Literary studies: fiction Books

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Book SynopsisRachel Scoggins is Associate Professor of English at Lander University.

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Book SynopsisInheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fiction’s engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale¬ (1866), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels’ concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels’ self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers’ expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fiction’s mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Speculating on Inheritance in Victorian FictionChapter One: “That Popular Character ... Call[ed] Another”: Relational Speculation in Our Mutual FriendChapter Two: “Houseless-ness” and the “Dead Pledge” in Wuthering HeightsChapter Three: Seeing “No Guiltless Minds”: Inheritance and Liability in Collins’s ArmadaleChapter Four: “Like the Inheritance of a Fortune”: “Speckilation” and Mortmain in Middlemarch Conclusion: Will-dangling and Sphex Wasps: Towards an Afterlife of Victorian Inheritance Bibliography About the Author

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Book SynopsisLiterary critics have aptly noted that death is arguably the most frequent topic, theme, or occurrence in all of American literature. Naturally, the works of such authors as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, among countless others, go to great lengths to support this observation; however, the renowned nineteenth-century American literary giant Herman Melville, most famous as the author of Moby Dick, has been frequently overlooked. In this book, seasoned literary scholar Corey Evan Thompson seeks to remedy this oversight.Death in Herman Melville’s Fiction: Melville’s “Memento Mori” is the first full-length study to examine the ubiquity and implications of death in Melville’s prose fiction. As Thompson shows, death occurs in all of Melville’s novels and much of his shorter fiction by various means. Not only is death a frequent occurrence in Melville’s fiction, but his characters die regardless of age, health, social status, or moral character. Drawing from his father’s death, Melville’s fiction provides his readers with the difficult realization that it is the inevitable destination for everyone who is on this journey called life.

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Book SynopsisIn this incisive new book, P. V. Laxmiprasad addresses the great Indian queen Rani Chennamma of Kittur as a character in Indian fiction. The Queen of Kittur by Basavaraj Naikar highlights the themes of honor and glory, patriotism and freedom, betrayal and defeat of the royal family of Kittur as revealed by the life of Rani Chennamma. This novel is a precious jewel in Indian literature. Laxmiprasad’s critical evaluation contextualizes female Indian royalty as a subject in historical fiction and rising force of nationalism, heroism, and solidarity.

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Book SynopsisThe Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 unleashed unprecedented violence. In Feminist Fiction and the Indian Partition of 1947, Indian scholar Priyanka Gupta explores how women were doubly suppressed and victimized before and after the partition. The violence, and the displacement of large populations, made this historical episode of separation more and more significant for women. Novels set during the Partition offer unique viewpoints and perspectives that have not previously been explored.

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway pioneered the short story genre by prioritizing economy of prose. He also wrote the shortest short story: his famous six-word "For Sale: Baby Shoes Never Worn!" The whole story embodies these words, which are semantically meaningful. Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe's "single-effect" theory, each story drives the reader to concentrate on a substantial controlling idea that directs the story from beginning to end. A writer of the "Lost Generation," Hemingway went to Europe during World War I to master writing. He also served at the front. He used his experiences then, before, and after to craft a highly original approach to the short story, involving thematic issues around marriage, war, friendship, bullfighting, love, nature, and enemies. He also explored themes of alienation, isolation, existential philosophy, meaninglessness, nihilism, and aimlessness. Hemingway's wide perspective invites an intense subjectivity, uniting with readers who become an active part of the interpretation. Zennure Köseman's new book offers a deft exploration of this craft.

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Book SynopsisThe death of Spain’s Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, on July 24, 1568, remains an enigma. Several accounts insinuated that the Spanish Crown Prince was murdered while incarcerated by order of his father, King Philip II. The mystery of Don Carlos’s death, supported by ambassadorial accounts that implied foul play, became a fertile subject for defamation campaigns against Philip, fostering an extraordinary fluidity between history and fiction. This book investigates three treatments of the Don Carlos legend on which this fluidity had a potent, transformational impact: César Vichard de Saint-Réal’s novel, Dom Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672), Friedrich Schiller’s play, Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien (1787), and Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Don Carlos (1867). Through these cultural variations on a historical theme, the authors and composer contributed innovative elements to their genres. In The Don Carlos Enigma, the exciting young scholar Maria-Cristina Necula explores how the particular blend of history and fiction around the personage of Don Carlos inspired such artistic liberties with evolutionary outcomes. Saint-Réal advanced the nouvelle historique genre by developing the element of conspiracy. Schiller’s play began the transition from the Sturm und Drang literary movement towards Weimar Classicism. Verdi introduced new dramatic and musical elements to bring opera closer to the realism of dramatic theatre. Within each of these treatments, pivotal points of narrative, semantic, dramatic, and musical transformation shaped not only the story of Don Carlos, but the expressive forms themselves. In support of the investigation, selected scenes from the three works are explored and framed by an engagement with studies in the fields of French literature, German theatre, French and Italian opera, and Spanish history. The enigma of the Spanish prince may never be solved, but Saint-Réal, Schiller, and Verdi have offered alternatives that, in a sense, unburden history of truth that it could never bear alone. In the case of Don Carlos, history is in itself an encyclopedia of variations.

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Book SynopsisWidely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary. In this new edition of his popular study, Peter Widdowson identifies the elements in his work which enable Hardy to be read in this way: the focus on unstable class and sexual relations in a society undergoing rapid change; the highly-charged and contradictory representations of women at the heart of this dangerously ‘metamorphic’ social process; the self-reflexive artifice of the writing itself as an aspect of Hardy’s ‘satiric’ worldview; his ironic humanism in the ‘new Dark Age’ of the modern world. Drawing on contemporary approaches to literary study in an accessible way, the author shows where this radical and destabilizing Hardy is to be located in the texts; and similarly seeks to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is. For this edition, Professor Widdowson has updated the Select Bibliography and has also included a ‘Postscript’ on film and TV adaptation of Hardy’s fiction, since many newcomers to Hardy may these days experience his work for the first time in this medium. This lucid and engaging study offers a comprehensive guide to reading Hardy anew as a writer who continues to challenge our assumptions about art and life.

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Book SynopsisMargaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana, and 1960s and 1970s English Canada.Focusing on Laurence's published works as well as her unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her characters are poised between African colonies of occupation during decolonization and the settler-colony of English Canada during the implementation of Canadian multiculturalism. Laurence's Canadian characters are often divided subjects who are not quite members of their ancestral ""imperial"" cultures, yet also not truly ""native"" to their nation. Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada shows how Laurence and her characters negotiate complex tensions between ""self"" and ""nation,"" and argues that Laurence's African and Canadian writing demonstrates a divided Canadian subject who holds significant implications for both the individual and the country of Canada.Bringing together Laurence's writing about Africa and Canada, Davis offers a unique contribution to the study of Canadian literature. The book is an original interpretation of Laurence's work and reveals how she displaces the simple notion that Canada is a sum total of different cultures and conceives Canada as a mosaic that is in flux and constituted through continually changing social relations.Table of Contents Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada by Laura K. Davis Introduction: Writing and Region Part One: Writing About Africa Chapter One: Conflicts of Culture in The Prophet's Camel Bell and This Side Jordan Chapter Two: Toward Cross-Cultural Understanding: Margaret Laurence's Africa in The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories Part Two: Writing About Canada Chapter Three: Community and the Canadian Nation in The Stone Angel and A Bird in the House Chapter Four: Narrating Nation in The Diviners Conclusion: Essays, Letters, and Politics Works Cited Index

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