Literary studies: fiction Books

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance. While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutková, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Social, Political, and Personal Dimensions of Storytelling - Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston William PART I. ANNA SEGHERS: A MISSING PIECE IN THE CANON OF MODERNIST STORYTELLERS Anna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years - Christiane Zehl Romero Who Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers's "The Excursion of the Dead Girls": Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction - Peter Beicken Anna Seghers's Rubble Literature, 1947-49 - Ute Brandes Anna Seghers and the Struggle to Tell Stories about the Nazi Past in the Early German Democratic Republic - Stephen Brockmann Aufbauzeit or flaue Zeit? Anna Seghers's GDR Novels - Hunter Bivens The Time of Decision in Anna Seghers - Benjamin Robinson Filling the Void with Stories: Anna Seghers's Conceptual Metaphors - Jennifer Marston William PART II. EXPRESSIONS OF MODERNITY: USING STORYTELLING UNCONVENTIONALLY Storytelling and Telling Stories in Heine's Prose Fiction - Robert C. Holub Modernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka - Kristy R. Boney Synthesis and Transtextuality: The Jewish Reinvention of Chinese Mythical Stories in "Shanghai Ghetto" - Weijia Li American Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools - Elizabeth Loentz A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945 - Michaela Peroutkova Changed for the Better? Alternative Uses of the Transformative Cancer Trope in Thomas Mann's Die Betrogene and Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life - Kristen Hetrick PART III. THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE: STORYTELLING IN ACUTE HISTORICAL MOMENTS Problems and Effects of Autobiographical Storytelling: Als Pimpf in Polen: Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung 1940-1945 (1993) and A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazis' Program for Evacuating Children during World War II (1998) - Jost Hermand Too Near, Too Far: My GDR Story - Marc Silberman Conflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred - Andy Spencer "Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen": Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf's Novel Kindheitsmuster - Luke Springman Narrating Germany's Past: A Story of Exile and the Return Home-A Translation of the Chapter "Above the Lake" from Ursula Krechel's Novel Landgericht - Amy Kepple Strawser Storytelling in the GDR: An Interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich - Sylvia Fischer Notes on the Contributors

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith the disappearance of the eyewitness generation and the globalization of Holocaust memory, this book interrogates key concepts in Holocaust and trauma studies through an assessment of contemporary German-language Jewish authors. In the shifting media landscape of the twenty-first century, the second and third generations of German-language Jewish authors are grappling with the disappearance of the eyewitness generation and the hyper-mediation and globalization of Holocaust memory. Benjamin Stein, Maxim Biller, Vladmir Vertlib, and Eva Menasse each experiment with new approaches towards Holocaust representation and the Nazi past. This book investigates major shifts in Holocaust memory since the turn of the millennium, and argues that the works of these authors call for a much-needed reassessment of key concepts and terms in Holocaust discourse such as authenticity, empathy, normalization, representation, traumatic unspeakability, and postmemory. Drawing on current research in media, memory, cultural, and literary studies, Maria Roca Lizarazu develops a fresh approach which challenges the dominant focus on traumatic unspeakability by engaging with the culturally mediated travels of transgenerational and transnational contemporary Holocaust memory. Roca Lizarazu pays special attention to ethical and aesthetic challenges of contemporary Holocaust memory and how these are addressed in the medium of contemporary German-language literature. This book offers a critical new perspective on the central paradigms informing recent Holocaust and trauma studies scholarship and, in doing so, provides novel insights into a new generational approach towards Holocaust remembrance and representation. MARIA ROCA LIZARAZU is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, UK.Trade ReviewMaria Roca Lizarazu's Renegotiating Postmemory is impressive in the breadth of its theoretical engagement with current post-Holocaust memory and media discourses. -- Charlotte Schallié * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Holocaust Memory in the New Millennium-Between Continuity and Change Rethinking Testimony: Authenticity, Travelling Memories, and Post-Holocaust Jewish Identities in Benjamin Stein's Die Leinwand "Im Land der Väter und Verräter": Intertextuality, Influence, and the Problem of Symbiosis in Maxim Biller's Writing Contrapuntal Memory, Dialogism, and Irony: Challenges to Transnationalism in Vladimir Vertlib's Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur From the Family to the Meta-Memorial Novel: Eva Menasse's Fiction Conclusion: The Critique of the Critique of Representation: Self- and Metareflexivity in Contemporary Holocaust Fiction

Read more less

Book SynopsisA comparative study of "inner" and "territorial" forms of literary exile under Nazism and Francoism, proposing an integrative model of exile that emphasizes common approaches and themes rather than division. Writers opposed to National Socialism or Francoism have been considered either territorial exiles, who left their country, or "inner exiles," who did not. Those who stayed were initially accorded greater status, while those who left were denigrated. With time, however, there was a growing recognition of the hardship and achievements of territorial exiles and increasing criticism of inner exiles. Later critical debates have perpetuated this fissure and failed to explore the similar origins and assumptions of the two forms of exile. This book adopts a unique cross-cultural approach, illuminating the shared roots of opposition across the two cultures and exilic settings. It challenges the traditional divide, demonstrating striking similarities in terminology, exilic identities, and literary concerns, between not only "inner" and "outer" but also the German and Spanish contexts. The study offers new perspectives on the literary historiography of twentieth-century Germany and Spain, showing how, in the impact and consequences of dictatorship, the histories of the two countries intersect. It is thus of interest to literary historiansand students of German and Spanish literature, and it also, because it provides English translations of all quotations, serves as an introduction for English-speaking readers to this poorly understood phenomenon and its implications for other exilic settings. Mónica Jato is Reader and John Klapper is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, UK.Trade ReviewFractured Frontiers benefits from the successful positioning and argumentation of the authors on comparative subjects not typically paired together. . . . The authors challenge the frameworks not only of how we define exile writing, but also how we look at the bookended periods of time isolating the Nazi and Francoist regimes. This book touches areas of scholarship such as history, literature, exile, migration and politics, alongside Hispanic, German and European studies, and will be suited for a diverse audience, from those interested in the postwar impact of dictatorship to readers of exile writing. -- Gina Benavidez * H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I. Overarching Issues Cultural Contexts Exile: The Temptation of the Trope Part II. The Uses of History German Historical Narratives in Inner and Territorial Exile Historical Uses of Myth in 1940s Spanish Poetry Part III. A Complicated Return Blurring of the Lines: The Complexities of Return to Germany Destiempo: The Challenges of a Long Return in the Spanish Context Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisTraces Hemingway's critical fortunes over the ninety years of his prominence, telling us something about what we value in literature and why scholarly reputations rise and fall. Hemingway burst on the literary scene in the 1920s with spare, penetrating short stories and brilliant novels. Soon he was held as a standard for modern writers. Meanwhile, he used his celebrity to create a persona like the stoic,macho heroes of his fiction. After a decline during the 1930s and 1940s, he came roaring back with The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize. While his popularity waxed and waned during his lifetime, Hemingway's reputation among scholars remained strong as long as traditional scholarship dominated. New approaches beginning in the 1960s brought a sea change, however, finding grave fault with his work and making him a figure ripe for vilification. Yet during this time scholarship on him continued to appear. His works still sell well, and several are staples on high-school and college syllabi. A new scholarly edition of his letters is drawing prominent attention, and there is a resurgence in scholarly attention to - and approbation for - his work. Tracing Hemingway's critical fortunes tells us something about what we value in literature and why reputations rise and fall as scholars find new ways to examine and interpret creative work.Trade Review[A] treat. . . . The Critics and Hemingway is a major resource for Hemingway studies, one that I will regularly reach for and send my students to. -- Alex Vernon * JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *Mazzeno has succeeded in generating an engaging and highly readable - yet also very useful - narrative, for which we can all be grateful. * THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW *[A] rigorously researched reference book to be consulted when one wants to learn who said what and when about Hemingway. . . . [T]he strength of the text . . . lies in its cumulative effect. Taking on the task which must have been a very laborious one, carrying the burden of a big amount of material to be considered with enthusiasm, the book certainly deserves a good and easily accessible place on Hemingway library shelves. * POLISH JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *By critiquing critical assessments, Mazzeno identifies the predilections and biases shaping [critics'] judgments, uncovering the forces that sustain Hemingway's reputation as both a literary and cultural icon. * AMERICAN LITERATURE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: "The Most Interesting Man in the World" Spokesperson for the Lost Generation (1924-1932) Writing on His Own Terms (1932-1952) The Critics' Darling (1952-1961) Posthumous Evaluations (1961-1969) Turbulence (1970-1979) Calm Before the Storm (1980-1985) A "Sea Change" in Hemingway Studies (1986-1990) "Hemingway": Site for Competing Theories (1991-1999) Old Themes, New Discoveries (2000-2010) The Undisputed Champ Once More (2011-2014) Conclusion: The Enduring Master Major Works by Ernest Hemingway Works Cited

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first book to examine the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre, which is especially timely in light of current concerns about male privilege. Günter Grass (1927-2015) was a fixture at the heart of German cultural life, a self-styled spokesman of the Kulturnation (cultural nation) who imagined it linking him to canonical male literary figures and their authority. He was also the object of valid feminist criticism: a rigid conception of gender permeates his works, belying his professed skepticism toward ideologies. A heterosexual male, Grass lent his representative persona a natural veneer by appropriating his era's gendered discursive constructs, including Heimat, the Bildungsroman, and narratives about German wartime victims and perpetrators. Such appropriation elevated his remembering artist's masculinity above that of the status quo's defenders and exploiters of memory. This book is the first to evaluate the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre and its legacy in light of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery.Trade ReviewTimothy Malchow's study is a noteworthy, timely and needed contribution to the existing scholarship on Grass as it approaches his oeuvre through the lens of memory and gender, two concepts that are - so Malchow's core argument - inextricably linked in Grass's works. -- MONATSHEFTEMalchow's book is original, even ground-breaking, in showing how Grass draws on two fundamentally German modes of discourse, the Bildungsroman and the Heimat motif (often enacted in another prose genre, the Heimatroman) to shape his narratives and guide his exploration of German memory, particularly as it relates to the question of guilt and innocence, victimhood and perpetration, with respect to the period of National Socialist rule. . . . [The book] constitutes a noteworthy contribution to Grass scholarship . . . . Excellent . . . . -- John Pizer * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Including admirably researched considerations of literary genres, education, homeland (Heimat), memory, trauma, and sexuality, this is a multifaceted and satisfying portrait of the literary artist as a man. -- J. M. Jeep * CHOICE *Throughout his book, Malchow makes a strong case for the connection between gender-coded imagery and the process of memory and memory creation in the two works. . . . By establishing the link between gender and memory, Malchow opens an additional avenue for Grass scholars to explore in assessing the author's work. -- Adrian Chubb * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations, Translations, and Transcriptions Introduction Grass's Biography in Context: 1927-1959 Corporeal Memory, Trauma, and Art in The Tin Drum Bildung, Heimat, and Gendered Modes of German Memory in The Tin Drum A Patriarchal Arbiter of German Cultural Memory and His Feminized Others: Leveling Bildung, Opening Heimat, and Championing Art from the 1960s to the New Millennium Grass's Early Life Once Again: Broken Silence, Mourning, and Gendered Approaches to Memory in Peeling the Onion Epilogue Works Cited

Read more less

Book SynopsisShows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined the concept of Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism. The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, the eastern European dissident writers György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera revived the concept to counter a perceived Cold War memory vacuum, aligning themselves with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Their observations gave rise to a protracted public debate that posited literature against politics. This debate was both anticipated and expanded upon in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria, and Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Dubravka Ugrešić in (the former) Yugoslavia, all of whom questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism. Yvonne Zivkovic draws on space and memory studies to show how Mitteleuropa emerged as an alternate memory discourse that reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective that examines civic values against public tendencies of memory manipulation.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations and Note on Translations Introduction: Mitteleuropa as a Transnational Memory Discourse The Legacy of Mitteleuropa: Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke: The Austrian Periphery and Mitteleuropa Mitteleuropa as Conflicted Community in the Writings of Danilo Kis and Aleksandar Tisma Mitteleuropa after 1989. New Memory Challenges in Christoph Ransmayr and Dubravka Ugresi? Conclusion: Mitteleuropa Literature in the 21st Century: Revisiting the Promise of Border-Crossing Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Notes on Usage and Documentation Introduction: The Complicated Afterlives of Doyle and Holmes 1: The Emergence of a Popular Writer (1879-1900) 2: New Ventures (1901-1930) 3: Decades of Critical Neglect (1931-1970) 4: Traditional Readings, New Theoretical Critiques (1971-1990) 5: Achieving Respectability among Critics (1991-2000) 6: Twenty-First Century Critiques I (2001-2010) 7: Twenty-First Century Critiques II (2011-2020) 8: Future Directions Appendix: Sherlockian Scholarship and Activities Chronological List of Arthur Conan Doyle's Major Publications Works Cited Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWINNER of the 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award Volume of new essays investigating Kleist's influences and sources both literary and philosophical, their role as paradigms, and the ways in which he responded to and often shattered them. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a rebel who upset canonization by employing his predecessors and contemporaries as what Steven Howe calls "inspirational foils." It was precisely a keen awareness of literary and philosophical traditions that allowed Kleist to shatter prevailing paradigms. Though little is known about what specifically Kleist read, the frequent allusions in his enduringly modern oeuvre indicate fruitful dialogues with both canonical and marginal works of European literature, spanning antiquity (The Old Testament, Sophocles), the Early Modern Period (Shakespeare, De Zayas), the late Enlightenment (Wieland, Goethe, Schiller), and the first eleven years of the nineteenth century (Mereau, Brentano, Collin). Kleist's works also evidence encounters with his philosophical precursors and contemporaries, including the ancient Greeks (Aristotle) and representatives of all phases of Enlightenment thought (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson, Spalding, Fichte, Kant, Hegel), economic theories (Smith, Kraus), and developments in anthropology, sociology, and law. This volume of new essays sheds light on Kleist's relationship to his literary and philosophical influences and on their function as paradigms to which his writings respond.Trade ReviewSurprising, original, and eminently readable, this is an outstanding addition to serious scholarship about an author whose work is increasingly significant for contemporary readers. Highly recommended. * CHOICE MAGAZINE *Table of ContentsForeword: A Note on Kleist in American Art, Film, and Literature - Paul Michael Lützeler Acknowledgments Introduction: Kleist's Literary and Philosophical Paradigms = Jeffrey L. High, Rebecca Stewart, and Elaine Chen Part I. Kleist's Literary Paradigms In the Beginning: Kleist, Genesis, Kafka, and the Pursuit of Epistemological Salvation - Gail K. Hart Just Violence? War, Law, and Politics in Kleist's Die Herrmannsschlacht and Shakespeare's Henry V - Steven Howe The Mereau-Brentano Translations of María de Zayas's "Spanish Novellas" and Kleist's Prose Works - Jeffrey L. High and Lisa Beesley The Old and the New: Christoph Martin Wieland and Kleist on Parteigeist - John A. McCarthy Receptions, Homages, and Anti-Occupational Allegories of Autonomy: The Case of Schiller's Bohemian Cup and Kleist's Broken Jug - Jeffrey L. High and Elaine Chen Anti-Napoleonic Rage and the Hope for a Better Future: Collin between Schiller and Kleist - Rebecca Stewart Part II: Kleist's Philosophical Paradigms Fiat claritas et pereat opus: Equity and the Limits of Rectification in Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas - John T. Hamilton Kleist, Johann Joachim Spalding and the Bestimmung des Menschen: Philosophy as a Way of Life? - Laura Anna Macor War Games: Kleist, Adam Ferguson, and the Cultural Poetics of Play - Christian Moser Economic Concepts and Authorial Self-Design in Heinrich von Kleist's Letters - Johannes Endres Gender and the Politics of Recognition in Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right and Kleist's Amphitryon - Bernd Fischer Kleist and Haiti - With and Beyond Hegel - Katrin Pahl Notes on the Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisEmphasizing the role of and portrayal of emotion, this study argues for the inclusion of six late-eighteenth-century German-language novels by and about women in a revised canon. Literature written by women in German during the "Age of Goethe" was largely considered unworthy Trivialliteratur. Using insights from Gender Studies yet acknowledging the need for a literary canon, Great Books by German Women offers a critical interpretation of six canon-worthy German novels written by women in the period, which it calls the "Age of Emotion." The novels are chosen because they depict women's ordinary yet interesting lives and because each contains prose particularly expressive of emotion. Sophie von La Roche's Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim draws on the tradition of the epistolary novel while finding new ways to depict empathetic emotions. Friederike Unger's Julchen Grünthal brings to the Frauenroman or women's novel the use of irony to portray a heroine's emotions during her coming of age. Sophie Mereau's Blütenalter der Empfindung imagines women's affinity for the philosophical sublime, while Caroline Wolzogen depicts female desire in her Agnes von Lilien: both add lyricism to their prose, capturing sensual emotions. Karoline Fischer's Die Honigmonathe explores the agony that extreme emotions cause - not only for women but for men. And Caroline Pichler's Frauenwürde expands the focus from a young heroine to multiple mature characters. This study concludes that the influence of these six works was in no way trivial, either in portraying women's lives and emotions or in the history of German literature.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Passion and Prejudice: Toward a New Literary Canon for the German Novel 1: An Anglophile Fräulein and Her Epistolary Emotions: Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) by Sophie von La Roche 2: Reading for Pleasure vs. Reading for Pain: Julchen Grünthal: Eine Pensionsgeschichte (1784) by Friederike Unger 3: Sympathy for the Sublime: Das Blütenalter der Empfindung (1794) by Sophie Mereau 4: The Legitimacy of Passionate Narrative and the Metanarrative of Anonymity: Agnes von Lilien (1796) by Caroline von Wolzogen 5: Monstrous Pathos and the Agony of Female Influence: Die Honigmonathe(1804) by Caroline Fischer 6: Adultery Rewarded: Women's Emotions and Men's Indignity in Frauenwürde (1818) by Caroline Pichler Conclusion: Great Books, Or: The Laurel Wreath as a Mixed Blessing Appendix A: Publication Information and Plot Summaries, Chronologically Listed Appendix B: Biographies of the Novelists Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis first book in English on Meisel-Hess, an early feminist voice in modernist discourse, illustrates the dynamic interplay between gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity in Austrian and German modernism. Grete Meisel-Hess (1879-1922), a contemporary of Freud, Schnitzler, and Klimt, was a feminist voice in early-twentieth-century modernist discourse. Born in Prague to Jewish parents and raised in Vienna, she became a literary presence with her 1902 novel Fanny Roth. Influenced by many of her contemporaries, she also criticized their notions of gender and sexuality. Relocating to Berlin, she continued to write fiction and began publishing on sexology and the women's movement. Helga Thorson's book combines a literary-cultural exploration of modernism in Vienna and Berlin with a biography of Meisel-Hess and a critical analysis of her works. Focusing on Meisel-Hess's negotiations of feminism, modernism, and Jewishness, it illustrates the dynamic interplay between gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity in Austrian and German modernism. Analyzing Meisel-Hess's fiction as well as her sexological studies, Thorson argues that Meisel-Hess posited herself as both a "New Woman" and the writer of the "New Woman." The book draws on extensive archival research that uncovered a large number of new sources, including an unpublished drama and a variety of documents and letters scattered in collections across Europe. Until now there have been only limited secondary sources about Meisel-Hess, most containing errors and omissions regarding her biography. This is the first book on Meisel-Hess in English.Trade ReviewWhile Thorson's book is grounded in long-gestating research and writing, it takes inspiration from current research on gender and modernism as well as relatively recent critical notions such as "geo-modernism" and discussions surrounding intersectionality. It hence offers several layers of analysis: deep textual work; the very rich reconstruction of intellectual, social, and life contexts situating these ideas and texts; and, finally, the theoretical concerns of current scholarship. * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction: Breaking with the Past, Forging the Future 1: The New Woman of the Early Twentieth Century 2: Feminism and Jewishness in Viennese Literary Modernism 3: Theorizing the Sexual Crisis through Journalism and Sexology 4: Effecting Change through Literature: Die Intellektuellen (1911) 5: Sexual Sociology during the First World War Conclusion: Living the Sexual Crisis Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn alternative genealogy of abstract art, featuring the crucial role of 19th-century German literature in shaping it aesthetically, culturally, and socially. Once upon a time (or more specifically, in 1911!) there was an artist named Wassily Kandinsky who created the world's first abstract artwork and forever altered the course of art history - or so the traditional story goes. A good story, but not the full story. The Myth of Abstraction reveals that abstract art was envisioned long before Kandinsky, in the pages of nineteenth-century German literature. It originated from the written word, described by German writers who portrayed in language what did not yet exist as art. Yet if writers were already writing about abstract art, why were painters not painting it? To solve the riddle, this book features the work of three canonical nineteenth-century authors - Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Gottfried Keller - who imagine, theorize, and describe abstract art in their literary writing, sometimes warning about the revolution it will cause not just in art, but in all aspects of social life. Through close readings of their textual images and visual analyses of actual paintings, Andrea Meyertholen shows how these writers anticipated the twentieth-century birth of abstract art by establishing the necessary conditions for its production, reception, and consumption. The first study to bring these early descriptions of abstraction together and investigate their significance, The Myth of Abstraction writes an alternative genealogy featuring the crucial role of literature in shaping abstract art in aesthetic, cultural, and social terms.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art Apocalypse Now: Heinrich Von Kleist's Sublime De-Framing of Caspar David Friedrich's Der Mönch Am Meer (1810) The Kleistian Sublime Is Now: Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman The Clouding of Perception: Seeing The (Un)Real Potential for Abstraction in the Poetry and Science of Goethe's Clouds (1821) In the Service of Clouds or Optical Illusion?: Romanticism, Pointillism, and Impressionism Driven to Distraction and from Abstraction: The Birth and Death of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich (1854/55, 1879/80) Inside the Mind and Outside the Margins: The Unruly Lines of Paul Klee, André Masson, and Cy Twombly Epilogue: Laocoön and His Sisters: The Future of Literature and Art

Read more less

Book SynopsisInvestigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik. In recent decades, life writing has exploded in popularity: memoirs that focus on traumatic experiences now constitute the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide. But life writing is not only highly marketable; it also does important emotional, cultural, and political work. It is more available to amateurs and those without the cultural capital or the self-confidence to embrace more traditional literary forms, and thus gives voice to marginalized populations. Contested Selves investigates various forms of German-language life writing, including memoirs, interviews, letters, diaries, and graphic novels, shedding light on its democratic potential, on its ability to personalize history and historicize the personal. The contributors ask how the various authors construct and negotiate notions of the self relative to sociopolitical contexts, cultural traditions, genre expectations, and narrative norms. They also investigate the nexus of writing, memory, and experience, including the genre's truth claims vis-à-vis the pliability and unreliability of human memories. Finally, they explore ethical questions that arise from intimate life writing and from the representation of "vulnerable subjects" as well as from the interrelation of material body, embodied self, and narrative. All forms of life writing discussed in this volume are invested in a process of making meaning and in an exchange of experience that allows us to relate our lives to the lives of others.Trade ReviewThe contributions to Contested Selves demonstrate most impressively that there is a strong nexus between life writing and politics. Neither politics nor life writing nor the nexus between the two will vanish any time soon; it is to be hoped that books such as Contested Selves will continue to shed light on them. -- MONATSHEFTETable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer Part I. Women's Life Writing, Female Subjectivity and Agency 1: "A Portrait of the Moment": Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Letters at the Boundary of Life Writing Laura Deiulio 2: A Force of Nature: Narrative Strategies of Autobiography in the Work of Poet-Queen Carmen Sylva Beth Ann Muellner 3: Writing the Cultural Memory of East Germany through Women's Interviewliteratur Julie Shoults Part II. Modern Life Writing and Aesthetics 4: A Life of Its Own: Alfred Döblin on Autobiography and the Novel Matthias Müller 5: A Man of the Century in His Poems: Johannes R. Becher and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Life Narrative Kristin Eichhorn Part III. Trauma and Vergangenheitsbewältigung 6: Writing Two Selves: A Woman's Struggle to Cope with War Erika Quinn 7: "Confrontation with My Complicity": Paratextual Self-Encounters in Diaries of the Second World War Kathryn Sederberg 8: Voices from an "Extinct Species": Narrative Responses to Trauma in German-Jewish Memoirs Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich Part IV. Transnational and Transgenerational Life Writing in Contemporary Germany9: The Case of the Disappearing Son: Gender, Genre, and German Postwar Cultural Memory in Niklas Frank's Meine deutsche Mutter and F. C. Delius's Bildnis der Mutter als junge Frau Katra Byram 10: Lena Gorelik's Autofictional Letter Lieber Mischa: A Guide to Being Jewish in Contemporary Germany Lydia H. Heiss 11: Shapeshifters: Metamorphosing Transgenerational Trauma through Comics Maureen Burdock 12: Homeland, Nation, and Gender in the Life Writing of German and Jewish Émigrés Aylin Bademsoy Bibliography Notes on the Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first English-language study devoted to Hölderlin's novel in three decades, this book reveals Hyperion's literary and philosophical richness and its complex ties with politics, choreography, and economics. While few would question the importance of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) for the development of German idealism and twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and critical theory, Hölderlin scholarship remains largely inaccessible to those working in English. This is especially true for his novel Hyperion - otherwise his most accessible work - which has not had a book-length study in English devoted to it in more than three decades. Anthony Curtis Adler opens Hölderlin's novel up to the reader by stressing its literary uniqueness, philosophical riches, complex ties with contemporaneous discourses, and relevance to contemporary Continental political theory. Neither merely a stepping-stone to his later and more esoteric poetry, nor a novelistic presentation of an idealist dialectics, Hyperion offers a powerful new vision of the relation between poetry, political economy, and philosophical truth. Poetry, for Hölderlin, anticipates forms of political life that have only been obscurely glimpsed; rather than imitating a luminously given idea of the Good, it patiently guides toward a dimly sensed better world. Thus it replaces the Platonic philosopher-king with the poetic leader of the dance. Yet in just this way, Adler shows, Hyperion's project converges with a constellation of quintessentially "modern" discourses and practices, including the codification of dance in early modernity and the rise of political economy in the 18th century. Readers will discover the "choreographic" logic underlying both of these - and, with this, a new way to think about the relations between literature, politics, economics, and dance.Trade ReviewAdler allows several Hölderlins to appear: a ploughman cutting through the conceptual foundations of the West; a deeper thinker than any Plato or Marx of the nature and consistency of political renewal; a gardener. A poet, too. But poetry's modes-giving, measuring, streaming, interrupting-must first find their essence, shared with politics, in dance. To grasp this we must deform our thinking, even practice a slash-and-burn agriculture of the mind. Adler guides us through wide fields, fields of rock and ossification, to ripe banks of open receptivity. . . . Truth is not a stable correspondence but an echo in gesture, a hyperbolic fit, a flare of reconnaissance. This is what Adler gives us to think on the deepest level-a gift that, like a river, overflows itself. -- Simon Horn * German Quarterly *Original, wide-ranging, and challenging. -- E.G. Wickersham * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction Hyperbole, Measure, Dance The Athens Letter - Choreographic Writings Political Personae The Politics of Life The Choreographic Project of Modernity Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisDetails Lawrence's reception of Melville and reveals his underacknowledged role in the Melville Revival, while contributing to the history of the book and the study of the creative process. How Lawrence Read Melville is a highly focused account of D. H. Lawrence's discovery and reception of Herman Melville, from when he first read Moby-Dick as a young man to his final references to Melville in his late works. It shows Lawrence's initial reaction to Moby-Dick; how it led him to other works by Melville, namely Typee and Omoo; and how Melville affected Lawrence's critical and creative writing and shaped his philosophy. This book is a study of the creative process that shows how one great writer inspired another, but it also makes a major contribution to the history of the book and two of its subfields: the history of reading, and reception studies. By his death in 1891, Melville had been forgotten except by a small circle of English enthusiasts. That group put Lawrence onto Melville, whereupon he became a - until now largely unacknowledged - leader of the Melville Revival that rescued the great writer from obscurity. This Swiss army knife of a book will appeal to scholars and booklovers alike.Trade ReviewThe tightly focused premise of this volume - to examine the influence of Herman Melville on the life and work of D. H. Lawrence - initially seems better suited to an academic article than a full-length book study. How much can there be to say on this topic? As it transpires, there's a good deal, and Kevin J. Hayes's engaging, conversational style makes the journey a pleasurable and captivating one. * TLS *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: An English Midlands Bookshelf 2: An Archway into the Future 3: Everyman and the Dead Narrator 4: How Moby-Dick Shaped Women in Love 5: A Little Hesperides of the Soul and Body 6: The Symbolistic All-Knowledge 7: The Melville Centenary 8: Typee under Etna 9: Two Days in Tahiti 10: The Voyage Home Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines portrayals of plants and landscapes in recent German novels and films, addressing the contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, and social and ecological injustice that they expose. Plants, Places, and Power is a study of plants and landscapes in and beyond contemporary German-language literature and film. Stories and images of plants and landscapes in cultural productions are key sites for exposing the violent legacies of German colonialism and Nazism and for addressing contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, social and ecological injustice, and gender inequity. The novels and films discussed in this book address these key political issues in contemporary Europe and propose alternative ways for people to live together on this planet by formulating more inclusive and sustainable concepts of belonging. The book has two main objectives: to offer new approaches to contemporary literature and film from an intersectional, ecological perspective, and to form a canon. All of the works focused on, from Mo Asumang's documentary film Roots Germania (2007) through Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020) and from Yōko Tawada's novel Das nackte Auge (2004) to Saša Stanišić's Herkunft (2019), are by female artists, artists of color, artists who have experienced forced displacement, and/or queer artists. In five chapters, Maria Stehle reads artworks in reference to ecological systems, develops forms of eco- and social criticism based on art, and intertwines ecological and critical thinking with questions of form, affect, and aesthetics.Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments: People and Places Introduction: Living in Relation: Plants, Place-Making, and Social Justice 1: Landscapes: Infrastructures, Power Topographies, and Feral Gardens in Juli Zeh's Unterleuten (2016), Valeska Grisebach's Western (2017), and Anna Sofie Hartmann's Giraffe (2019) 2: Uncanny Gardens: Migration and Belonging in Dörte Hansen's Altes Land (2015) and Saša Stanišić's Herkunft (2019) 3: Trees, Roots, and Anti-Racism in Ilija Trojanow's Nach der Flucht (2017), Mo Asumang's Roots Germania (2007) and Die Arier (2014), and Elliot Blue's Home? (2018) 4: Defiant Flowers and Manufactured Happiness in Vera Chytilová's Daisies (1966), Pipilotti Rist's Pepperminta (2009), and Jessica Hausner's Little Joe: Glück ist ein Geschäft (2019) 5: Senses, Queer Interrelations, and Decolonial Geographies in Yōko Tawada's Das nackte Auge (2004), Shari Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick (2012), and Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020) Epilogue: Erasures and Different Stories Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisBreaks new ground by both analyzing the literary qualities of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth and contextualizing their concern with climate change within the wider crises of the Anthropocene. With the rise of concern about global warming in recent years, climate-change fiction, or cli-fi, has become increasingly important both as a publishing phenomenon and as an area of academic study and research. Flood narratives have become a subsection of cli-fi in their own right. This book proposes new readings of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth, Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall, and The Flood by Maggie Gee. Helen E. Mundler's book takes into account the wealth of criticism that has appeared on these texts in recent years, acknowledging important contributions from critics including Adam Trexler, Adeline Johns-Putra, and Astrid Bracke. However, her book's strength is that it takes a new approach, going beyond the topicality of the texts and treating them not just as ideological statements but giving them their due as literary artifacts. While the importance of climate change is beyond debate, this book takes a more balanced approach that places it within a wider context of the multiple crises of the Anthropocene.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1: An Odd Sort of Cli-Fi? Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow 2: "Hadn't mankind done it before-started from scratch?" Reinterpreting Visions of Past and Future in Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy 3: Watering Down? Clare Morrall's When the Floods Came 4: The Archive and After: A Kaleidoscopic Reading of Maggie Gee's The Flood Conclusion Works Cited Index

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisShows how Adler, Wander, Hilsenrath, and Klüger intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma, revealing new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature. How did German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursue literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society? How did their literary life writings reflect their postwar struggles? This monograph focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah - H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. It analyzes their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publishing, and publicizing Holocaust testimony. These case studies shed light on the devastating aftermaths of the Holocaust in different contexts. Adler depicts his attempts to overcome marginalization as a writer in Britain in the 1950s. Wander reflects on his failure to find a home either in postwar Austria or in the GDR. Hilsenrath satirizes his struggles as an emigrant to the US in the 1960s and after returning to Berlin in the 1980s. Finally, in her 2008 memoir, Ruth Klüger follows up her earlier, highly impactful memoir of the concentration camps by narrating the misogyny and antisemitism she experienced in US and German academia. Helen Finch analyzes how these under-researched texts intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma. Drawing on scholarship on Holocaust testimony, transnational memory, and affect theory, her book reveals new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1: Modernist Marginalization in Exile: H. G. Adler in the 1950s and 1960s 2: Solidarity and Trauma between Austria and the GDR: Fred Wander from the 1960s to 2006 3: Transnational Transgression: Edgar Hilsenrath from 1980 to 2018 4: Feminist Rage: Ruth Klüger in the New Millennium Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisOffers a European view of racial attitudes in the US during the era of the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow, with relevance to today's Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Marylin, a novel by the Austrian writer Arthur Rundt about a mixed-race woman passing as white, moves from Chicago to New York City and concludes tragically on a Caribbean island. First published in 1928 and now translated into English, it offers a European view of racial attitudes in the US during the era of the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow. Rundt's short but powerful novel touches several vital issues in society today, engaging each in a way that prompts further examination and cross-fertilization. First, it sheds historical light on what has become painfully obvious in the Black Lives Matter era (if it wasn't before): the continued injustice experienced by Blacks in America as an effect of structural racism. Second, it confronts issues of migration and hybrid identities. Third, it has relevance for Women's Studies through the title character's interaction with the patriarchy. Through these connections, it responds to a growing current in German Studies concerned with diversity and inclusion and integrating the discipline into the broader humanities. An introduction and an afterword, both of them extensive and scholarly, contextualize the novel in its time and as it relates to ours.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction - Peter Hoeyng and Chauncey J. Mellor Marylin Afterword - Priscilla D. Layne

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance. "Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceaușescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Müller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain. This book is an in-depth investigation of Müller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Müller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.Table of ContentsPreface List of Terms and Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: The Filed Story of Niederungen Chapter 2: Contact Stories: The Author and the Officer Chapter 3: Conspiratorial Stories: The Securitate Sources MAYER, SORIN, and EVA Chapter 4: Captured Stories: Remote Audio Surveillance Chapter 5: Migrating Stories Epilogue Bibliography Appendix I: Müller's Surveillance Timeline (1974-1993) Appendix II: Author's Accreditation by CNSAS Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first English translation of a presciently modern portrayal of emerging feminist sensibilities in a nineteenth-century family, by one of Germany's leading pre-First World War writers. Best known now for her involvement with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) first became famous for fiction and criticism that engaged provocatively with "the woman question." In recent years, the author's literary treatment of the challenges facing women in a patriarchal society has awakened renewed interest. Anneliese's House is the first English translation of her last and most masterful work of fiction, the 1921 Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende vorigen Jahrhunderts (The House: A Family Story from the End of the Nineteenth Century). Anneliese Branhardt, the book's protagonist, long ago renounced a career as a pianist to raise a family with her physician husband, Frank. She worries about her son Balduin - an aspiring poet modeled on Rilke - and about her equally free-spirited daughter Gitta. She is haunted by memories of a daughter who died in childhood and anxious about a risky, late pregnancy. With her domestic harmony threatened by her own stirrings of autonomy and her children's growing independence, Anneliese finds the future both frightening and promising. The edition is fully annotated, with a critical introduction and bibliography.Trade ReviewThis translation makes Andreas-Salomé's last novel accessible to English speakers and offers an important addition to the growing body of critical work on the author. [...] With Anneliese's House, Beck and Whitinger pave the way for broadening insight into the emancipatory significance of her fiction. * FEMINIST GERMAN STUDIES *This intricate psychological novel . . . is about the house of happiness we can build for ourselves and how that deeply human vision sits with nature. [It is] surely the best of her fiction and deserves to be read widely. -- Lesley Chamberlain * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger deserve praise both for rendering precise, intricate sentences from German into English, and for deciding that this novel deserves attention. -- Declan O'Driscoll * IRISH TIMES *Unfolding largely within the titular house, Lou Andreas-Salomé's last novel delicately probes a German bourgeois family on the cusp of a new era. As it renders the inner turmoil of parents and young adult children who sometimes remain opaque even to themselves, the text gently insists on the sustaining goodwill of love in the face of inevitable social change, disappointment, passing time, and mortality. As a subtly complex response to modern times, Anneliese's House-in this finely worded translation-proves the capacities, nuance, and significance of literary evocations of marriage and family. * Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis *Anneliese's House gives invaluable insight into Lou Salomé's thoughts on the complicated process of relationship between the sexes. This makes it an important book in considering her own relationships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud. It is translated with subtlety and sensitivity. * Sue Prideaux, author of I am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche *A wonderfully lucid and elegant translation and a must-read not only for literary scholars but also for social historians for its evocative treatment of the "woman question" and family relationships in the early twentieth century. * Erika Rummel, Professor Emerita of History, Wilfrid Laurier University *A Nietzschean ode to love, marriage, and motherhood, Lou Andreas-Salomé's last novel is finally available in English. Accompanied by an informative introduction and extensive notes, this well-wrought translation captures the psychological nuance and exuberance of the original's bourgeois critique of turn-of-the-century German patriarchy and its incipient anti-Semitism. * Susan Ingram, York University *Salomé's final novel is shot through with a critical eye for the fractured realities of the time and can be read alongside her famously insightful work on Ibsen or Freud. The sharp dialogue, brilliant characterisation and architectural acuity are lovingly translated by Beck and Whitinger to make this essential reading for those interested in twentieth-century German literature and the vital recovery of major women writers. * Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature, New College, Oxford *This first translation into English should reach a wide, international readership. [It] is readable, thoroughly considered and researched, and could serve as a model for those interested in translation studies. Beck and Whitinger's erudite introduction presents their translation philosophy, which includes bringing their readers to the foreign text by preserving elements of German language and culture (lviii-lix). Their extensive endnotes contribute an impressive amount of context and clarification to Salomé's narrative. -- Susan C. Anderson * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction Biographical Sketch The Critical Fortunes of Andreas-Salomé and Das Haus Grasping the Novel: Interpretive Trends and Points to Ponder Works Cited Translators' Note and Acknowledgments Anneliese's House Part One Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Part Two Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first English translation of Fontane's late, posthumously published novel, featuring the eponymous, complex heroine and confronting issues regarding gender roles and marriage that still resonate today. Theodor Fontane hesitated to publish his late novel Mathilde Möhring because he believed it was too subtle and spare for the popular taste of the day. Published posthumously in 1906, its themes - corrosive economic precarity, the ambivalence of marriage for women, and the burden of work expectations for men - resonate uncannily with readers today. The heroine Mathilde and her mother cling to the underside of the lower middle class by renting out a room in their small Berlin apartment. Their new tenant seems to offer a path to middle-class security, so although marriage is not her first choice, Mathilde applies her shrewd understanding of class mores to pursue it - with results both triumphant and catastrophic. The last among Fontane's powerfully drawn female protagonists, Mathilde is unlike any previous heroine of a German novel: intelligent and energetic but plain and deeply pragmatic. We follow the fearless but flawed Mathilde from the bustling metropolis of Berlin to Woldenstein, a sleepy backwater town she single-handedly transforms, and back. Unknown in the English-speaking world, this compact work has the humor and pathos familiar to readers of Fontane, and is powerfully evocative of the politics of class, gender, and religion in late 19th-century Germany. An introduction, afterword, and extensive endnotes richly contextualize the work for both general readers and students of literature, history, gender studies, and German studies.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction - Rachael Huener Mathilde Möhring Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Notes Afterword - Helen Chambers

Read more less

Book SynopsisOscar Wilde was popular in his own lifetime, especially as an author of comic plays. But he is also now seen as one of the most important figures in the development of modern gay literature and modern gay liberation, not only because of works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray but also because of the notorious trials that sent him to prison (and an early death) for behavior considered unacceptable in his own era. The present volume examines the whole range of Wilde’s work, from the light-hearted to the tragically serious, and explores Wilde and his writings in their biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJohn Steinbeck’s The Pearl is one of the most popular and most frequently taught of all American novellas. Although it began its life as a brief parable, an allegorical novella about a poor fisherman finding a pearl, becoming greedy, and subsequently suffering a job-like loss, it has remained in the literary conversation for nearly three-quarters of a century for reasons that seem to exceed its original goals. Its Mexican setting, in a location not far from California, gives it a particular interest today as the United States becomes increasingly multicultural. The present volume examines the book from numerous perspectives – historical, cultural, social, economic, ethnic, and literary. This book in the Critical Insights series explores the many factors that have made Steinbeck’s short novel so enduringly appealing, examining the history of the work’s critical reception while also contributing new insights that have not been pursued before.For all these reasons and more, this latest contribution to the Critical Insights series may be of special interest to many readers. A collection of four critical context essays are intended to treat Steinbeck's novella:-From a historical vantage point-In terms of its critical reception-Using a specific critical lens-By comparing and contrasting it with other important worksThe Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world's most studied literature. Edited and written by some of academia's most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: The Pearl provides authoritative, in-depth scholarship that students and researchers will rely on for years. This volume is destined to become a valuable purchase for all.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume discusses some of Tan's key themes: communication across generations of a family when those generations have grown up in different cultures, the immigrant experience, mother/daughter relationships, the intersection of gender roles and an Asian or Asian American experience, and depression and the artist, among others.Amy Tan has called writing "an extreme privilege, but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone." It seems Amy Tan will always be most associated with her highly successful debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. Yet she has also published five other bestselling novels, two memoirs, two children's books, and has participated in adapting her writing into many other forms of media, including film, television, and opera. This volume offers insights into the full range of her creative work.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSince its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction--namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King. Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back. Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership--the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.Trade ReviewUnderstanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped—including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics—to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work." —Mary K. Holland, State University of New York, New Paltz

Read more less

Book SynopsisSince its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction--namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King.Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership- the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.Trade ReviewUnderstanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped?including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics?to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work.- Mary K. Holland, State University of New York, New Paltz;""Understanding David Foster Wallace is the first critical study of Wallace that I ever got my hands on and it remains a wonderful introduction to his work. Boswell writes on Wallace with clarity, precision, and a graceful authority. Readers will come away with a firm grasp of Wallace's major themes and aesthetic concerns.""- Ralph Clare, Boise State University;""Boswell reads like a novelist and a critic, with a sensitivity to craft and narrative design married to a lucid and eclectic grasp of Wallace's myriad theoretical and intellectual contexts. If you read just one book about Wallace's fiction, this is the study to read.""- Stephen Burn, University of Glasgow;""This welcome edition builds impressively on Boswell's seminal work in its previous incarnations. The volume is rounded out by two chapters on Oblivion and The Pale King, making it a complete and cohesive guide to Wallace's oeuvre. Managing to balance astute observation and accessible style, Understanding David Foster Wallace is indispensable for seasoned scholars and new readers alike.""- Clare Hayes-Brady, University College Dublin

Read more less

Book SynopsisHarry Potter and Beyond explores J. K. Rowling's beloved best-selling series and its virtuoso reimagining of British literary traditions. Weaving together elements of fantasy, the school-story novel, detective fiction, allegory, and bildungsroman, the Harry Potter novels evade simplistic categorization as children's or fantasy literature. Because the Potter series both breaks new ground and adheres to longstanding narrative formulas, readers can enhance their enjoyment of these epic adventures by better understanding their place in literary history.Along with the seven foundational novels of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and Beyond assesses the extraordinary range of supplementary material concerning the young wizard and his allies, including the films of the books, the subsequent film series of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the theatrical spectacle Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and a range of other Potter-inspired narratives. Beyond the world of Potter, Pugh surveys Rowling's literary fiction The Casual Vacancy and her detective series featuring Cormoran Strike, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Through this comprehensive overview of Rowling's body of work, Pugh reveals the vast web of connections between yesteryear's stories and Rowling's vivid creations.Trade ReviewContextualizing Rowling's works within and beyond the Harry Potter franchise in terms of genre, ideology, critical response, and artistic achievement, Tison Pugh's new book offers an informed, appreciative, and approachable assessment."—Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University"In his eminently readable Harry Potter and Beyond, Tison Pugh offers keen insights into race, gender, queerness, and especially genre as he illuminates Rowling's fantasy fiction and also her mystery novels."—Beverly Clark, Wheaton College"This engaging and well-researched book explains how J. K. Rowling builds on five key literary genres and does a brilliant job illuminating those genres, such that the book is both an overview of Harry Potter as literature and an introduction to literature by way of Harry Potter. Highly recommended."—Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood.A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation--not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated women writers in the world. In Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Geneva Cobb Moore explores how Morrison captures and mirrors the tragedy experienced by and transformation of African Americans, using parody and pastiche, semiotics and metaphors, and allegory to portray black life in the United States, teaching untaught history to liberate Americans.In this short and accessible book, originally published as part of Moore's Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature, she covers each of Morrison's novels, from The Bluest Eye to Beloved to God Help the Child. With a new introduction and added coverage of Morrison's final book, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Bodily Evidence will be essential reading for scholars, students, and readers of Morrison's novels.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of Stewart O'Nan's work offers a comprehensive introduction to his writings and carefully examines recurring thematic concerns and stylistic characteristics of his novels. The author of eighteen novels, several works of nonfiction, and two short-story collections, O'Nan received the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for best novel for Snow Angels and the Drew Heinz Prize for In the Walled City. In 1996 Granta magazine named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.In Understanding Stewart O'Nan, Heike Paul appraises O'Nan's oeuvre to date, including his popular multigenerational trilogy of novels--Wish You Were Here; Emily, Alone; and Henry, Himself--that received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, and the Guardian.Paul argues that O'Nan is not only a writer of popular fiction but also has developed into a major literary voice worthy of canonical status and of having a firm place in school, college, and university curricula. To this end Paul analyzes his use of formulas of long-standing popular American genres, such as the Western and the gothic tale, as he re-invents them in innovative and complex ways creating a style that Paul describes as ""everyday gothic."" She also offers a critical examination of O'Nan's treatment of American myths and vivid descriptions of struggling middle class settings and individuals who lead precarious lives. Paul believes this first critical study of O'Nan's collected works will be instrumental in building a critical archive and analysis of his oeuvre.Trade ReviewThe Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries will have an immediate and important impact on the rapidly developing field of Atlantic history. Peter Coclanis and the volume's contributors have assembled a collection of first-rate scholarship, well written and nicely executed."" - Russell R. Menard, University of Minnesota""Should any doubt the richness of 'Atlantic History' as an approach to our understanding of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, let them turn to this perceptive collection. Herein a host of respected scholars engage fully in a breadth of topics encompassing the Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and British Empires, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to illuminate the interconnected nature of the Atlantic economy during the two hundred years prior to the Age of Revolutions. This work is essential for anyone interested in the early modern Atlantic World."" - John J. McCusker, Trinity University

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine and frequently defy accepted notions of truth.Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first comprehensive study to address Franzen's work to date, including his latest novel, Crossroads. Jonathan Franzen—novelist and essayist—is a critical darling, commercial success, and magnet for controversy. His third novel, The Corrections (2000), was selected for Oprah's book club, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the National Book Award. Franzen has been featured on the cover of Time and in an episode of The Simpsons. Love him or hate him, the publication of each new novel is a literary event. In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy Galow studies Franzen's first five novels plus his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021. He opens with the Oprah controversy—Franzen, it seems, did not want his books to be popular—and goes on to unpack the author's ambivalent relationship to his status within the "Theory Generation" of 1980s college graduates turned writers and the postmodern threads that run throughout his work. For Franzen, the social and individual are inseparable. Galow examines why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers. From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers. From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner. Lissa Paul brings to light Fenwick’s letters for the first time to reveal the relationships she developed with many key figures of her era, and to tell Fenwick’s story as depicted by the woman herself. Fenwick began as a writer in the radical London of the 1790s, a member of Mary Wollstonecraft’s circle, and when her marriage crumbled, she became a prolific author of children’s literature to support her family. Eventually Fenwick moved to Barbados, becoming the owner of a school while confronting the reality of slavery in the British colonies. She would go on to establish schools in numerous cities in the United States and Canada, all the while taking care of her daughter and grandchildren and maintaining her friendships through letters that, as presented here, tell the story of her life. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Table of ContentsCover PageTitle PageCopyright PageContentsIllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNotes on the TextAbbreviationsPreludeChapter 1. Daughter of MethodismChapter 2. Mother and AuthorChapter 3. Children’s Book Writer and FriendChapter 4. Governess and NetworkerChapter 5. Colonist and SlaveholderChapter 6. School Owner and MournerChapter 7. North American GrandmotherCodaNotesReferencesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisCharles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Delaware, definitively transformed study of the novel Frankenstein with his foundational volume The Frankenstein Notebooks and, in nineteenth century studies more broadly, brought heightened attention to the nuances of writing and editing. Frankenstein and STEAM consolidates the generative legacy of his later work on the novel's broad relation to topics in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). Seven chapters written by leading and emerging scholars pay homage to Robinson's later perspectives of the novel and a concluding postscript contains remembrances by his colleagues and students. This volume not only makes explicit the question of what it means to be human, a question Robinson invited students and colleagues to examine throughout his career, but it also illustrates the depth of the field and diversity of those who have been inspired by Robinson's work. Frankenstein and STEAM offers direction for continuing scholarship on the intersections of literature, science, and technology.Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Robin Hammerman 1 Frankenstein, Frankenstein, and the Dream of Science Susan J. Wolfson 2 Frankenstein Meets the FAANG Five: Figures of Monstrous Technology in Digital Media Discourse Mark A. McCutcheon 3 “the history of gods”: Singularity and Gender in Ex Machina Lisa Crafton 4 “My food is not that of man”: Food as Posthuman Phenomenon Siobhan Watters 5 Reading Frankenstein’s Ecological Legacy Lisbeth Chapin 6 Playing Devil’s Advocate: Defending the Criminal Justice System in Frankenstein L. Adam Mekler 7 Teaching Frankenstein as Pastiche, Parody, and Adaptation in the General Education Classroom Brian Bates Postscript: Remembrances of Charles E. Robinson Robin Hammerman Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAs author of the “Wilderness Letter” and major award-winning novels, histories, essays, and biographies, Wallace Stegner worked throughout his life to protect western lands, places, and peoples. His writing was and remains an inspiration and guide for countless people attempting to cultivate a sense of place in the American West while tacking their way through uncertain times. This book tells the story of Stegner and his family as they made a home just outside of Palo Alto, California, dur­ing its transition from the Valley of Heart’s Delight (known for its rolling hills and orchards) to Silicon Valley. In this thoughtful study of the novels Stegner wrote in Califor­nia—including his Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose—readers are invited to consider with Stegner what the practice of place requires in the American West. Specialists in the literature and history of the American West will find new analyses of Stegner and his influential work. Other readers will be guided through Stegner’s work in concrete and accessible prose, and anyone who has longed for home and a sense of place will encounter a powerful, beautiful, and at times tragic attempt to build and preserve it.

Read more less

Book SynopsisCombining a breadth of scholarship, insightful critical thinking, and an engaging personal interaction with Mary Hallock Foote's substantial collection of illustrations and writings, Megan Riley McGilchrist provides a significant contribution to western literature and the lives of western writers. Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote opens a window into the remarkable, little-known nineteenth-century personal history of accomplished American author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, a woman both of her time, and ahead of it. When Mary gave up a successful career as an illustrator in New York to follow her husband, a mining engineer, to the West, she found herself in a new, unfamiliar, and often challenging world—sometimes feeling like an exile. The thousands of pages of her unpublished letters, which form the foundation of this book, give rare insight into the process of acculturation and eventually the transformation that she experienced. This wide-ranging analysis also examines the role that nature and Mary's lifelong connection with the natural world played in her adaptation to the western mining towns where she spent much of the rest of her life. In many ways, Mary's life mirrored that of author Megan Riley McGilchrist, whose parallel exile began in 1977 when she left America for England. Drawing equivalences with Mary's life as an exile and her own life as an expatriate American woman, Megan provides a meditation on her own transformation, as much as on Mary's. Megan demonstrates what it has been like to be a twenty-first-century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner—to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth-century woman.Comprising elements of biography, literary analysis, history, and personal history, and containing many unpublished excerpts from Mary's voluminous correspondence, Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote offers insight into the ways Mary perceived the world around her. It also provides insight into the experiences of exiles of any time—people who have left a familiar environment to embark on a new life in a new and not necessarily comfortable setting.Trade ReviewThis is the kind of book more literary and cultural critics should be writing: A book that offers rich and deep analysis but in a novelistic way, a book that fully demonstrates how reading-whether novels, letters, illustrations-fully enriches our understanding of our own lives." - Melody Graulich, professor of English and American studies, Utah State UniversityTable of Contents The Backstory Correspondences Transformation CHAPTER ONEIn Exile Seeing Landscape: a personal view Reflection Nature in Exile The Nostalgia of the Exile: A personal view Understanding Exile Reflections on Transformation: An interpretation Transformation Interpretation of Landscape What If? CHAPTER TWONew Almaden Echoes of Ancient Greece Parallels CHAPTER THREELeadville CHAPTER FOURMexico Mary in Mexico CHAPTER FIVEIdaho Mary and Helena: a retrospective view Reflection Living in a New Landscape Mirror Images CHAPTER SIXGrass Valley Mary and Angle of Repose Resolution EPILOGUE WORKS CITED ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Read more less

Book SynopsisWorlding the Westerntakes the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a re-examination of the consequences of exceptionalism and closed borders in the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to put the world back in ways that challenge the dark side of globalization and proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics. A driving force in the book is a comment from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote "the unity of the world is not one: it is made of a diversity, including disparity and opposition. It is made of it, which is to say that it is not added to it and does not reduce it. The unity of the world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds" (The Creation of the World or Globalization, 2007, p. 109). Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction I consider in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case (a laboratory of the future in Charles Bowden's term), in which these features - diversity, disparity, and opposition - are present and yet historically have often been so masked or denied in the rush towards unanimity and nation-building. In this book, the past is never lost or irrelevant, but rather circles around, re-emerging in lives as echoes and hauntings. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to put the notion of a single world under pressure.Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Enter West Chapter 1. On Worlding Chapter 2. "What West?": Hernan Diaz's In the Distance Chapter 3. "What World We Making?": Sebastian Barry's Days Without End Chapter 4. "The World in All Its Workings": Téa Obreht's Inland Chapter 5. "A Land of Missing Things": C Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills Is Gold Chapter 6. To Remember Otherwise and Against — Tribalography, Robin Wall Kimmerer, LeAnne Howe, and Tommy Orange Chapter 7. "The Story and the Archive of the Story": Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive Chapter 8. Exit West — Conclusions Perhaps Notes References Index About the Author

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first of its kind, this collection brings together writers from diverse academic and nonacademic worlds to explore how Austen's readers experience and process her novels' erotic power. Are Jane Austen's novels sexy? For many Austen lovers, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" From the moment Colin Firth stripped down to his breeches and shirt in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, screen adaptations inspired by Austen's novels have banked on their ability to depict sexual tension and romantic desire. Meanwhile, the success of spin-offs, sequels, and elaborations confirms that Austen's novels have become a potent aphrodisiac for everyday readers. Clearly, the fourteen million viewers who watched Firth's unveiling were onto something: Austen's novels turn people on. Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond brings together a range of voices-from literary scholars to video game designers-to explore how different types of readers experience the realm of desire and the erotic in all things Austen. In this timely collection, writers, critics, journalists, and authors of internet content weigh in on sex and romance in Austen's works and in the conversations and creations the novels inspire-from sequels to critical analyses to online role-playing games. Contributors examine what is at stake for each set of Austen enthusiasts when Eros is added to the equation, in so doing building on the long tradition of Austen criticism and enriching our appreciation of the novels.Trade ReviewWhat makes this collection of essays unique, necessary, fun, and flat-out inspiring is how it brings together [...] an expansive range of perspectives and experiences. I've never read a collection quite like this one, and the editors' introductory essay on why scholars and fans need each other itself makes an important intervention. * JASNA News *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction - Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim Part I: The Novels 1. Austen's Teasing, or What the Wit Wants - Mary Ann O'Farrell 2. Performing (Dis)comfort: Queer Possibilities in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park - Jade Higa 3. Taking Hands: The Fisting Phantasmic in Sense and Sensibility - Christien Garcia Part II: Austen Fan Culture and Austenesque Fiction 4. Always Wanting More: Desire and Austen Fan Fiction - Marilyn Francus 5. Unconquerable Attraction: Darcy and Elizabeth's Falling in Love in Austenesque Novels - Maria Clara Pivato Biajoli 6. What's Hidden in Highbury? - Stephanie Oppenheim 7. Passion and Pastiche - Diana Birchall Part III: Austen on Stage, on Screen, and Online 8. In Search of Colin Firth's Bum - Nora Nachumi 9. Jane Again - Rachel Brownstein 10. Touching Scenes: Austen, Intimacy and Staging Lovers' Vows - Elaine McGirr 11. Jane's Player's: Sex and Romance in the Virtual World of Jane Austen - Judy Tyrer 12. To YouTube from Gretna Green: Updating Lydia Bennet for the Digital Age - Margaret Dunlap Part IV: Austen in Conversations and Contexts 13. Erotic Austen - Devoney Looser 14. The Shadow Jane - Laura Engel 15. In Bed with Mr. Knightly: How Austen and Her Readers Understand Sexual Compatibility - Deborah Knuth Klenck and Ted Scheinman Afterword: Sex, Romance, and Representation in Uzma Jalaluddin's Ayesha at Last - Juliette Wells Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores the dimensions of the coming-of-age novel in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, focusing on works by eight major Afro-Latin American writers The centuries-old European genre of the coming-of-age story has been transformed by contemporary Afro-Latin American novelists to address key aspects of the diaspora in various nations of the Caribbean and Latin America. While attention to Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian literature has increased in recent decades, few critics have focused specifically on the Afro-Latin American Bildungsroman, and fewer still have addressed novels from both Spanish- and Brazilian-speaking regions, as author Bonnie Wasserman does in this study. The memory and continuing impact of slavery especially shape these coming-of-age stories. Often interwoven with race is a focus on religion, particularly the importance of African folk religions and traditions in the lives of young people. Immigration-and the return journey-is another important theme in the novels. Coming of Age in the Afro-Latin American Novel discusses works&emdash;all published around the turn of the 21st century&emdash;by such important writers as Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa and Mayra Santos-Febres (from Puerto Rico), Conceição Evaristo and Paulo Lins (from Brazil); Teresa Cardenas and Pedro Pérez Sarduy (from Cuba); and Junot Diaz and Rita Indiana (from the Dominican Republic). Wasserman's far-reaching analysis is both rigorous and compassionate, shedding a clear light on ways in which descendants of Africans have experienced life in the New World.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Intergenerational Bildungsroman in Daughters of the Stone and Ponciá Vicencio 2. The Epistolary Afro-Cuban Bildungsroman 3. Boys to Men: Masculinity in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and City of God 4. Reinventing the Afro-Latin American Bildungsroman Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn writing about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the 100th anniversary of its 1885 publication, Henry Nash Smith remarked that the novel ""made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century."" This volume of essays examines what made this vernacular so groundbreaking, as well as the controversy that still surrounds one of the first Great American novels.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

Read more less

Book SynopsisCritical Insights: Richard Wright explores the work of this groundbreaking author of Black Boy and Native Son, to place the author’s body of work in the canon of American literature, the literature of identity and literature of protest.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSamuel Johnson’s life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships—and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that explore relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries—including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton—and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick” and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility.Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"This volume of essays advances the field not only because it focuses on a new topic but also because of the patient and imaginative analysis in the various essays. The audience here extends beyond Johnsonians because so many other figures of interest are included, from Frances Burney, Burke, Warton, Seward, and Arthur Murphy to Goldsmith and of course Boswell." -- Steven Lynn * University of South Carolina *"An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson's life, philosophy, and literary work, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship." * Midwest Book Review *"The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend." * Choice *"This collection of ten essays begins with three solid essays, all making good use of correspondence." * Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *"Lee, as editor, sets out to counterbalance Johnson’s need for solitude to accomplish his literary works with his at times almost desperate search for company to alleviate his periods of despair and disillusion. How could someone with such a sociable character and love of conversation succeed in creating such a corpus of work that within its pages we can find epithets suitable for most occasions in life?" * The New Rambler *"These essays, well presented in this volume by Bucknell University Press, bring context, color, and an array of information that should prove of value to students and scholars of Johnson’s expansive circle." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"The book uses...discussions to provide an engaging illustration of time, place, and character for a wide audience. For scholars who know Boswell’s biography and eighteenth-century London well, the book offers primarily a useful synthesis of biographies and cultural history." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"As a monograph designed for considering the historical interconnectedness in readings of literature, history, and culture, Community and Solitude, part of Bucknell University Press's Transits series, accomplishes its goal with welcome fidelity." * The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats *"This volume of essays advances the field not only because it focuses on a new topic but also because of the patient and imaginative analysis in the various essays. The audience here extends beyond Johnsonians because so many other figures of interest are included, from Frances Burney, Burke, Warton, Seward, and Arthur Murphy to Goldsmith and of course Boswell." -- Steven Lynn * University of South Carolina *"An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson's life, philosophy, and literary work, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship." * Midwest Book Review *"The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend." * Choice *"This collection of ten essays begins with three solid essays, all making good use of correspondence." * Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *"Lee, as editor, sets out to counterbalance Johnson’s need for solitude to accomplish his literary works with his at times almost desperate search for company to alleviate his periods of despair and disillusion. How could someone with such a sociable character and love of conversation succeed in creating such a corpus of work that within its pages we can find epithets suitable for most occasions in life?" * The New Rambler *"These essays, well presented in this volume by Bucknell University Press, bring context, color, and an array of information that should prove of value to students and scholars of Johnson’s expansive circle." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"The book uses...discussions to provide an engaging illustration of time, place, and character for a wide audience. For scholars who know Boswell’s biography and eighteenth-century London well, the book offers primarily a useful synthesis of biographies and cultural history." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"As a monograph designed for considering the historical interconnectedness in readings of literature, history, and culture, Community and Solitude, part of Bucknell University Press's Transits series, accomplishes its goal with welcome fidelity." * The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats *Table of Contents List of Tables… vAbbreviations … vi Introduction ... 1Part I. Personal Relationships: Letters and Conversation ... 11 One Connecting with Three “Young Dogs”: Johnson’s Early Letters to Robert Chambers, Bennet Langton, and James Boswell ... 12John Radner Two James Elphinston and Samuel Johnson: Contact, Irritations, and an “Argonautic” Letter ... 44Christine Jackson-Holzberg Three The Case of the Missing Hottentot: John Dun’s Conversation with Samuel Johnson in Tour to the Hebrides as Reported by Boswell and Dun ... 79James CaudlePart II. Literary Relationships: Major Texts and Topics ... 118 Four Oliver Goldsmith’s Revisions to The Traveller ... 119James E. May Five “Down with her, Burney!”: Johnson, Burney, and the Politics of Literary Celebrity ... 165Marilyn Francus Six In the First Circle: The Four Narrators of the Life of Savage ... 205Lance Wilcox Seven “Under the shade of exalted merit”: Arthur Murphy’s A Poetical Epistle to Mr. Samuel Johnson, A.M. ... 236Anthony W. Lee Eight Johnson, Burke, Boswell, and the Slavery Debate ... 258Elizabeth Lambert Nine Samuel Johnson and Anna Seward: Solitude and Sensibility ... 295Claudia Thomas Kairoff Ten Johnson, Warton, and the Popular Reader ... 331Christopher CataneseAcknowledgments... 358Bibliography ... 360Index ... 389About the Contributors ... 390

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature’s greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning. It is from this discovery about the nature of language as a self-referential semiotic system that Machado crafts his “new narrative.” Long celebrated in Brazil as a dazzlingly original writer, Machado has struggled to gain respect and attention outside the Luso-Brazilian ken. He is the epitome of the “outsider” or “marginal,” the iconoclastic and wildly innovative genius who hails from a culture rarely studied in the Western literary hierarchy and so consigned to the status of “eccentric.” Had the Brazilian master written not in Portuguese but English, French, or German, he would today be regarded as one of the true exemplars of the modern novel, in expression as well as in theory. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"Earl E. Fitz advances the question of language as key to innovation and modernity in the mature works of Machado de Assis. Fitz attributes his departure from realism to a new awareness of the mutability, instability, self-referentiality and inescapable ambiguity of language in relation to meaning. What the novels are really about is not what they seem." -- K. David Jackson * Yale University *Is Machado de Assis a theoretician of the novel? Earl Fitz’s book is a fascinating response to such a question. In this exciting journey through the writer’s late novels, we learn that Machado didn’t tell us what he was thinking; differently, he showed us the very act of thinking through language. It’s worth reading: Fitz’s passion for Machado is contagious. -- Pedro Meira Monteiro, Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Spanish and Portuguese * Princeton University *"A masterwork of original and seminal scholarship that rescues a critically important Latin American writer from an undeserved obscurity." * Midwest Book Review *"Earl Fitz’s book should be appreciated as a complement to the many other excellent studies of Machado’s relation to a plentiful external landscape. Lest we become overly confident about our ability to know these realities, we should pause and, considering perspectives like those of this book, clean our glasses." * Journal of Lusophone Studies *"Fitz’s study provides a strong argument for why scholars interested in narrative theory and form should give, if not renewed, then new attention to the work of Machado de Assis." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"[A] passionate and convincingly argued monograph...Fitz’s study makes a vital contribution to Machadoan criticism in that it highlights, perhaps more clearly, more forcefully, and in more detail than previously offered, the holistic view Machado came to embrace of narrative as a dynamic confluence of unstable signs capable of creating seemingly stable realities." * Hispania *"Along with the translation of more works by Brazilian writers and scholars alike, books like Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory pave the way for the reception of literary works that, otherwise, remain regrettably off the radar even among many in academia." * Hispanic Review *"Earl E. Fitz advances the question of language as key to innovation and modernity in the mature works of Machado de Assis. Fitz attributes his departure from realism to a new awareness of the mutability, instability, self-referentiality and inescapable ambiguity of language in relation to meaning. What the novels are really about is not what they seem." -- K. David Jackson * Yale University *Is Machado de Assis a theoretician of the novel? Earl Fitz’s book is a fascinating response to such a question. In this exciting journey through the writer’s late novels, we learn that Machado didn’t tell us what he was thinking; differently, he showed us the very act of thinking through language. It’s worth reading: Fitz’s passion for Machado is contagious. -- Pedro Meira Monteiro, Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Spanish and Portuguese * Princeton University *"A masterwork of original and seminal scholarship that rescues a critically important Latin American writer from an undeserved obscurity." * Midwest Book Review *"Earl Fitz’s book should be appreciated as a complement to the many other excellent studies of Machado’s relation to a plentiful external landscape. Lest we become overly confident about our ability to know these realities, we should pause and, considering perspectives like those of this book, clean our glasses." * Journal of Lusophone Studies *"Fitz’s study provides a strong argument for why scholars interested in narrative theory and form should give, if not renewed, then new attention to the work of Machado de Assis." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"[A] passionate and convincingly argued monograph...Fitz’s study makes a vital contribution to Machadoan criticism in that it highlights, perhaps more clearly, more forcefully, and in more detail than previously offered, the holistic view Machado came to embrace of narrative as a dynamic confluence of unstable signs capable of creating seemingly stable realities." * Hispania *"Along with the translation of more works by Brazilian writers and scholars alike, books like Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory pave the way for the reception of literary works that, otherwise, remain regrettably off the radar even among many in academia." * Hispanic Review *Table of ContentsAbbreviations .. ivA Note on Translations... v Introduction ... 1 One - The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas ... 95 Two - The Psychiatrist ... 132 Three - Quincas Borba ... 169 Four - Dom Casmurro ... 196 Five - Esau and Jacob ... 235 Six - Counselor Ayres Memorial ... 260 Conclusion ... 283Acknowledgements ... 310Bibliography ... 311Index ... 324About the Author ... 325

Read more less