Literary studies: fiction Books

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 Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors.Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major countercultural movements that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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Book SynopsisIn Understanding Jonathan Coe, the first full-length study of the British novelist, Merritt Moseley surveys a writer whose experimental technique has become increasingly well received and critically admired. Coe is the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Priz du Meilleur Livre Entranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prizes for Fiction, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. His oeuvre includes eleven novels and three biographies--two of famous Hollywood actors Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and one of English modernist novelist B. S. Johnson.Following an introductory overview of Coe's life and career, Moseley examines Coe's complex engagement with popular culture, his experimental technique, his political satire, and his broad-canvased depictions of British society. Though his first three books, An Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, and The Dwarves of Death, received little notice upon publication, Moseley shows their strengths as literary works and as precursors. In 1994 Coe gained visibility with What a Carve Up!, which has remained his most admired and discussed novel. He has since published a postmodern take on sleep disorders and university students, The House of Sleep; a two-volume roman-fleuve consisting of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle; a touching account of a lonely woman's life, The Rain before It Falls; a satiric vision of a misguided life, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim; and a domestic comedy thriller set at the 1958 world's fair in Brussels, Expo '58. Moseley explicates these works and discusses the recurring features of Coe's fiction: political consciousness, a deep artistic concern with the form of fiction, and comedy.

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Book SynopsisWhat Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo reveals that Proust was quite aware of the advantageous trade-off between financial indulgence and artistic inspiration; his liberal squandering of money provided the grist for fictional characters and incidents of surprising effectiveness, both in the artistic sphere and later on in the commercial one. But Hauser was not aware of this odd aspect of Proust’s creativity, nor could he have been since the positive returns from the writer’s masterpieces were late in coming. Focusing on more than 350 letters between Proust and Hauser and drawing on records of the Rothschild Archive and financial data assembled from the twenty-one-volume Kolb edition of Proust’s letters, Balsamo reconstructs Proust’s finances and provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative and speculative process. Balsamo carefully follows Proust’s financial activities, including investments ranging from Royal Dutch Securities to American railroads to Eastern European copper mines, his exchanges with various banks and brokerage firms, his impetuous gifts, and the changing size and composition of his portfolio. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Proust was, Balsamo concludes, a master at turning financial indulgence into narrative craftsmanship, economic costs into artistic opportunities.Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth on reckless ventures and on magnificent presents for the men and women who struck his fancy. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in AppalachiaSince his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O’Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction— attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.The editors contend that Rash’s work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face.The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash’s work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash’s artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash’s work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies.Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

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Book SynopsisRandall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, asa well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre - memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

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Book SynopsisJames Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales - The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer (1823-1841) - romantically portray frontier America during the colonial and early republican eras. Bill Christophersen's Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America suggests they also highlight problems plaguing nineteenth-century America during the contentious decades following the Missouri Compromise, when Congress admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state.During the 1820s and 1830s, the nation was riven by sectional animosity, slavery, prejudice, populist politics, and finally economic collapse. Christophersen argues that Cooper used his fictions to imagine a path forward for the Republic. Cooper, he further suggests, brought back Leather-Stocking to test whether the common man, as empowered by Jackson's presidency, was capable of republican virtue - something the author considered key to renewing the nation.

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Book SynopsisLouise Erdrich is one of the most important, prolific, and widely read contemporary Indigenous writers. Here leading scholars analyze the three critically acclaimed recent novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—that make up what has become known as Erdrich’s “justice trilogy.” Set in small towns and reservations of northern North Dakota, these three interwoven works bring together a vibrant cast of characters whose lives are shaped by history, identity, and community. Individually and collectively, the essays herein illuminate Erdrich’s storytelling abilities; the complex relations among crime, punishment, and forgiveness that characterize her work; and the Anishinaabe contexts that underlie her presentation of character, conflict, and community. The volume also includes a reader’s guide to each novel, a glossary, and an interview with Erdrich that will aid in readers’ navigation of the justice novels. These timely, original, and compelling readings make a valuable contribution to Erdrich scholarship and, subsequently, to the study of Native literature and women’s authorship as a whole.

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Book SynopsisArteletra analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics - defined here as the potential to disagree - without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls ""the politics of going unnoticed,"" which he derives from an archive of three noteworthy, though under-appreciated, authors who wrote during the Sixties: Calvert Casey (1924 - 69), Juan Filloy (1894 - 2000), and Armon?¡a Somers (1914 - 94). For the first time ever, Casey, Filloy, and Somers are put in dialogue with one another to further demonstrate the unique contributions of Latin American writers to contemporary debates about the cross?¼roads of literatures and politics. What unites them is their shared investment in stories about those who go unnoticed. As a practice, going unnoticed creates space and opportunities for queer, rural, and female subjects, among others, to step back from unjust institutions. As a political discourse, going unnoticed deactivates the binary structures of biopolitics (e.g., visible/invisible, pure/filthy, friend/enemy) that divide humans from one another in the service of power and economic inequality. Though the politics of going unnoticed was ignored during the Sixties for its apparent individualism, these three writers work through alternatives to the politics of visibility that has animated political discourse on the left for the last half-century. More than a self-interested critique, going unnoticed opens new possibilities for engaging in the messy business of politics while imagining and creating better communities.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: ArteletrA al vesre PART ONE: The Itinerary of Errant Palindromes Chapter One: On Errant Palindromes Chapter Two: On Going Unnoticed Chapter Three: On Unattended Details PART TWO: The Politics of Going Unnoticed Chapter Four: A Double Negative in Cuba Chapter Five: An Errant Allegory in Argentina Chapter Six: A Nude Woman in Uruguay PART THREE: The Aesthetics of Writing in Plain Sight Chapter Seven: ¡Ay, epopeyA!; or, Filloy's Gauchos at the Origins Chapter Eight: ¡Sometamos o matemoS!; or, Somers's Mandrake Syndrome Chapter Nine: Supuso su puS; or, Casey's Wasted Narratives PART FOUR: The Ethics of Being Perceived Chapter Ten: Exposure through Dialogues Chapter Eleven: From Monodialogues to Pandemonium Chapter Twelve: Aiding the Adversary Conclusion: Re-ves la ArteletrA Notes Works Cited Index

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Book Synopsis Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: A Consumer's Dystopia Chapter Two: The Consuming Self Chapter Three: Consumer Culture's "Collateral Damage" Chapter Four: A Consumer's Dreams and Nightmares Chapter Five: Working-Class Consumption Consuming Together Aesthetic Interruptions of the Mundane Low and High Tactical Consumption Conclusion Conclusiom Notes Works Cited Index

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Book Synopsis Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: A Consumer's Dystopia Chapter Two: The Consuming Self Chapter Three: Consumer Culture's "Collateral Damage" Chapter Four: A Consumer's Dreams and Nightmares Chapter Five: Working-Class Consumption Consuming Together Aesthetic Interruptions of the Mundane Low and High Tactical Consumption Conclusion Conclusiom Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisA noncommissioned officer of the Nicaraguan National Guard travels to New York to meet the famous bodybuilder, Charles Atlas. When he approaches his hero, he finds a body pierced with syringes and tubes, a cyborg of fragile artificial life. In the garden of a Central American dictator's mansion, a prisoner is locked in a cage next to a lion's. Nature and animal instinct will take their course. In post-Sandinista Nicaragua, an amputee policeman must face—alone and wounded—a drug gang commanded by his former guerrilla leader. Despite the gravity and violence present in many of Sergio Ramírez Mercado's short stories and novels, his writing is governed by irony and parody. Fábula del Poder proposes a novel critical assessment of the narrative work of Ramírez, who won the Cervantes Prize in 2017, emphasizing the mechanisms of representation and criticism of power in contemporary Latin American literature. In an entertaining and dynamic way, the book applies an interdisciplinary, theoretical approach, borrowing concepts from political theory, literary criticism, video games, visual culture, and sports, and reviews the contemporary historiography of Nicaragua and Latin America.Un suboficial de la Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua viaja a Nueva York para conocer al célebre fisicoculturista Charles Atlas. Cuando logra acercarse al héroe, encuentra un cuerpo traspasado de jeringas y mangueras, un cíborg de frágil vida artificial. En el jardín de la mansión de un dictador centroamericano, un prisionero es encerrado en la jaula contigua a la de un león. La naturaleza y el instinto animal seguirán su curso. En la Nicaragua post-sandinista, un policía amputado de una pierna debe enfrentar—solo y herido—a una banda de narcotraficantes comandada por su antiguo jefe guerrillero. A pesar de la gravedad y violencia de las historias contadas en muchos de los cuentos y las novelas de Sergio Ramírez Mercado, su obra está regida por la ironía y la parodia. Fábula del Poder propone una novedosa valoración crítica de la obra narrativa de Ramírez, quien recibió el Premio Cervantes en 2017, haciendo énfasis en los mecanismos de representación y crítica del poder en la literatura contemporánea de América Latina. De manera amena y dinámica el libro utiliza un marco teórico interdisciplinario y aplica conceptos de teoría política, crítica literaria, videojuegos, cultura visual y deportiva, y repasa la historiografía contemporánea de Nicaragua y América Latina.

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Book SynopsisAs a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oft outrageous ""Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction"" persona, James Ellroy has used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels. Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroy from 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution and his public and private image.Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. Ellroy's complex narratives, which merge history and fiction, have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, a revisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine's Novel of the Year 1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adapted into films. Much of Ellroy's remarkable life story has served as the template for the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal, unsolved murder of his mother, to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroy has lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writers could claim.In Conversations with James Ellroy, Ellroy talks extensively about his life, his literary influences, his persona, and his attitudes towards politics and religion. In interviews with fellow crime writers Craig McDonald, David Peace, and others, including several previously unpublished interviews, Ellroy is at turns charismatic and eloquent, combative and enigmatic.

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Book SynopsisDespite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture. While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book and the history of the medium. For the past half-century they have also been the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. The sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned. Moreover, characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the globe. Their images and adventures have shaped many other media, such as film, videogames, and even prose fiction. The primary aim of this reader is twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated commentary on superheroes, and second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical themes that are of interest to a great many readers both in the academy and beyond.

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Book SynopsisHerman Melville’s Moby-Dick is often considered the greatest American novel – a vast epic that combines deep philosophy and high adventure as well as rich comedy and profound tragedy. Moby-Dick also offers a particularly diverse array of characters of various types, personalities, and ethnic backgrounds, and its styles are as varied as the people it depicts. Full of humorous dialects and idioms and brimming with probing, impassioned, poetic speeches, Melville’s novel explores the fascinating world of whale-hunting in the mid-nineteenth century, even as it also explores some of the most perennial questions about the purposes and meanings of life. The final impact of the book, when enraged whale meets pursuing ship, is one of the most memorable episodes in all of American literature.This volume and author of nearly 30 books and over 300 essays) is designed to help make Melville’s great novel more readily accessible to a wide audience, especially students and everyday readers. Containing numerous essays by many prominent Melville scholars, the book places Melville and his epic novel in their various historical contexts while also showing how the novel continues to be relevant – and powerful – today. The volume seeks to show that Moby-Dick is no mere period piece but instead fully deserves its reputation as perhaps the greatest work of American fiction.

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Book SynopsisDiverse in theme, style and cultural context, the American short story can take many forms. The only common theme is the short story’s unique ability to captivate an audience. This volume discusses the origin and popularity of the short story. Original critical essays on a diverse collection of writers highlight Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin and many others.Each essay is 2,500 to 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 SynopsisRussian Novelists is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Every article in this set was carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information available about the topic covered.The essays in Russian Novelists discuss such influential writers as Vassily Aksyonov, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Pushkin, and Leo Tolstoy.

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Book SynopsisToni Morrison's 1987 tale of Sethe, an escaped slave living in Cincinnati and struggling to overcome her past, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 along with instant international acclaim. Several essays in this volume study major themes of Beloved, including motherhood, the psychological impacts of slavery, and repression of memory, as well as connections to the real-life slave who inspired Morrison's story.Taken together, the essays presented in this volume give special attention to the traumatic horrors of slavery. Indeed, although their authors examine Sethe's act of infanticide from various perspectives, it is evident that the recurring theme throughout the volume is not the question of rightness or the wrongness of the act itself, but the ways in which the characters contend with and survive a dehumanizing and absurd historical movement. Beloved, the narrative, and Beloved the character, become Morrison's conduits for confronting a story that is impossible to tell but needs to be told.Each essay is 2,500 to 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: About This Volume Critical Context: Original Introductory Essays Critical Readings: Original In-Depth Essays Further Readings Detailed Bibliography Detailed Bio of the Editor General Subject Index

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Book SynopsisWhen the New York Times published the first print interview with Cormac McCarthy in 1992, the author was barely known outside a small group of academics, writers, and devoted readers. None of his books up to that point, among them Suttree and Blood Meridian, had sold more than five thousand copies in hardcover. But that same year McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses made the best-seller lists, and over the next two decades, with the publication of such books as No Country for Old Men, the basis for the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning film, and The Road, a Pulitzer Prize winner and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, McCarthy became a household name. In Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King traces McCarthy’s journey from cult figure to literary icon. Drawing extensively on McCarthy’s papers and those of Albert Erskine, his editor and devoted advocate at Random House, as well as the latest in McCarthy scholarship, King investigates the changes that McCarthy’s work as a novelist, his writing methods, and the reception of his novels, both inside and outside the publishing industry, have undergone over the course of his career. Taking several of McCarthy’s major novels as case studies, King explores the lengthy process of their composition through multiple drafts and revisions, the signal contributions of the author’s agents and publishers, and McCarthy’s growing confidence as a writer who is strongly attentive to tone and repeated metaphors and images. This work also reveals the wide range of McCarthy’s reading and research, especially of historical and scientific materials, as well as key intertextual connections between the novels. Part literary biography, part archival investigation, and part study of print culture, this book is particularly revealing of how one talented writer, properly nurtured by dedicated allies, went on to gain a huge measure of recognition and respect, which has become increasingly difficult for serious authors to achieve in today’s profit-driven publishing world.

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Book SynopsisSince the release of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, Cormac McCarthy’s characters, intricate plots, and sometimes forbidding settings have captivated the attention of countless readers while exploring deep philosophical problems, including that of human agency and free will. This multiauthor volume places the full range of his novels in historical, literary, and cultural contexts and shifts the focus of critical engagement to questions of determinism, fatalism, and free will. Essayists over the course of eleven chapters show how McCarthy’s protagonists and antagonists often confront grotesque realities and destinies, and find themselves prey to incessant subconscious and uncontrollable forces. In the process, these scholars reveal that McCarthy’s works arrive thoroughly tinctured with religious complexities, ambiguities of ancient and modern thinking, and profoundly splintered notions of morality, freedom, and ethics. Consequently, McCarthy’s philosophical depth, mastery of language, and sometimes shocking psychological analysis are brought into sharp focus for longtime readers. With new scholarship from eminent critics, an accessible style, and precise attention to the lesser-known works, Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies re-introduces the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s work under the twin themes of fatalism and determinism.Trade Review“Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies is an intelligently assembled, thoughtful, and original collection of essays that, together, form a useful point of reference in the literature that is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, as a good collection should, this one provides both nuance and variety, and the editors focus the spotlight tightly on their themes illuminating McCarthy’s richly productive fiction.”—Nicholas Monk, director of Warwick University’s Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and author of True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity

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Book SynopsisAlthough Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention due to its engaging narrative and broad appeal to a sense of justice, little has been done to examine the modern classic through the lens of Lee's controversial novel Go Set a Watchman, published unexpectedly a year before the author's death. In Mockingbird Grows Up Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of interpreting, contextualising, and deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics, such as race, sexuality, language, and reading contexts. Critically, the volume revisits the question of African-American characterisation in Lee's work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long believed to be an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee's fiction. The editors also take on questions regarding the publication of Go Set a Watchman, and Holly Blackford contributes an essay that places Watchman within the pantheon of American literature.Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee's appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.

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Book SynopsisIn the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communities and cultures that would challenge their Yankee prejudices.Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this group's travels onto the private story of Emerson's final years, as aphasia set in and increasingly robbed him of his words. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

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Book SynopsisIn the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communities and cultures that would challenge their Yankee prejudices.Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this group's travels onto the private story of Emerson's final years, as aphasia set in and increasingly robbed him of his words. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

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Book SynopsisIn the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.Trade Review “This fascinating biography of Charles Wright covers Morocco, Mexico, Europe, and points in the United States where he encounters sections of society rarely attended to. Hogue does an excellent job of making us understand Wright’s importance, his failures, his struggles, and the major contribution of his work to American and African American literary culture.”—Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s “Though Charles Wright left little in the way of papers behind, Hogue’s dogged pursuit of leads has given us the most complete documentary record of this important Black writer—someone whose queer, surreal, and satirical fiction no doubt anticipates the main currents of Black studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century.”—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary UndergroundTable of Contents Preface Chapter One: The Missouri Years Chapter Two: Arriving in New York City Chapter Three: The Messenger Chapter Four: The Years in Tangier Chapter Five: The Return to New York and the publication of The Wig Chapter Six: The Seventies and the Village Voice Chapter Seven: After Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About and the Hodenfields Chapter Eight: The Eighties Chapter Nine: The Nineties Chapter Ten: The Two Thousands Works Cited Notes

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Book SynopsisIn the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.Trade Review “This fascinating biography of Charles Wright covers Morocco, Mexico, Europe, and points in the United States where he encounters sections of society rarely attended to. Hogue does an excellent job of making us understand Wright’s importance, his failures, his struggles, and the major contribution of his work to American and African American literary culture.”—Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s “Though Charles Wright left little in the way of papers behind, Hogue’s dogged pursuit of leads has given us the most complete documentary record of this important Black writer—someone whose queer, surreal, and satirical fiction no doubt anticipates the main currents of Black studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century.”—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

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Book SynopsisMany tell the spirited tales of the American West, describing life in the North American frontier as it moved from its earliest border at the Appalachian Mountain range through Westward expansion to the Pacific coastline. Others write or speak of their rich, varied experiences as members of First People Nations. Each story takes its place in history, part of the development and narrative of America.This volume provides both an overview of and a more in-depth context to the stories of over 100 acclaimed writers. Each entry includes a comprehensive overview of each author's biography and literary career as well as a ready-reference listing of their major works in all genres.Writers in this volume include: Cormac McCarthy Black Elk Black Hawk Sherman Alexie Leslie Marmon Silko Janet Campbell Hale Paul Gunn Allen Vine Deloria James Fennimore Cooper Larry McMurtry Willa Cather Kit Carson Mark Twain Stephen Crane Louis L’Amour N. Scott Momaday Louise Erdrich James Welch Joy Harjo Charles Eastman John Joseph Mathews Linda Hogan Tommy Picoand Tommy Orange. Each essay identifies the writer’s major genres, and birth and death dates and places. The volume also includes a Chronological List of Authors; Genre Index; Personages Index; Title Index; Subject Index; and dozens of photographs. Designed to introduce readers at the high school and university level to the rich world of Native Americans and the vivid literature of the American West, this title provides students with careful research and resources to further explore these rich literary traditions.

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Book SynopsisAlice Walker's The Color Purple is one of the most celebrated and influential novels in American and African American literature, a rare winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction, and the inspiration for an acclaimed film adaptation and Broadway musical. In celebration of The Color Purple's fortieth anniversary, this volume offers new readings of the classic literary work from biographical, cultural, historical, and spiritual points of view, with additional analyses devoted to art, adaptations, comparative texts, ethics, linguistics, masculinity, motherhood, poetry, and social activism and movements such as Black Lives Matter.

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a late work in this important writer's long career, has often been examined not only in relation to his previous works but also as a new departure. An unusually brief novel, this book has been discussed not only in relation to the novella genre but also in connection to Hemingway's own life, with the author himself often being compared to the ""old man"" of the title. This volume offers a wide range of approaches to the text, exploring it in terms of history, psychology, sociology, and—last but not least—artistic achievement.

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Book SynopsisThe first study to bring Hemingway, Vonnegut, O'Brien, and 9/11 literature together in order to examine views about war, gender, and domesticity over a hundred-year period. War has often been seen as the domain of men and thus irrelevant to gender analysis, and American writers have frequently examined war according to traditional gender expectations: that boys become men by going to war and girls become women by building a home. Yet the writers discussed in this book complicate these expectations, since their female characters often take part directly in war and especially since their male characters repeatedly imagine domestic spaces for themselves in the midst of war. Chapters on Hemingway and the First World War, Kurt Vonnegut and the Second World War, and Tim O'Brien and the Vietnam War place these writers in their particular historical and cultural contexts while tracing similarities in their depiction of gender relationships, imagined domestic spaces, and the representability of trauma. The book concludes by examining post-9/11 American literature, probing what happenswhen the front lines actually come home to Americans. While much has been written about Hemingway, Vonnegut, O'Brien, and even 9/11 literature separately, this study is the first to bring them together in order to examine views about war, gender, and domesticity over a hundred-year period. It argues that 9/11 literature follows a long tradition of American writing about war in which the domestic and public realms are inextricably intertwined and in which imagined domestic spaces can provide a window into representing wartime trauma, an experience often thought to be unrepresentable or incomprehensible to those who were not actually there. Susan Farrell is Professor of English at the College of Charleston.Table of ContentsIntroduction "Isn't It Pretty to Think So?": Ernest Hemingway's Impossible Homes "A Universe of Two": Constructing Worlds through Narrative in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut "It Wasn't a War Story. It Was a Love Story": Tim O'Brien and the Ethics of Home "A Hole in the Middle of Me": Shattered Homes in Post-9/11 Literature Afterword Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThe first English-language monograph on Hermann Broch's literary and theoretical work on mass hysteria. Winner of the 2023 Radomír Luža Prize for the Best Manuscript in Austrian/Czechoslovak Studies in the World War II Era Austrian Jewish author Hermann Broch (1886-1951), a leading figure of European Modernism, spent decades attempting to understand the phenomenon of mass hysteria. With his work, he hoped to help protect society from the allure of mass hysteria, embodied in the fanatical appeal of National Socialism. He was torn between two approaches to the problem: using literature to diagnose and expose the irrational knowledge that underpins mass hysteria, and employing theory as a more precise and effective means of doing the same. In this first English-language monograph on the topic, Brett E. Sterling traces the development of Broch's understanding of the mass from an initial confrontation in 1918 to a recurring theme in his fiction and ultimately to the monumental but incomplete Massenwahntheorie (Theory of Mass Hysteria, 1939-48). In thorough readings of Broch's major fictional and theoretical works, the analysis centers on the question of how his literature and theory provide distinct but complementary approaches to conceiving and representing the elusive figure of the mass and the attendant experience of mass hysteria. With political extremism and conspiratorial thinking on the rise, Sterling makes the case that Broch's insights into mass hysteria - literary as well as theoretical - are of renewed relevance to a contemporary audience.Trade ReviewThis is one of the best and clearest investigations of Hermann Broch's work that has appeared in recent years. . . . It is the first monograph devoted to the representation and analysis of the modern mass in Broch's narrative and essayistic works. * Journal of Austrian Studies *Notoriously, Hermann Broch never makes it easy for his readers, be it in the tortuous style or the challenging subjects of his writing. Yet as Sterling shows throughout this lucid and thought-inducing study, everything that so exercised Broch during the 'age of extremes' has, alas, become current again today. * Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1: First Encounters, 1918-1929 2: The Power of Literature 3: The Mass Takes Shape: Literary Representations 4: Theory and Its Discontents: The Massenwahntheorie 5: The Threshold of Experience: Die Verzauberung Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the process of "becoming woman" through an analysis of the depiction of girls and young women in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. What does it mean to "become woman" in the context of neoliberalism and postfeminism? What is the role of will in this process? Willful Girls explores these questions through an analysis of the depiction of girls and youngwomen in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. It identifies four sets of concerns that are vital for an understanding of gendered subject formation in the contemporary context: agency and volition; body and beauty; sisterhood and identification; and sex and desire. The book examines numerous nonfiction feminist texts as well as novels by Helene Hegemann, Caitlin Moran, Charlotte Roche, Emma Jane Unsworth, Kate Zambreno, and Juli Zeh, among others. These texts illustrate the complex processes by which female subjects become women today. Failure, refusal, disgust, and anger are striking features of these becomings. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed (Willful Subjects) and thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, and Elizabeth Grosz, the book demonstrates the significance of willfulness for understandings and assertions of female agency. In addition, it proposesa view of literary works themselves as instances of willfulness. The book will be of interest to scholars working in comparative literature, English, German studies, and feminist, gender, and queer studies. Emily Jeremiah is Senior Lecturer in German and Gender Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.Trade ReviewAn intricate and important work of literary criticism which will be of interest to scholars, students, and those curious about contemporary feminisms across national and linguistic boundaries. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[T]his book [is] a useful corrective to the excessive focus on 'adult models of subjectivity' (2) that still dominate mainstream feminist literature. Jeremiah is, instead, attentive to literary depictions of childhood . . . . Jeremiah's methodology is both comparative and connective . . . . [Her] narration is lucid, cogent, and conversational, beginning with a synoptic reading of the various novels, and culminating in a sustained critical engagement with their various thematic issues. . . . It is perhaps a measure of how good Jeremiah's critical work is that I found [this book] to be an excellent template for examining similar concerns in other genres, such as Modernist poetry and ?lm. -- Shalini Sengupta * CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S WRITING *[O]ffers a critical exploration of the formation of gendered subjects by analyzing depictions of young women in a selection of . . . texts, both fiction and nonfiction. . . . [W]ill prove useful both in the German and Anglo-American context. * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Willful Girls Contemporary Anglo-American and German Feminisms Agency and Volition Body and Beauty Sisterhood and Identification Sex and Desire Conclusion: Green Girls, Trainwrecks, and Willful Politics Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAssesses the relevance of the works of Fontane, perhaps the foremost German novelist between Goethe and Mann, for the twenty-first century. Theodor Fontane remains a canonical figure in German literature, the most important representative of poetic realism, and likely the best German-language novelist between Goethe and Mann, yet scholarly attention to his works oftenlags behind his stature, at least in the English-speaking academy. This volume, coinciding with Fontane's 200th birthday in 2019, assesses the relevance of his works for us today and also draws attention to the most current English-language research. Much has changed in the last two decades in critical theory, and the volume highlights how new methodological approaches and new archival research can update our understanding of Fontane's works. Although his novels are famously rooted in the details of quotidian life in nineteenth-century Germany, they also reflect larger historical transformations that resonate with our world today (e.g., financial crisis, class conflict, changing gender roles, and migration) and so speak to contemporary critical interests. The volume's contributors draw on literary and cultural studies approaches including gender and sexuality studies, emotion studies, transnationalismand globalization, media and visual studies, rhetorical criticism, paratextual criticism, and digital humanities. Their contributions survey a wide range of Fontane's literary production in order to speak to both German and non-German audiences in the twenty-first century. Contributors: James N. Bade, Russell A. Berman, Katharina Adeline Engler-Coldren, Todd Kontje, John B. Lyon, Ervin Malakaj, Nicolas von Passavant, Lynne Tatlock, Christian Thomas, Brian Tucker, Michael J. White, Holly A. Yanacek. John B. Lyon is Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh. Brian Tucker is Associate Professor of German at Wabash College.Trade Review[A] welcome addition to Fontane scholarship in general, and to English-language scholarship on Fontane in particular. . . . [T]imely and imperative. . . . The collection's new theoretical approaches, as well as its profound close readings, advance Fontane scholarship into the twenty-first century and will serve as a profitable springboard for continuing endeavors. . . . Filling a critical gap in scholarship, [this volume] documents [Fontane's] resilience and enduring relevance for readers and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. -- Edith H. Krause * GERMAN QUARTERLY *[C]ommemorate[s] what would have been Theodor Fontane's 200th birthday . . . [and aims] to both enrich and enliven English-language research on . . . [his] work. . . . Insights into Fontane's personal life, his agency as an author and as an aging observer, and his views on the military reveal an engaged, prescient, and versatile mind. The essays build on established research findings and offer some new readings. All German citations are translated. Recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Editions Introduction: Fontane in the Twenty-First Century - John B. Lyon and Brian Tucker Narrative Digression and the Transformation of Nationhood in Vor dem Sturm - Russell A. Berman Nasty Women: Female Anger as Moral Judgment in Grete Minde and Effi Briest - Holly A. Yanacek Peforming the Philistine: Gossip as a Narrative Device and a Strategy for Reflection on Anti-Semitism in Theodor Fontane's L'Adultera - Nicolas von Passavant To Have an Eye: Visual Culture and the Misapprehension of Class in Irrungen, Wirrungen - Brian Tucker Fontane as a Pacifist? The Anti-War Message in Quitt and Fontane's Changing Attitude to Militarism - James N. Bade Disjunctive Transnationalisms in Fontane's Frau Jenny Treibel - John B. Lyon On the "Right Measure" in Effi Briest: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Prosaic - Katharina Adeline Engler-Coldren Transfiguration, Effect, and Engagement: Theodor Fontane's Aesthetic Thought - Michael J. White Fontane and World Literature: Prussians, Jews, and the Specter of Africa in Die Poggenpuhls - Todd Kontje Von Zwanzig bis Dreissig: The Male Author in Parts - Lynne Tatlock Melusine von Barby's Barriers and Connections in Fontane's Der Stechlin - Christian Thomas Senescence and Fontane's Der Stechlin - Ervin Malakaj Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisHighlights the spirituality and cosmopolitanism of four contemporary German Muslim writers, showing that they undermine the "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting. At a time when the place of Muslims in German society is being disputed, this book explores how four contemporary German writers of Muslim backgrounds - Zafer Senocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Navid Kermani - point beyond identity politics and suggest new ways of thinking about religion and community. Twist highlights both the spirituality and the cosmopolitanism of these authors, bringing their thought into dialogue with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy is critical of communities based on a single guiding principle (be it God or Reason) and thus involving a universalizing core that leads to conflicts between identity groups. He proposes alternative notions of both religious faith (a postmonotheistic version with elements of mysticism) and community (spontaneous communities requiring no shared identity). Twist relates these arguments to post-9/11 debates over cosmopolitanism and religion, illuminating how the writers under study draw upon mystical Islam's deconstructive potential, finding divine insight in love, sex, music, pain, and beauty. Such a worldly and affective spirituality dispels associations between Islam and sexual conservatism while rejecting monotheistic ideology. Thus, unlike the homogenizing drive of universalist cosmopolitanism, these writers' nonfoundational conceptualizations undermine the twenty-first century's "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting. JOSEPH TWIST is Fixed-term Lecturer in German at University College Dublin.Trade Review[A] welcome contribution to the scholarship on the works of German authors of Muslim background. By studying the philosophical insights in the literary works of Senocak, Zaimoglu, Kermani, and SAID, Twist highlights literature's openness to alterity and its 'capacity for experimentation.' His work shows that the deconstructive potential of minority literature contests the ways in which we think of cosmopolitanism and identity. -- Mert Bahadir Reisoglu * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[P]rovides a welcome analysis of Muslim spiritualities . . . . Twist's valuable contribution . . . allows a creative perspective on engaging Islam seriously in readings of contemporary German literature. * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *[A] powerful counter-model of both conventional ideas about (post)religious identities and academia's traditional way of reading (and thereby constructing) Muslim authors as representatives and cultural mediators of their faith . . . . [O]ne of the latest and most valuable contributions to reimagining Islam toward an immanentist spirituality, a worldly, cosmopolitan faith that appreciates and acknowledges differences and interconnectedness . . . . * STUDIES IN 20TH- and 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: Spirituality, Cosmopolitanism, and Muslim German Writers Between Heaven and Earth, and Self and Other: Zafer Senocak's Übergang Poetry, Prayer, and Apostasy: SAID's Psalmen Romantic Religion and Counter-Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism: Feridun Zaimoglu's Liebesbrand Between Pleasure and Terror: The Divine in Navid Kermani's Fiction Conclusion: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Cultural Renewal Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.Trade ReviewThe editors . . . opt[] for a heterogeneous definition [of travel literature] that includes first-person documentaries, fiction and fictionalized travel impressions, visual records such as comics and films, poetic forms, chick lit, and journalistic essays [and] covers gender differences, treats inequality between privileged and desperate travel, illustrates the injustice between poverty and wealth, and connects sex travel and exploitation. . . . [A]cute analyses . . . . A valuable resource for those interested in contemporary German culture. Recommended. * CHOICE *With the consideration of other forms of media like comics and film, this volume exceeds the boundaries of literature per se and thereby dares to move forward exploratively into truly unknown climes. -- Michaela Holdenried * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Since the beginning of the 21st century, German fictional and nonfictional travel literature alike have taken a more anxious look at travel, as Karin Baumgartner and Monika Shafi demonstrate in their multifaceted and cleverly introduced anthology. What they title summatively as Anxious Journeys encompasses various experiences of a loss of lightheartedness. . . . The volume brings . . . hitherto understudied aspects of travel into the focus of research and illuminates travel literature as "the most socially important of all literary genres." -- Björn Weyand * GERMANISTIK *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Monika Shafi and Karin Baumgartner PART I. MIGRATION AND REFUGEES Travel and Trauma in Post-1989 Europe: Julya Rabinowich's Die Erdfresserin and Terézia Mora's Das Ungeheuer - Anke S. Biendarra Europe, the Middle East, and Identities in Transition: Navid Kermani's Einbruch der Wirklichkeit. Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa - Magda Tarnawska Senel PART II. TRAVELERS AND TOURISTS Around the World in Seventy Stories: Christoph Ransmayr's Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes - Monika Shafi The Political Tourist in Juli Zeh's Die Stille ist ein Geräusch - Nicole Coleman Transnational Turkish-German Travelogues: Turkish-German Women Writers' Millennial Travel Narratives - Heather Merle Benbow The End of Travel in Sibylle Berg's Wunderbare Jahre and Rolf Niederhauser's Seltsame Schleife - Karin Baumgartner PART III. EXPLORATION AND NOSTALGIA Disappearing Act: Felicitas Hoppe's Hoppe and Australian Myths - Andrew Wright Hurley "Always conceal . . . tthy tenets, thy treasure, and thy travelling." Irony and Ambiguity in Ilija Trojanow's Travel Narratives About the Middle East - Gundela Hachmann PART IV. TRAVELING THROUGH MENTAL LANDSCAPES Walking in Circles: Josef Winkler's Mutter und der Bleistift (2013) - Carola Daffner Into Thin Air: Extreme Landscapes, Self-Discovery, and Narrative in Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg - Nicole Grewling The Atlas as Travel Writing and as Post-Colonial Critique: Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands - Christina Gerhardt PART V. VISUAL AND SONIC JOURNEYS Graphic Journeys: Travel Writing and the Medium of Comics - Christina Kraenzle Travel's Utopian Potential in Andrea Grill's Liebesmaschine N.Y.C. - John Blair and Muriel Cormican Heimat: Diaspora-Ulrich Seidl's Paradies: Liebe - Sunka Simon Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis book begins to recover the global history of solidarity as a principle of authorship, taking Anna Seghers (1900-1983) as an exemplar and reading her alongside prominent contemporaries: Brecht, Carpentier, and Spivak. In the twentieth century, leftist authors around the world understood their writing as an act of solidarity, but their common project was obscured by the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of socialist states. This book begins to recover the global history of solidarity as a principle of authorship, taking Anna Seghers (1900-1983), one of the most important German writers of her time, as an exemplar. Like other leftist authors in other languages and contexts, Seghers emphasized how people are implicated in global economic inequality and efforts to change it. Writing to Change the World introduces Seghers's concept of solidarian authorship by telling the story of an award, still in existence today, that she bequeathed to support East German and Latin American authors. The book then follows the history of the idea by reading Seghers alongside prominent contemporaries: the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier in the 1960s, and the Indian scholar and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the 1980s. These writers thematized and critiqued solidarity, often by depicting characters who forge connections across borders. In doing so, they also commented on the literary institutions that fostered their own work. Providing new evidence for Seghers's global relevance beyond German literature, Writingto Change the World argues for the continued significance of solidarity both as a model of global authorship and as a framework for analysis of world literature. In doing so, it refocuses attention on global structures of inequality and collective imaginings of a better world. Marike Janzen is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas.Trade ReviewIn the story of Anna Seghers we recognize not only an example of a dynamic life in thrilling times, but that of a thrilling life in dynamic times. Janzen's study is an outstanding contribution to literary history, world history, economic policy, and gender research. -- Dean J. Guarnaschelli * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *These comparative chapters offer astute insights, bolstered by helpful endnotes and bibliography. Broadening the view of both Seghers and the authors with whom she is compared, this book suggests further avenues for research and will appeal to a wide audience. Recommended. * CHOICE *Janzen takes Seghers's statement "for we write not to describe, but in describing to effect change" as her starting point in illuminating the project of left-wing authors, male and female, "to build solidarity and thus transform the world," something that "continues to hold relevance [in the post-communist world] and needs to be recovered." . . . Janzen first historicizes the Seghers Prize and then examines Seghers's works innovatively in a contrapuntal way to those of Brecht, Carpentier, and Spivak. -- Loreto Vilar * GERMANISTIK *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Authorship and World as Shared Time Solidarian Authorship after Socialism: From the Anna Seghers Stipendium to the Anna Seghers Preis Shared Time in the Comintern Era: Seghers and Brecht State Writers and Solidarity: Seghers and Carpentier Mute Messengers: Solidarity and the Subaltern in Seghers and Spivak Conclusion: Authorship as History and Norm Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTakes the recent wave of German autobiographical writing on illness and disability seriously as literature, demonstrating the value of a literary disability studies approach. In the German-speaking world there has been a new wave - intensifying since 2007 - of autobiographically inspired writing on illness and disability, death and dying. Nina Schmidt's book takes this writing seriously as literature,examining how the authors of such personal narratives come to write of their experiences between the poles of cliché and exceptionality. Identifying shortcomings in the approaches taken thus far to such texts, she makes suggestions as to how to better read their narratives from the stance of literary scholarship, then demonstrates the value of a literary disability studies approach to such writing with close readings of Charlotte Roche's Schoßgebete(2011), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer (2007), and - in the final, comparative chapter - Christoph Schlingensief's So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (2009) and Wolfgang Herrndorf's blog-cum-book Arbeit und Struktur (2010-13). Schmidt shows that authors dealing with illness and disability do so with an awareness of their precarious subject position in the public eye, a position they negotiate creatively. Writing the liminal experience of serious illness along the borders of genre, moving between fictional and autobiographical modes, they carve out spaces from which they speak up and share their personal stories in the realm of literature, to political ends. Nina Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher in the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.Trade ReviewThe author shows how the texts under discussion break down borders in the literary and societal realms by way of their deep and multifaceted analyses...The way she proceeds does justice to texts that met a negative reception, offers a basis for the interpretation of future texts, and could represent an enrichment of German Studies. -- Malcolm Pender * GERMANISTIK *[B]reaks new ground . . . . Schmidt . . . ask[s] why so little scholarly attention has been paid to autobiographical writing about the universal experience of illness. [Her] impeccable scholarship explains why we haven't analyzed illness narratives more deeply, convinces us why we should, and shows us how we can. -- Elizabeth Hamilton * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Schmidt's exceptionally rich book makes a strong case for the need not only to include but better integrate the field of disability studies [and German Studies] . . . . [C]ontributes meaningfully to how we read and understand innovative narrative strategies, structures, and experiences of illness and disability . . . . [I]ts critical perspective would also be of great value to those interested in the fields of literature, narratology, and narrative medicine. * STUDIES IN 20TH- and 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *Nina Schmidt's study of illness writing in contemporary German-language literature not only fills notable gaps in scholarship on the primary texts she analyzes, but also knits together a wide range of scholarship on autofiction, disability studies, and (not only German) illness writing into an engaging study of great importance. -- Alexandra M. Hill * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Taken as a whole, The Wounded Self is an excellent scholarly book that should significantly influence future debates on the topics of autobiography, autofiction, disability studies, and illness writing. In addition to German studies and cultural studies, it will be of great interest to the medical humanities. -- Ina Linge * WEIMARER BEITRÄGE *[C]omprehensive and excellently argued . . . . With its demanding objectives and carefully developed theoretical framework, The Wounded Self presents innovative and insightful readings of diverse twenty-first century illness narratives. This exemplary study is a valuable contribution to the field of illness narratives and to the ongoing complex theorization of autobiographical authorship that deals with illness. -- Franziska Gygax * BIOGRAPHY *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Contemporary German-Language Illness Writing as Literature; Analyzing Narrative Strategies, Aesthetic Forms, and Experimentations with Genre through the Lens of Disability Theory Autofiction, Disgust, and Trauma: Negotiating Vulnerable Subject Positions in Charlotte Roche's Schoßgebete (2011) Looking Beyond the Self - Reflecting the Other: Staring as a Narrative Device in Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (2009) Intertextuality and the Transnational in Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer (2007): Writing Breast Cancer from beyond the Border Confronting Cancer Publicly: Diary Writing in Extremis by Christoph Schlingensief and Wolfgang Herrndorf Conclusion: "Und was dann"; Recent Developments and Research Desiderata Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays engaging with the developing field of literary geography to devote attention to the "regional" settings of Munro's stories and how they affect her characters' development or stasis. Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, has revolutionized the architecture of the short story. This collection of essays on Munro engages with literary geography, an emergent interdisciplinary field that is located at the interface between human geography and literary studies and is one of the most salient manifestations of the ongoing spatial turn in the arts and humanities. Critical readings of Munro's stories have labeled her literary production "regional," since she sets the majority of her short stories in the area of rural Ontario where she grew up. Until now, however, little attention has been devoted to the role of that location in the stories and tothe way that particular setting interacts with her characters' development or stasis. This collection contains eleven essays organized in two parts: first, Conceptualizing Space and Place: Houses, Landscapes, Territory; and second, Close Readings of Space and Place. Contributors: Corinne Bigot, Lynn Blin, Giuseppina Botta, Fausto Ciompi, Ailsa Cox, Christine Lorre-Johnston, Robert McGill, Claire Omhovère, Anca-Raluca Radu, Eleonora Rao, Caterina Ricciardi. Christine Lorre-Johnston is a senior lecturer in English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Eleonora Rao teaches English and American literatures at the University of Salerno.Trade Review[B]ooks such as Space and Place in Alice Munro's Fiction may find grateful readerships not only in experienced Canadianists, and especially Munrovians, but also among the younger generation of readers and scholars . Space and Place in Alice Munro's Fiction is a praiseworthy effort and an invitation to further debates. * THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/REVUE CANADIENNE DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE *[T]hese articles generate valuable new insights, informed by spatial theory concepts and a new critical vocabulary. * BRITISH JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Christine Lorre-Johnston and Eleonora Rao Where Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro's Open Houses - Robert McGill "Whose House Is That?" Spaces of Metamorphosis in Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades, Who Do You Think You Are?, and The View from Castle Rock - Eleonora Rao Mapping the Vernacular Landscape in Alice Munro's "What Do You Want to Know For?" and Other Stories - Corinne Bigot Stories in the Landscape Mode: A Reading of Alice Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women," "Walker Brothers Cowboy," and "Lichen" - Claire Omhovère "What Place Is This?" Alice Munro's Fictional Places and Her Place in Fiction - Anca-Raluca Radu "The Emptiness in Place of Her": Space, Absence, and Memory in Alice Munro's Dear Life - Ailsa Cox Down the Rabbit Hole: Revisiting the Topos of the Cave in Alice Munro's Short Stories - Christine Lorre-Johnston Spaces of Utopia and Spaces of Actuality in Alice Munro's "Jakarta" - Fausto Ciompi Spatial Perspectives in Alice Munro's "Passion" - Giuseppina Botta Charting Alice Munro's Terra Incognita: Punctuated Space in "Free Radicals" - Lynn Blin Heterotopy in Alice Munro's "In Sight of the Lake" - Caterina Ricciardi

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Book SynopsisExamines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag. Preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a moral and ethical limit case is key to the European Union's attempt to construct a pan-European identity. But with the Eastern expansion of the EU, new member states have challenged the Holocaust's singularity, calling for the traumas of the Stalinist Gulag to be acknowledged much more explicitly. Thus even though Europe has been unified politically, it is divided by its diverging perceptions of the past. Jessica Ortner argues that German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe and the GDR who migrated to Germany as refugees during or after the Cold War have responded critically to the need to widen European cultural memory to include the traumatic experiences of the East. The writers focused on include Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik, Vladimir Vertlib, and Barbara Honigmann. A central focus of the book is the "traveling of memories" from Eastern Europe and the GDR to (Western) Germany and Austria. Introducing the term "literature of mnemonic migration," Ortner asserts that these authors' writings negotiate the mnemonic divide between East and West. They criticize the normative memory politics of both Germany and the Soviet Union and address not only the politically explosive question of how to remember both National Socialism and Communism but also the status of Jews in contemporary Germany.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Writing Against the Backdrop of European Memory Politics after 1989 Part I. Contextualizing Literature of Mnemonic Migration: Political and Aesthetic Settings 1: Politics and Memory: Overcoming the Mnemonic Division of Europe? 2: Setting the Scene: Aesthetic Representations of Europe Part II. Imaginations of Europe-Nazism and Stalinism Rethought 3: Redefining the Jewish Past: Vladimir Vertlib 4: Family Memory as a Vessel of Amnesia: Katja Petrowskaja 5: The East-West Division through the Lens of the Divided Germany: Barbara Honigmann Part III. Contesting Germany's Social Framework of Memory 6: Traumatic Recollections: Olga Grjasnowa 7: Dichotomy as a Principle of Mnemonic Migration: Lena Gorelik Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays by leading scholars examining today's vibrant and innovative German crime fiction, along with its historical background. Although George Bernard Shaw quipped that "the Germans lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels," there is a long tradition of German crime fiction; it simply hasn't aligned itself with international trends. Duringthe 1920s, German-language writers dispensed with the detective and focused instead on criminals, a trend that did not take hold in other countries until after 1945, by which time Germany had gone on to produce antidetective novels that were similarly ahead of their time. German crime fiction has thus always been a curious case; rather than follow the established rules of the genre, it has always been interested in examining, breaking, and ultimately rewriting those rules. This book assembles leading international scholars to examine today's German crime fiction. It features innovative scholarly work that matches the innovativeness of the genre, taking up the Regionalkrimi;crime fiction's reimagining and transforming of traditional identities; historical crime fiction that examines Germany's and Austria's conflicted twentieth-century past; and how the newly vibrant Austrian crime fiction ties in with and differentiates itself from its German counterpart. Contributors: Angelika Baier, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Kyle Frackman, Sascha Gerhards, Heike Henderson, Susanne C. Knittel, Anita McChesney, Traci S. O'Brien,Jon Sherman, Faye Stewart, Magdalena Waligórska. Lynn M. Kutch is Professor of German at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Todd Herzog is Professor and Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.Trade ReviewOpens up both the foreign view of German-language crime literature and the cultural self-descriptions to which [that literature] gives rise. . . . [Also] contains contributions on crime literature 'by women for women,' on feminist crime literature . . . . -- Nele Hoffmann * ARBITRIUM *[C]omprehensive and interesting analysis. . . . For readers in Germany and Austria as well the essays in Tatort Germany should be of great interest [because it allows one] to learn how the German-language detective novel is perceived in the US. I recommend Tatort Germany as an enrichment of any collection of secondary literature on the genre. * CRIMEMAG *This volume offers a rich insight into contemporary German-language crime fiction and its emerging trends. . . . [T]he extensive analysis of currently untranslated texts--with quotations in English--performs an important function, too, especially as it serves to encourage more translations of German-language crime novels in future. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *The volume's focus on contemporary trends in German-language crime fiction offers a welcome corrective to [the widespread lack of knowledge of German-language crime fiction in the English-speaking world], as does its exploration of the 'peculiarly German twists' of the genre in its three sections on place, history, and identity. . . . [R]ich and diverse . . . highly recommended for researchers of genre fiction, whether working in German Studies or beyond: quotations are provided in German and English, and an extensive bibliography[y] direct[s] readers to resources in both languages. . . . -- Katharina Hall * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[C]onvincingly make[s] a case for the serious scholarly study of your favorite guilty pleasure: those prolific German crime novels that are, in their own idiosyncratic way, every bit as good as their English and Swedish counterparts. By placing twenty-first century German crime fiction into its historical, international and theoretical contexts, Kutch and Herzog-and the volume's contributors-provide a fascinating broader explanation of a current literary phenomenon. -- Rob McFarland * WOMEN IN GERMAN NEWSLETTER *That crime fiction written in German represents a 'curious case' has been established before, but a more wide-reaching case can indeed be made for contemporary German-language crime fiction, and the editors and contributors of this volume succeed in doing so quite admirably. -- Thomas Kniesche * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog Vor Ort: The Functions and Early Roots of German Regional Crime - Kyle Frackman Krimi Quo Vadis: Literary and Televised Trends in the German Crime Genre - Sascha Gerhards Plurality and Alterity in wolf Haas's Detective Brenner Mysteries - Jon Sherman The Case of the Austrian Regional Crime Novel - Anita McChesney "Darkness at the Beginning": The Holocaust in Contemporary German Crime Fiction - Magdalena Waligórska Case Histories: The Lagacy of Nazi Euthanasia in Recent German Heimatkrimis - Susanne C. Knittel "Der Fall Loest": A Case Study of Crime Stories and the Public Sphere in the GDR - Carol Anne Costabile-Heming What's in Your Bag?: "Freudian Crimes" and Austria's Nazi Past in Eva Rossmann's Freudsche Verbrechen - Traci S. O'Brien Layered Deviance: Intersexuality in Contemporary German Crime Fiction - Angelika Baier Girls in the Gay Bar: Performing and Policing Identity in Crime Fiction - Faye Stewart Eva Rossmann's Culinary Mysteries - Heike Henderson Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisAnalyzes two groups of "musical novels" -- novels that take music as a model for their construction -- including jazz novels by Toni Morrison and Michael Ondaatje, and novels based on Bach's Goldberg Variations. What is a "musical novel"? This book defines the genre as musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its form. The musical novel crosses medial boundaries, aspiring to techniques, structures, and impressions similar tothose of music. It takes music as a model for its own construction, borrowing techniques and forms that range from immediately perceptible, essential aspects of music (rhythm, timbre, the simultaneity of multiple voices) to microstructural (jazz riffs, call and response, leitmotifs) and macrostructural elements (themes and variations, symphonies, albums). The musical novel also evokes the performance context by imitating elements of spontaneity that characterize improvised jazz or audience interaction. The Musical Novel builds upon theories of intermediality and semiotics to analyze the musical structures, forms, and techniques in two groups of musical novels, which serve as case studies. The first group imitates an entire musical genre and consists of jazz novels by Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Xam Wilson Cartiér, Stanley Crouch, Jack Fuller, Michael Ondaatje, and Christian Gailly. The secondgroup of novels, by Richard Powers, Gabriel Josipovici, Rachel Cusk, Nancy Huston, and Thomas Bernhard, imitates a single piece of music, J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Emily Petermann is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz.Trade Review[R]ecommends itself to literary or music libraries, as well as to all those interested in the sounds and structures of the contemporary Anglo-American novel. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *[A] necessary work of methodology, refining and clarifying prior attempts at intermedial analysis into a toolset that offers much as a foundation for future works of criticism. * H-MUSIC *For the scholar of musical fiction, this book is of great interest. * JIVE-TALK.COM *[O]f significant interest not only to the literary scholar but also to the philosopher of art. . . . Petermann's exploration of th[e] literary subgenre [of the 'musical novel'], defined as 'musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its very form' (p.2) invites us to rethink a series of classical problems - the essence of music, boundaries of art forms, musical sense and meaning, the relation between music and language - through the lens of these peculiar textual artworks. * UNIVERSA. RECENSIONI DI FILOSOFIA *Selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2014 * . *[A]n important contribution to the field of word and music studies. . . . Petermann offers a theory of intermediality that standardizes the features of novels that 'transpos[e] elements of music.' . . . . [E]xpertly crafted. . . . If for no other reason, one should read The Musical Novel to enjoy the author's elegant language --Petermann's prose was music to this reviewer's ears. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Petermann makes a strong and patient case for a thriving tradition of intermediality, and one - this is what distinguishes her book from earlier passes at the subject - that crucially involves audience expectations and reception as part of the equation: knowing the Goldberg Variations or a particular jazz standard provides a subliminal framework for fictional improvisation which a reader unfamiliar with the music might lack. * TLS *The musical knowledge that Petermann displays throughout her book is as sound as her literary background: this promotes illuminating insights for readers coming from both worlds. . . . [Her] theory of intermediality is entirely persuasive and plausible, and as such it is highly useful to anybody seeking to expand further the field of word and music studies. Overall . . . a most thoughtful and comprehensive formalist approach to intermediality in general and the musical novel in particular. * MUSIC & LETTERS *Table of ContentsIntroduction Theorizing the Musical Novel Elements of Sound in Jazz Novels Structural Patterns in Jazz Novels The Performance Situation in Jazz Novels Structural Patterns in Novels Based on the Goldberg Variations Composition, Performance, and Reception in Novels Based on the Goldberg Variations Conclusion Appendix: Diagrams of Intermediality in Selected Novels Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisTracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer, revealing how and why the writer has been "under fire" since the advent of his career. Threatened by a rival editor brandishing a double-barreled shotgun, young Samuel Clemens had his first taste of literary criticism. Clemens began his long writing career penning satirical articles for his brother's newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri. His humor delighted everyone except his targets, and it would not be the last time his writing provoked threats of "dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off." Clemens adopted the name Mark Twain while living in the Nevada Territory, where his caustic comedy led to angry confrontations, a challenge to a duel, and a subsequent flight. Nursing his wounded ego in California, Twain vowed to develop a reputation that would"stand fire" and in the process became the classic American writer. Mark Twain under Fire tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer: his reception as a humorist, his "return fire" on genteel critics, and the development of academic criticism. As a history of Twain criticism, the book draws on English and foreign-language scholarship. Fulton discusses the forces and ideas that have influenced criticism, revealinghow and why Mark Twain has been "under fire" from the advent of his career to the present day, when his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn remains one of America's most frequently banned books. Joe B. Fulton is Professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He has published four previous books on Mark Twain.Trade ReviewFulton gives an excellent account of the difficulties faced by nineteenth-century American scholars . . . who wanted both to establish American literature on strong 'native' ground yet struggled to recognize that ground in Calaveras County, or a Colorado silver mine, or on the banks of the Mississippi. * TLS *Table of ContentsIntroduction "A Reputation That Can Stand Fire": Mark Twain's Early Reception through 1910 "All Right, Then, I'll Go to Hell": Mark Twain's Disputed Legacy, 1910-1950 "Only One Right Form for a Story": Mark Twain and Cold War Criticism, 1950-1970 "Everyone Is a Moon, and Has a Dark Side": New Phases of Mark Twain Criticism from the 1970s through the 1980s "It Is Difference of Opinion That Makes Horse-Races": Mark Twain as a Partisan in the Culture Wars, 1990s to 2015 Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive narrative overview and analysis of the criticism of the controversial German author's works. When the Swedish Academy announced that Günter Grass had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, it singled out his first novel The Tin Drum (1959, English translation 1963) as a seminal work that had signaled thepostwar rebirth of German letters, auguring "a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." Nearly fifty years after its publication, the novel's significance has been generally acknowledged: it is the uncontested favorite among Grass's works of fiction on the part of reading public and critics alike, yet its canonical status tends to obscure the decidedly mixed and even hostile reactions it initially elicited. Along with The Tin Drum, Grass's impressive body of literary work since the 1950s has spawned a cottage industry of Grass criticism, making a reliable guide through the thicket of sometimes contradictory readings a definite desideratum. SiegfriedMews fills this lacuna in Grass scholarship by way of a detailed but succinct, descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of the scholarship from 1959 to 2005. Grass's politically motivated interventions in publicdiscourse have kept him highly visible, blurring the boundaries between politics and aesthetics. Mews therefore examines not only academic criticism but also the daily and weekly press (and other news media), providing additionalinsight into the reception of Grass's works. Siegfried Mews is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Trade ReviewWinner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, 2008 * . *An important contribution to the facilitation of further Grass research. Indispensable to those working in the field. Sets new methodological standards for tertiary literature on the reception of a modern writer's fictional oeuvre. * ARBITRIUM *As a prolific author and also graphic artist and performer, Grass has earned both intense critical responses from the media, in Germany and abroad, and vast amounts of scholarship. Mews's first-rate, well-organized guide to and overview of this literature ... is nuanced, balanced, and sophisticated, making this a treasure trove of information. * CHOICE *This volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone seeking quick and dependable orientation in the vast body of Grass scholarship. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Mews's book more than achieves the goals it sets itself and provides a valuable work of reference for Grass scholarship. * H-NET *[W]ill be an essential research tool for all future Grass critics, having something to teach to even his most experienced readers. * MONATSHEFTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum Katz und Maus / Cat and Mouse Hundejahre / Dog Years Danziger Trilogie / The Danzig Trilogy Örtlich betäubt / Local Anaesthetic Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke / From the Diary of a Snail Der Butt / The Flounder Das Treffen in Telgte / The Meeting at Telgte Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus / Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out Die Rättin / The Rat Zunge zeigen / Show Your Tongue Unkenrufe / The Call of the Toad Ein weites Feld / Too Far Afield Mein Jahrhundert / My Century Im Krebsgang / Crabwalk Epilogue Works Cited Index

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