual, textual, and contextual information to Hemingway studies in general and his participation in the war specifically, Vernon has written a critical biography for Hemingway’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War that includes discussion of the left-wing politics of the era and the execution of José Robles Pazos. Finally, the book provides readings of For Whom the Bell Tolls both in historical context and on its own terms.Marked by both impressive breadth and accessibility, Hemingway’s Second War will be an indispensible resource for students of literature, film, journalism, and European history and a landmark work for readers of Ernest Hemingway.

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Book SynopsisIn the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flurry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato's Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato's way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato's principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any contemporary translation. Much of what the dialogue offers to today's reader - namely, its invitation to see erotic experience as the privileged locus of our contact with the sacred and the divine - is lost in translation by failures of tone more than by inaccuracies or simple infelicities. The elevation and sophistication of Shelley's prose makes his translation a much better English vehicle for Plato's writing than the rather chatty and colloquial translations current today. Plato's speeches on love need an English idiom in which myth is at home, and in which humour rises to urbanity rather than descending to mere wit and joke. With Shelley, we get a translation of a great literary masterpiece by a writer who is himself a literary master, and his mastery is of exactly the type required by Plato's text. This translation came at the height of Shelley's powers, mirroring in language and conception some of his finest works, and so is itself a precious document in the history of Romanticism, for which the re-appropriation of Plato is second in importance only to the massive influence of Shakespeare. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband's literary executor, upon publication of (a somewhat expurgated version of) the dialogue, boasted that "Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special and the tangible. This did not result from imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study. He then translated his Symposium and Ion; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley." If this goes too far, it goes at least in the right direction. David K. O'Connor, in his introduction and footnotes, provides the historical and philosophic framework to appreciate best the importance of the dialogue and translation.Table of Contentsintroduction, notes, Stephanus numbers, index

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Book SynopsisThis title includes in-depth critical discussions of Edgar Allan Poe's work. This is a collection of sixteen essays by leading scholars examining the short stories and life of the 19th century American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Representing the best of a broad range of critical perspectives from the psychoanalytical to the postcolonial, the volume serves as an excellent introduction to Poe's tales and the critical conversation surrounding them. The volume is introduced by Steven Frye, Professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield, the author of ""Historiography and the American Romance: A Study of Four Authors"" (2001) and the editor of ""Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation"" (2008). Original essays illuminate the influences that shaped Poe, contextualize his work, and assess his enduring impact on American and Continental poetry and fiction. A sketch of the historical and cultural forces surrounding Poe illuminates their influence on his aesthetic; a reception history examines Poe's enduring contributions to the short story genre, the French Symbolist movement, and modernist aesthetics; a comparison of Poe's and Baudelaire's works reveals how the two authors exploited the duplicitous possibilities within the writer-reader relationship; and a critical reading of ""The Fall of the House of Usher,"" ""The Black Cat,"" ""The Tell-Tale Heart,"" ""Ligeia,"" and ""Bernice"" seeks to expose the stories' unifying aesthetic principles. Further, a varied selection of critical views offers detailed analyses of Poe's most essential tales like ""The Murders in the Rue Morgue"", ""The Fall of the House of Usher"", ""The Cask of Amontillado"", ""The Gold Bug"", and ""Ligeia"". Uniquely, the collection also contains an original essay by Nathaniel Rich, senior editor of ""The Paris Review"". Reflecting on Poe's insight into and fascination with the perverse instincts of humanity, Rich offers a writer's perspective on one of America's most enigmatic writers. Finally, a wealth of reference material, including a complete list of Poe's publications and a full biography, rounds out the volume by giving readers ample sources for continuing their studies. Edited and with an introduction by Steven Frye, the collection is a gateway into the best of Poe and his critics. Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of 'Works Cited', along with endnotes.

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Book SynopsisThe purpose of this collection of sixteen essays on William Faulkner's multi-faceted novel is to provide the reader who has read or is about to read Absalom, Absalom! with as much of a multi-faceted perspective as possible.Faulkner created a novel so complex that every interpretation of his "little postage stamp of native soil" is as valid as a single postage stamp in a postal system. Each essay is limited by its premise, but that very limitation enables the critic to focus the reader's attention upon an aspect of this multifaceted novel. The value of each of these pieces is not only what it reveals but what it does not reveal, enabling the reader to participate in the critical process by questioning, disagreeing, conjuring his or her own insights along the way.The opening six original essays offer basic, clearly stated perspectives: a brief view of Faulkner's life and works; and two close readings of Absalom, Absalom! that apply specific critical methods. The novel in a cultural-historical context is also discussed, as is the novel's critical reception. Many more narrowly-focused essays discuss the novel from a feminist standpoint, its relationship to The Great Gatsby and All the King's Men.The narrative perspective and the storytelling themes that pervade the novel are discussed at length as is the interwoven web of facts that enriches Absalom, Absalom! with countless dimensions. Tensions between the old south and the modern era are explored. Faulkner's structure and prose style are meticulously investigated. In sum, this reference provides a remarkably rich, deeply varied number of perspectives on a novel that continues to offer new insight into its complex design and execution.Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of "Works Cited," along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources:

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Book SynopsisThe novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.

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Book SynopsisThe prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated in over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment.Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh's works and major works of scholarship. The essays in part 2, ""Approaches,"" present ideas for teaching Ghosh's works through considerations of postcolonial feminism, historicity in the novels, environmentalism, language, sociopolitical conflict, genre, intersectional reading, and the ethics of colonized subjecthood. Guidance for teaching Ghosh in different contexts, such as general education, world literature, or single-author classes, is provided.Trade ReviewI enjoyed reading [this volume] tremendously and enthusiastically recommend it"" - Pallavi Rastogi, Louisiana State University

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Book SynopsisThe Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as The Golden Lotus) was published in the early seventeenth century and may be the first long work of Chinese fiction written by a single (though anonymous) author. Featuring both complex structural features and psychological and emotional realism, the novel centers on the rich merchant Ximen Qing and his household and describes the physical surroundings and material objects of a Ming Dynasty city. In part a social, political, and moral critique, the novel reflects on hierarchical power relations of family and state and the materialism of life at the time.The essays in this volume provide ideas for teaching the novel from a variety of approaches, from questions of genre, intertextuality, and the novel's reception to material culture, family and social dynamics, and power structures in sexual relations. Insights into the novel's representation of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, legal culture, class, slavery, and obscenity are offered throughout the volume.Trade ReviewA stellar crew of senior scholars contributed essays for this volume." —David Rolston, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Book SynopsisThe Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as The Golden Lotus) was published in the early seventeenth century and may be the first long work of Chinese fiction written by a single (though anonymous) author. Featuring both complex structural features and psychological and emotional realism, the novel centers on the rich merchant Ximen Qing and his household and describes the physical surroundings and material objects of a Ming Dynasty city. In part a social, political, and moral critique, the novel reflects on hierarchical power relations of family and state and the materialism of life at the time.The essays in this volume provide ideas for teaching the novel from a variety of approaches, from questions of genre, intertextuality, and the novel's reception to material culture, family and social dynamics, and power structures in sexual relations. Insights into the novel's representation of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, legal culture, class, slavery, and obscenity are offered throughout the volume.

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Book SynopsisAcclaimed as the greatest American novel of the last quarter century, ""Beloved"" confronts the legacy of slavery and its aftermath. The new full-length essays in this volume provide a comprehensive critical overview of this modern classic. This study guide also features a chronology of the author's life, a bibliography, an index, notes on the contributing writers, and an introduction by literature professor Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisMaya Angelou's unforgettable autobiography, nominated for the National Book Award in 1969, recounts her struggle as a young black woman to overcome obstacles and realize her dreams. The new full-length essays in this title provide a comprehensive critical overview of this modern classic. This study guide also features an introduction by master scholar Harold Bloom, notes on the contributing writers, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index for easy reference.

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Book SynopsisNight, a memoir by concentration camp survivor and Nobel Peace Prize - winner Elie Wiesel, is a key work of Holocaust literature. It bears witness to the horrors endured by a teenage boy whose freedom and family are forcibly wrested from him. This new study guide to Wiesel's moving story also features an annotated bibliography, a listing of other works by the author, and an introduction by literary scholar Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisIn this classic coming-of-age novel set in post-World War II America, Esther Greenwood emerges as a double for author Sylvia Plath. A summer internship at a fashion magazine in New York City reveals only the lack of beauty in the young woman's inner life, as Esther succumbs to a pervasive depression that she likens to being trapped beneath the title object, a bell jar, struggling for her next breath. Noted literary scholar Harold Bloom introduces this new title in the ""Bloom's Guides"" series, which also features an annotated bibliography and a listing of other works by the author.

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Book SynopsisThe Joy Luck Club explores the lives of the women in four Chinese-American families and the daughters who struggle to fulfill or reject the cultural and familial expectations placed on them. Residing in San Francisco's Chinatown, the characters reveal themselves through their stories to be incredibly strong women. This guide to ""The Joy Luck Club"" includes helpful critical excerpts for those studying the book, an annotated bibliography, an index for quick reference, and an introduction by critic Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisThings Fall Apart, set in Nigeria about a century ago, is widely regarded as Chinua Achebe's masterpiece. Considered one of the most broadly read African novels, Achebe's work responded to the two-dimensional caricatures of Africans that often dominated Western literature. This invaluable new edition of the study guide contains a selection of the finest contemporary criticism of this classic novel.

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Book SynopsisTracing the rise of Napoleon as the leader of the barnyard animals and his ensuing dictatorship in the farmyard community, this classic satiric allegory serves as a warning to all societies as it depicts the slide from revolution to totalitarianism. Orwell transforms the seeming pastoral innocence of his setting into a pernicious political theater of repression and control. This new edition of critical essays examining Animal Farm provides 10 to 12 full-length critical essays for students of literature, plus a chronology of the author's life, a bibliography, an index, and notes on the contributing writers.

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Book SynopsisWidely acclaimed as one of the finest short story writers and known for her acerbic wit, complex themes, and illuminating portrayal of the American South, Flannery O'Connor is a favorite among students, scholars, and general readers. Her stories ""A Good Man Is Hard to Find"" and ""Everything That Rises Must Converge"" confirm her prodigious talent and are prominently featured in high school and university literature courses today. This new collection of critical essays presents a chronology of O'Connor's life, a bibliography of her works, an index, and an introductory essay by literary critic Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisAs a chronicler of the African American experience in fiction and as an incisive cultural commentator in her essays and lectures, Toni Morrison (b. 1931) is regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished novelists and intellectuals. Her novels are richly layered narratives that explore the meanings of tragedy and myth in individual lives. Morrison's perspectives on American life and culture, rendered with a deep understanding of the consequences of history and the power of art, are always compelling. Toni Morrison: Conversations includes interviews with the Nobel Laureate that bring into the foreground Morrison's comments on American literature and society, the academy, and her own work. She discusses growing up in Lorain, Ohio, her role as editor at Random House, the continuing evolution of her style, her teaching philosophy, and her most recent novels Jazz, Paradise, and Love. This volume includes interviews and profiles from the 1970s and 1980s that were not collected in Conversations with Toni Morrison (1993) and a rich collection of new interviews published together for the first time, including conversations with Paula Giddings, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and Elissa Schappell. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

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Book Synopsis¡Viva la historieta! critically examines the participation of Mexican comic books in the continuing debate over the character and consequences of globalization in Mexico. The focus of the book is on graphic narratives produced by and for Mexicans in the period following the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an economic accord that institutionalized the free-market vision of relationships among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Eight chapters cover a broad range of contemporary Mexican comics, including works of propaganda, romance and adventure, graphic novels, a corporate ""brand"" series, didactic single-issue books, and a superhero parody series. Each chapter offers an examination of the ways in which specific comics or comic book series represent Mexico's national identity, the U.S.'s influence, and globalization's effects on technology and economics since the passage of NAFTA. Through careful attention to how recent Mexican comics portray a changing nation, author Bruce Campbell reveals a contentious range of perspectives on the problems and promises of globalization. At the same time, Campbell argues that the contrasting views of globalization that circulate widely in Mexican historietas reflect a still unsettled relationship between Mexico and its superpower neighbor.

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Book SynopsisSoon after Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954, he became an object of literary and journalistic scrutiny. This attention would continue until his last days, four decades and forty books later. Conversations with Kingsley Amis includes both the first and last interviews Amis gave. Celebrated by reviewers and critics for his wit and irreverence, Amis rose to the occasion whenever interviewed. His clever and common-sense views covered everything from the state of the novel and current intellectual trends to the circumstances of his domestic life. Not many writers can hold the interest of inquisitors from both Penthouse and the Economist as Amis does. Not many writers, for that matter, articulate views worth recording on sexual relations, about which Amis is something of a failed expert, and on the modern university, about which he could claim a greater authority. English periodicals of all varieties sought out Amis for his opinions on culture, both high and low. Along the way, Amis also entertained literary interrogators from the Paris Review and other journals, including talks with a number of distinguished men of letters such as Clive James, Michael Barber, and John Mortimer.Trade Review"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing" - Kingsley Amis"

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Book SynopsisIf Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't ""think about [his] reader at all when [he's] writing,"" he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers, whether they be students, writers or academics, delighting in the diversity of his audience and in the ""greater democratization of commentary"" provided by alternative media.These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve. Most date from the late 1990s on, when the publication of Pulitzer-finalist Cloudsplitter in conjunction with the back-to-back release of film adaptations of his novels The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction suddenly put Banks in the spotlight as ""Hollywood's Hottest New Property.""Banks has always believed that the writer plays ""the role of the storyteller,"" fulfilling very basic and universal human needs: ""to talk about the human condition, to tell us something about ourselves."" Yet, for him, writing is not a one-way process. It is an exchange where the key is to tune in and listen--to the voices of the characters engaging the writer's imagination and to the voices of the readers sharing their own experiences of his books and of the world.

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Book SynopsisA collection of essays tracing seven decades of literary interaction between Hemingway and notable French authorsIn a 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: "The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck."When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1922, he was an unknown writer from America. The City of Light was where he learned his craft and gained legitimacy. Although much has been written about Hemingway's apprentice years in Paris, little has been published about his literary convergences with French writers. In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway's major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers.While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway's writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other's works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway's craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled "le style américain."

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway famously called Spain "the country that I loved more than any other except my own," and his forty-year love affair with it provided an inspiration and setting for major works from each decade of his career: The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden; his only full-length play, The Fifth Column; the Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth; and some of his finest short fiction, including "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."In Hemingway's Spain, Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino collect thirteen penetrating and innovative essays by scholars of different nationalities, generations, and perspectives who explore Hemingway's writing about Spain and his relationship to Spanish culture and ask us in a myriad of ways to rethink how Hemingway imagined Spain—whether through a modernist mythologization of the Spanish soil, his fascination with the bullfight, his interrogation of the relationship between travel and tourism, his involvement with Spanish politics, his dialog with Spanish writers, or his appreciation of the subtleties of Spanish values. In addition to fresh critical responses to some of Hemingway's most famous novels and stories, a particular strength of Hemingway's Spain is its consideration of neglected works, such as Hemingway's Spanish Civil War stories and The Dangerous Summer. The collection is noteworthy for its attention to how Hemingway's post–World War II fiction revisits and reimagines his earlier Spanish works, and it brings new light both to Hemingway's Spanish Civil War politics and his reception in Spain during the Franco years. Hemingway's lifelong engagement with Spain is central to under­standing and appreciating his work, and Hemingway's Spain is an indispensable exploration of Hemingway's home away from home.

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Book SynopsisIn 1925, Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that “the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because the war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” Though a world war veteran for seven years, at the time he wrote Fitzgerald, Hemingway had barely scratched the surface of his war experiences in his writing, yet it would be a subject he could never resist. As an eyewitness to the emergence of modern warfare, through the Second World War, and as a writer devoted to recreating experience on the page, Ernest Hemingway has gifted us with an oeuvre of wartime representation ideal for the classroom.Teaching Hemingway and War offers fifteen original essays on Hemingway’s relationship to war with a variety of instructional settings in mind, and the contributors bring to the volume a range of experience, backgrounds, and approaches. Some of the topics included are: The Violence of Story: Teaching In Our Time and Narrative Rhetoric Hemingway’s Maturing View of the Spanish Civil War Robert Jordan’s Philosophy of War in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway, PTSD, and Clinical Depression Perceptions of Pain in The Sun Also Rises Across the River and into the Trees as Trauma Literature The final section provides three excellent undergraduate essays as examples of what students are capable of producing and as contributions to Hemingway studies in their own right.

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Book SynopsisDevoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he called faërie, a world they both create and inhabit, and with the elements that make that world the special place it is. They cover a range of subjects, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and their place within the legendarium he called the Silmarillion to shorter works like "The Story of Kullervo" and "Smith of Wootton Major."From the pen of eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, the individual essays in this collection were written over a span of twenty years, each written to fit the parameters of a conference, an anthology, or both. They are revised slightly from their original versions to eliminate repetition and bring them up to date. Grouped loosely by theme, they present an unpatterned mosaic, depicting topics from myth to truth, from social manners to moral behavior, from textual history to the micro particles of Middle-earth.Together these essays present a complete picture of a man as complicated as the books that bear his name—an independent and unorthodox thinker who was both a believer and a doubter able to maintain conflicting ideas in tension, a teller of tales both romantic and bitter, hopeful and pessimistic, in equal parts tragic and comedic. A man whose work does not seek for right or wrong answers so much as a way to accommodate both; a man of antitheses.Scholars of fantasy literature generally and of Tolkien particularly will find much of value in this insightful collection by a seasoned explorer of Tolkien's world of faërie.Trade ReviewThere Would Always Be a Fairy Tale celebrates an expertise brought to its height by long and careful study, ultimately revealing as much about Flieger and her dedication as it does Tolkien and his." — Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research

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Book SynopsisWhile visiting with Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensie notices a bookshelf filled with such titles as Nymphs and Their Ways and Is Man a Myth? Beginning with these imaginary texts, Charlie W. Starr offers a comprehensive study of C. S. Lewis’s theory of myth, including his views on Greek and Norse mythology, the origins of myth, and the implications of myth on thought, art, gender, theology, and literary and linguistic theory. For Lewis, myth represents an ancient mode of thought focused in the imagination—a mode that became the key that ultimately brought Lewis to his belief in Jesus Christ as the myth become fact.Beginning with a foreword by Lewis scholar Devin Brown, The Faun’s Bookshelf goes on to discuss the many books Lewis imagined throughout his writings—books whose titles he made up but never wrote. It also presents the sylvan myths central to the first two book titles in Mr. Tumnus’s library, including explorations of the relationshipbetween myth and reality, the spiritual significance of natural conservation, and the spiritual and incarnational qualities of gender.Starr then turns to the definition of myth, the literaryqualities of myth, the mythic nature inherent in divine glory, humanity’s destiny to embrace (or reject) that glory, and a deeper exploration of the epistemological ramifications of myth in relation to meaning, imagination, reason, and truth.Trade Review"This book will be most interesting for those that enjoy Lewis already. It is well-written in accessible prose, so that it should not be consigned to the stacks of academic libraries." — Ethics and Culture

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Book SynopsisUsing a philosophical lens to more deeply examine, appreciate, and understand C. S. Lewis's writingsDrawing on C. S. Lewis's essays, sermons, and fiction, The Lion's Country offers a comprehensive exploration of Lewis's understanding of reality—important, Charlie W. Starr argues, to more fully understand Lewis's writing but also to challenge and inform our own thought about what constitutes the Real.For Lewis, reality is not simply a matter of what we can ascertain with our senses; the Real includes but also transcends the physical. Indeed, for Lewis, who is perhaps the most influential Christian writer of the 20th century, God is the most Real thing there is. Yet during the modernist era when Lewis lived, taught, and wrote, the prevailing view was that the only legitimate knowledge was that which could be derived from empirically provable facts. Lewis's rejection of such a narrow belief prompted him to ask, "What are facts without interpretation?" and led to his lifelong pursuit of experiencing and understanding the Real. Much of his fiction, including The Chronicles of Narnia, is fundamentally about how we can encounter reality and be certain of what we know.Starr's unique look at Lewis's philosophical and theological underpinnings extends even to a discussion of heaven and what it would be like to see the face of God. Including a never-before-released passage from Lewis's unpublished Prayer Manuscript, The Lion's Country is an essential contribution to Lewis studies.Trade Review"In The Lion's Country, Charlie Starr skillfully guides us through Lewis's theory of reality, a world of fine distinctions and conceptual and linguistic pitfalls. After finishing, readers will be well equipped to journey further on their own. Clear, engaging, and insightful." —Devin Brown, professor of English at Asbury University and author of A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis "Starr has provided us with a new thread to weave together the many different works in many different genres that flowed from Lewis's pen over a quarter century." —Louis Markos, professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and author of The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis for Beginners, The Myth Made Fact "Starr, a professor of English at Alderson Broaddus University who is also an expert on Lewis's handwriting, has a deep and intimate knowledge of Lewis's full body of work. In his new book, he marshals that knowledge for a single purpose: to tease out what Lewis had to say in his fiction, nonfiction, essays, letters, and sermons about the nature of reality. .... Such wonders await the reader who, guided by Starr, ventures into the realms of C. S. Lewis."—Christianity Today

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Book SynopsisA line-by-line analysis of one of Hemingway's greatest novels Published in 1940, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is widely considered a masterpiece of war literature. A bestseller upon its release, the novel has long been both admired and ridiculed for its depiction of Robert Jordan's military heroism and wartime romance. Yet its validation of seemingly conflicting narratives and its rendering of the intricate world its characters inhabit, as well as its dense historical, literary, and biographical allusions, have made it a work that remains a focus of interest and study. Alex Vernon, in this contribution to the Reading Hemingway series, mines the historical record to unprecedented depths, examining Hemingway's drafts and correspondence, synthesizing the body of literary criticism about the novel, and engaging in close textual analysis. As a result, new and important insights into the complex situation of the Spanish Civil War—integral to the novel—emerge, enriching our understanding of the novel. Through Vernon's comprehensive work, contemporary readers and scholars are reminded that For Whom the Bell Tolls is still vital, significant, and relevant.Trade Review"Meticulously researched and assembled by a widely respected authority on For Whom the Bell Tolls, this compendium is an extremely useful guide to the many references, allusions, and Spanish phrases in the novel."—Milton Cohen, author of The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s "The farther the world of the Spanish Civil War recedes into the past, the more anyone who wants to fully understand Hemingway's ambitious novel can use a guidebook like this one. With his lifetime of engagement with Hemingway, Alex Vernon is exactly the right person to write it, and he has done a splendid and thorough job."—Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 "Anyone interested in understanding Hemingway's achievement in this important and controversial novel will find Alex Vernon's Reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls indispensable. —Laurence W. Mazzeno, author of The Critics and Hemingway, 1924-2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon "Alex Vernon has written the indispensable companion to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Beautifully researched, this volume elucidates the historical forces, figures, places, and events essential to a deep understanding of this masterpiece set against the complexities of the Spanish Civil War. With vital insights into the novel's composition, its manuscript, its major themes, and Hemingway's craft, this book will be deeply appreciated by students and scholars alike." —Carl Eby, author of Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood and coeditor of Hemingway's Spain: Imagining the Spanish World

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Book SynopsisJames Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes provides an evocative and meticulously researched study of one of the best known and yet least understood authors of the New Negro Renaissance era. Johnson, familiar to many as an early civil rights leader active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an intentionally controversial writer on the subject of the significance of race in America, was one of the most prolific, wide-ranging, and yet elusive authors of twentieth-century African American literature.Johnson realised early in his writing career that he could draw attention to the struggles of African Americans by using unconventional literary methods such as the incorporation of sound into his texts. In this groundbreaking work, literary critic Noelle Morrissette examines how his literary representation of the extremes of sonic experience—functioning as either cultural violence or creative force—draws attention to the mutual contingencies and the interdependence of American and African American cultures. Moreover, Morrissette argues, Johnson represented these “American sounds” as a source of multiplicity and diversity, often developing a framework for the interracial transfer of sound. The lyricist and civil rights leader used sound as a formal aesthetic practice in and between his works, presenting it as an unbounded cultural practice that is as much an interracial as it is a racially distinct cultural history.Drawing on archival materials such as early manuscript notes and drafts of Johnson’s unpublished and published work, Morrissette explores the author’s complex aesthetic of sound, based on black expressive culture and cosmopolitan interracial experiences. This aesthetic evolved over the course of his writing life, beginning with his early Broadway musical comedy smash hits and the composition of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man(1912), and developing through his “real” autobiography, Along This Way (1933). The result is an innovative new interpretation of the works of one of the early twentieth century’s most important and controversial writers and civil rights leaders.

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Book SynopsisHow could novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin change the hearts and minds of thousands of mid-nineteenth-century readers, yet make so many modern readers cringe at their over-the-top, tear-filled scenes? Sentimental Readers explains why sentimental rhetoric was so compelling to readers of that earlier era, why its popularity waned in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and why today it is generally characterised as overly emotional and artificial. But author Faye Halpern also does more: she demonstrates that this now despised rhetoric remains relevant to contemporary writing teachers and literary scholars. Halpern examines these novels with a fresh eye by positioning sentimentality as a rhetorical strategy on the part of these novels’ (mostly) female authors, who used it to answer a question that plagued the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century American rhetoric and oratory: how could listeners be sure an eloquent speaker wasn’t unscrupulously persuading them of an untruth? The authors of sentimental novels managed to solve this problem even as the professional male rhetoricians and orators could not, because sentimental rhetoric, filled with tears and other physical cues of earnestness, ensured that an audience could trust the heroes and heroines of these novels. However, as a wider range of authors began wielding sentimental rhetoric later in the nineteenth century, readers found themselves less and less convinced by this strategy. In her final discussion, Halpern steps beyond a purely historical analysis to interrogate contemporary rhetoric and reading practices among literature professors and their students, particularly first-year students new to the “close reading” method advocated and taught in most college English classrooms. Doing so allows her to investigate how sentimental novels are understood today by both groups and how these contemporary reading strategies compare to those of Americans more than a century ago. Clearly, sentimental novels still have something to teach us about how and why we read.

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Book SynopsisAlice beyond Wonderland explores the ubiquitous power of Lewis Carroll’s imagined world. Including work by some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the field of Lewis Carroll studies, all introduced by Karoline Leach’s edgy foreword, Alice beyond Wonderland considers the literary, imaginative, and cultural influences of Carroll’s 19th-century story on the high-tech, postindustrial cultural space of the twenty-first century.The scholars in this volume attempt to move beyond the sexually charged permutations of the ""Carroll myth,"" the image of an introverted man fumbling into literary immortality through his love for a prepubescent Alice. Contributions include an essay comparing Dantean and Carrollian underworlds, one investigating child characters as double agents in untamed lands, one placing Wonderland within the geometrical and algebraic “fourth dimension,” one investigating the visual and verbal interplay of hand imagery, and one exploring the influence of Japanese translations of Alice on the Gothic-Lolita subculture of neo-Victorian enthusiasts. This is a bold, capacious, and challenging work.Trade Review“Alice beyond Wonderland both defines the continuing strangeness of the Alice books and offers a surprising and fresh reading of the ongoing ‘work’ of Carroll’s writing on Wonderland in the twenty-first century. This fresh consideration, determined not to repeat the critical tropes of the past, indicates the ways Alice has crossed cultures and literary, political, and technological spaces. Hollingsworth deserves our praise for being so bold a thinker in conceiving this project.”- Barry Qualls, author, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life;“Alice beyond Wonderland offers an exciting range of new perspectives on the Alice books, linked around the core theme of space. This impressive collection will make an excellent and original contribution to the literature on Alice and Carroll.”- Will Brooker, author, Alice’s Adventure: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture

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Book SynopsisCaterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.Trade ReviewWe have always known that Italian writers took an intense interest in Walt Whitman, but Caterina Bernardini's exciting study now fully opens us up to the astonishing degree to which Italy is Whitmanland. Whitman's reception in Italy, up to the breakdown of fascism in 1945, is not only a revealing story in itself but it also offers a history of transatlantic modernism in the context of the political and cultural distortions of the twentieth century. Bernardini's book is a case study demonstrating Whitman's place in Goethe's ever-relevant formula of Weltliteratur." - Walter Grünzweig, author, Constructing the German Walt Whitman"A spirited look at the intercultural conversations sparked by Whitman in Italy. Familiar names like Gabriele D'Annunzio and Cesare Pavese are joined by socialist Ada Negri and feminist Sibilla Aleramo, giving us a vibrant new map of Italian writings. Translation and reinvention transform the very meaning of 'literature' itself." - Wai Chee Dimock, author, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

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Book SynopsisHow does contemporary literature contend with the power and responsibility of authorship, particularly when considering marginalized groups? How have the works of multiethnic authors challenged the notion that writing and authorship are neutral or universal? In Novel Subjects, Leah Milne offers a new way to look at multicultural literature by focusing on scenes of writing in contemporary works by authors with marginalized identities. These scenes, she argues, establish authorship as a form of radical self-care-a term we owe to Audre Lorde, who defines self-care as self-preservation and 'an act of political warfare.' In engaging in this battle, the works discussed in this study confront limitations on ethnicity and nationality wrought by the institutionalization of multiculturalism. They also focus on identities whose mere presence on the cultural landscape is often perceived as vindictive or willful. Analyzing recent texts by Carmen Maria Machado, Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, Toni Morrison, and more, Milne connects works across cultures and nationalities in search of reasons for this recent trend of depicting writers as characters in multicultural texts. Her exploration uncovers fiction that embrace unacceptable or marginalized modes of storytelling-such as plagiarism, historical revisions, jokes, and lies-as well as inauthentic, invisible, and unexceptional subjects. These works ultimately reveal a shared goal of expanding the borders of belonging in ethnic and cultural groups, and thus add to the ever-evolving conversations surrounding both multicultural literature and self-care.Trade ReviewMilne offers a bold intervention in the field of contemporary American literature: a defense of multiculturalism at a time when it seems to have been largely abandoned except in corporate circles. When so much of American political discourse seems to be beholden to a resurgent anti-immigrant ethnonationalism, such a defense is welcome." - Min Hyoung Song, author, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American"The themes Milne engages are quite important to American literature, contemporary fiction, multiethnic literature, and ethnic studies-there aren't enough works that engage with contemporary ethnic American literature, especially when thinking through issues of narratology and intersectionality. Studies and comparative analyses of this kind are the most innovative in the field and are what students are looking for." - Jennifer Ho, coeditor, Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States

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Book SynopsisEcospatiality explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein. Building on the work of scholars in geography, sociology, ecocriticism, and geocriticism, this book articulates the theory of ecospatiality: an understanding of place as simultaneously spatial, ecological, and historical. In our current historical moment, which is characterized by ongoing ecological collapse and a not-unrelated increase in social disorder, few issues are more urgent than the human relationship with our environments. Whether we characterize this new epoch as the climate change era or the Anthropocene, we can no longer ignore the fact that the places we live are rapidly changing in response to economic and environmental pressures. Rather than thinking of place as a neutral site for social interaction, we should recognize how it underpins and intertwines with human experience.Fortunately, literature can help us think through how place operates. Lowell Wyse shows that texts can be understood as works of literary cartography. Focusing on works of nonfiction and fiction whose primary settings are on the North American continent, Ecospatiality demonstrates how these narratives rely on realistic literary geography to invoke, and sometimes retell, important aspects of environmental history within particular communities and bioregions.Trade ReviewIn the past, I have found it hard to recommend any single work that seemed like a comprehensive introduction to the field of place-conscious literary studies. This book is it." - Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska "Ecospatiality is a tour de force of literary cartography. Ranging across histories, bioregions, and communities-Indigenous, Latinx, African American, European American-Wyse introduces the concept of ecospatiality into the lexicon of the deep map. In a study that is impressively comprehensive, he contributes innovative readings of American authors and American landscapes." - Susan Naramore Maher, coeditor, Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time

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Book SynopsisContested Terrain explores suburban literature between two moments of domestic crisis: the housing shortage that gave rise to the modern era of suburbanization after World War II, and the mortgage defaults and housing foreclosures that precipitated the Great Recession. Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating, placeless quality of suburbia, Wilhite argues that we should reimagine suburban literature as part of a long literary tradition of U.S. regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and the environmental imperialism of urban sprawl. Wilhite produces new, unexpected readings of works by Sinclair Lewis, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Yates, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Ford, Jung Yun, and Patrick Flanery. Contested Terrain demonstrates how postwar suburban nation-building ushered in an informal geography that recalibrated notions of national identity, democratic citizenship, and domestic security to the scale of the single-family home. Trade Review“Keith Wilhite’s trenchant study of the literature of the U.S. suburbs is defined by a sophisticated critical understanding of regionality and regional writing. Vitally, Contested Terrain illuminates how post-1945 authors have interrogated the suburbs’ complex enmeshment within local, national, and global projects and processes.”—Martin Dines, author, The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spacial Complexity in Metropolitan America “Contested Terrain achieves the near impossible. It rescues a term pejoratively associated with provincialism to redefine suburbia as our primary noncontiguous national region. In making its case, by way of established and relatively new writers, ethnically diverse writers, and writers working in different genres, the book offers a superb cross section of what American writing over the last seventy-five years actually looks like.”—Stacey Olster, author, The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction

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Book SynopsisWho writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that’s hardly the only change. Today’s war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre’s conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics— authorship, content, and form—of the American war fiction genre.Trade Review“A very smart, very relevant work. Any scholar of American war fiction would find this study extremely useful.”—Eric Bennett, author, A Big Enough Lie“Writing Wars is a brilliant excavation of the stories Americans have been telling ourselves about war for the past century. Eisler has written a sharp, engaging, and troubling cultural history.”—Phil Klay, National Book Award winner, author, Redeployment “This brilliant, deeply interdisciplinary study is Eisler's first book, but with it he joins the ranks of Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and Paul Fussell. A stunning achievement.”—Choice

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Paul Auster is a comprehensive companion to the work of a writer who effectively balances a particular combination of Jewish American identity and European sensibility across an impressive breadth of novels, screenplays, essays, and poetry. James Peacock views Auster as chiefly concerned with the individual's problematic relationship with language, a theme present from the enigmatic poetry of Auster's early career to the more inclusive and optimistic imaginings of the films Smoke and Blue in the Face and the novels Timbuktu, The Brooklyn Follies, and Man in the Dark.Peacock's study maps the evolution of Auster's fiction and its forms, goals, and influences. Peacock argues that the key event for any Auster character is the realization that language should not be restricted to documenting reality but should instead be embraced for its metaphorical qualities and constantly shifting nature. Peacock finds in Auster a view of language as inherently ethical and communal because, to use language creatively, one must be immersed in the plurality of experience and listen to the voices of others. In celebrated works such as The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, these voices include Auster's literary antecedents. Increasingly in his recent work, however, they include those of ordinary people. Peacock suggests that in the aftermath of 9/11, much of Auster's fiction places even greater importance on sympathetic relations with ordinary individuals and advocates through artistic endeavors the merits of connecting with others.

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Book SynopsisEarl Ingersoll introduces the fiction of Steven Millhauser, whose distinguished career of more than four decades includes eight books of short fiction and four novels, the latest being the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler (1996). In Understanding Steven Millhauser, Ingersoll explores Millhauser's twelve books chronologically, revealing the development of a major contemporary American writer and a master of fiction who cares as deeply about his craft as the modernists did earlier in the past century. While most examinations of an author's work begin with at least a biographical sketch, Ingersoll has faced distinct challenges because Millhauser has resisted efforts to read his fiction through the lens of his biography. Responding to an interviewer's request for a brief biography, Millhauser provided the succinct ""1943-."" Part of such resistance, Ingersoll argues, arises from Millhauser's belief that if readers have too many questions about an author's work, the author has failed, and no amount of response can redress that failure. Millhauser's central characters, such as August Eschenburg and J. Franklin Payne, are often themselves artists or technicians who are ""overreachers,"" and Ingersoll shows that Millhauser's early expressions of literary realism have given way to interest in departures from the ""real."" For Millhauser, ""stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams."" Millhauser's strength is the ability to sustain obsessions because works of fiction succeed insofar as they are able to supplant reality. As a master fabulist, Ingersoll argues, Millhauser is preoccupied with extravagance both in the subject matter of his fiction and in his style. Whether it involves Martin Dressler doing himself in by designing and constructing increasingly complex hotels or the miniaturists in the short story ""Cathay"" pushing their impulse to extremes, past the eye's ability to see their art objects, Millhauser's fiction is full of such an impulse, which can produce prolific artists as well as compulsive lunatics. The triumph of Millhauser's craft, Ingersoll shows, is that it merges a fascination with the relationship between imagination and experience with a precise and allusive prose to produce works seamlessly joining the everyday with the radical and fantastic, in forms ranging from travelogues of the imagination to works merging the waking world with the world of dreams.

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Book SynopsisHenry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998).Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques.Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

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Book SynopsisGerald Alva Miller Jr.'s Understanding William Gibson is a thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson, author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. Gibson is the recipient of many notable awards for science fiction writing including the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's iconic novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace. With his early stories and his first trilogy of novels,Gibson became the father figure for a new genre of science fiction called ""cyberpunk"" that brought a gritty realism to its cerebral plots involving hackers and artificial intelligences.This study situates Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic affected both areas of literature. Miller follows a brief biographical sketch and a survey of the works that influenced him with an examination that divides Gibson's body of work into early stories, his three major novel trilogies, and his standalone works. Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors.Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major countercultural movements that influenced him (the Beat Generation, the hippies, and the punk rock movement) while also placing him within the history of science fiction and examining how his early works reacted against contemporaneous trends in the genre. These early works also exhibit the development of his unique aesthetic that would influence science fiction and literature more generally. Next a lengthy chapter explicates his groundbreaking Sprawl Trilogy, which began with Neuromancer. Miller then traces Gibson's aesthetic transformations across his two subsequent novel trilogies that increasingly eschew distant futures either to focus on our contemporary historical moment as a kind of science fiction itself or to imagine technological singularities that might lie just around the corner. These chapters detail how Gibson's aesthetic has morphed along with social, cultural, and technological changes in the real world. The study also looks at such standalone works as his collaborative steampunk novel, his attempts at screenwriting, his major essays, and even his experimental hypertext poetry. The study concludes with a discussion of Gibson's lasting influence and a brief examination of his most recent novel, The Peripheral, which signals yet another radical change in Gibson's aesthetic.

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