Literary studies: fiction Books

Book SynopsisMany recent studies of racial passing have emphasized the continuing, almost haunting power of racial segregation even in the post-segregation period in the US, or in the post-apartheid period in South Africa. This present-ness of racial passing, the fact that it has not really become passé, is noticeable in the great number of testimonies which have been published in the 2000s and 2010s by descendants of individuals who passed for white in the English-speaking world. The sheer number of publications suggest a continuing interest in the kind of relation to the personal and national past which is at stake in the long-delayed revelation of cases of racial passing. This interest in family memoirs or in fictional works re-tracing the erasure of some relative's racial identity is by no means limited to the United States: for instance, Zoë Wicomb in South Africa or Zadie Smith in the UK both use the passing novel to unravel the complex situation of mixed-race subjects in relation to their family past and to a national past marked by a history of racial inequality. Yet, the vast majority of critical approaches to racial passing have so far remained largely focused on the United States and its specific history of race relations. The objective of this volume is twofold: it aims at shedding light on the way texts or films show the work of individual memory and collective recollection as they grapple with a racially divided past, struggling with its legacy or playing with its stereotypes. Our second objective has been to explore the great variety in the forms taken by racial passing depending on the context, which in turn leads to differences in the ways it is remembered. Focusing on how a previously erased racial identity may resurface in the present has enabled us to extend the scope of our study to other countries than the United States, so that this volume hopes to propose some new, transnational directions in the study of racial passing.

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Book SynopsisThis book represents the first extended consideration of contemporary crime fiction as a European phenomenon. Understanding crime fiction in its broadest sense, as a transmedia practice, and offering unique insights into this practice in specific European countries and as a genuinely transcontinental endeavour, this book argues that the distinctiveness of the form can be found in its related historical and political inquiries. It asks how the genre’s excavation of Europe’s history of violence and protest in the twentieth century is informed by contemporary political questions. It also considers how the genre’s progressive reimagining of new identities forged at the crossroads of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is offset by its bleaker assessment of the corrosive effects of entrenched social inequalities, political corruption, and state violence. The result is a rich, vibrant collection that shows how crime fiction can help us better understand the complex relationship between Europe’s past, present, and future. Seven chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. Table of Contents

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the extent to which four sensation novelists responded to the Victorian theorizing of professionalism. A crucial period of redefinition of the professional ideal, the third quarter of the nineteenth century also witnessed the rise and the decline of the sensation novel, a scandalous and electrifying form that challenged aesthetic and socio-cultural standards. Owing to their controversial position in the literary marketplace, novelists like Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade and Ellen Wood developed a keen interest in professional issues, which occupy centre stage in their 1850s-70s narratives. By drawing on a variety of sociological, cultural and philosophical theories, Costantini skilfully assesses the ideological implications of the genre’s fictionalization of professionalism. She shows how sensation novelists provocatively represented the challenges faced by both elite and rising professionals, who are used as narrative vehicles for thorny discourses on authorship, ethicality, aestheticism and sociocultural identity.Trade Review«Sensation and Professionalism in the Victorian Novel is very well documented and provides a wealth of information on the various topics it deals with.» (Gilles Menegaldo, Miranda 12/2016) «In delineating new and unmapped connections between culture, economics, and society, Costantini’s book proves a very useful instrument for future research in Victorian studies.» (Maria Luigia Di Nisio, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 41-42/2016)Table of ContentsContents: Victorian professionalism – The sensation novel – Wilkie Collins – Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Charles Reade – Ellen Wood – British fiction 1850s-70s – Victorian professionals in the arts – Nineteenth-century law and medicine – Victorian detectives.

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Book SynopsisThe motif of the ‘identity quest’ features strongly in much contemporary French women’s writing, but nowhere more so than in the work of Nina Bouraoui. Author of numerous books since 1991 and winner of the 2005 Prix Renaudot, Bouraoui persistently explores the question of self-expression in her work, experimenting with a variety of self-representational modes and emphasising the importance of language to the construction of her sense of self. Considering the textual identities produced through Bouraoui’s work in the period 1999–2011, this book examines how self-referential writing can represent a crucial act of resistance to a number of contemporary problems, including race, gender and social isolation. Using the work of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler to theorise the transformative potential of the literary text, the author proposes autofiction as a uniquely unrestricted space, which for writers such as Bouraoui may provide the only medium through which to formulate a coherent and manageable sense of self.Trade Review«Overall, this essay on Nina Bouraoui’s autofictional writing makes an important contribution to gender and genre studies in the field of Francophone literature, along with constituting a very thorough analysis of Bouraoui’s work that is, as far as I know, unprecedented.» (Nathalie Segeral, H-France Review Vol. 17/2017) Read the full review hereTable of ContentsContents: Introduction: Seeking Selfhood in the Textual – Acts of Resistance: Rewriting Gender and Sexuality – Garçon manqué: Resisting Language as Violence – La vie heureuse: Reappropriating the Self – Poupée bella: Textual Escape – Recovering from Loss: The Textual Return to Algeria – Le jour du séisme: Broken Land, Broken Childhood – Sauvage and Mes mauvaises pensées: Coming of Age in Algeria – Sauvage and Mes mauvaises pensées: Leaving Childhood Behind – Writing for Others? Relational Identity and the Textual Encounter – Poupée bella and Avant les hommes: Escaping Isolation through Reading – Appelez-moi par mon prénom: Textual Relations – Nos baisers sont des adieux: Resolving the Quest

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the different treatment of writing by women andwriting by men in twenty-first-century Spain. Focusing on contemporarySpanish authors Ana María Matute (1926–2014), Rosa Montero (1952–),and Lucía Etxebarria (1966–), the author examines how Spanish womenwriters are marketed in Spain and, in particular, how current marketingstrategies reinforce traditional structures of femininity. Through an analysis of their work and lives in the context of the FrancoRegime, the Transition to democracy and contemporary Spain, this bookprovides an innovative study of the construction of the public personaeof these key female writers. As social media and the internet transformauthors’ relationship with their readers, the rapidly shifting publishingindustry offers an important context for the difficult balance betweenhigh levels of reception and visibility and the persistence of traditionalgender stereotypes.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: Gender, Memory, Culture, and History in the Spanish Literary Market – The Question of «Women’s Writing»: A «Double-Edged» Double Bind? – The Reception and Marketing of Women Writers in Spain – The Literary Market and the Construction of the Public Personae of Women Writers – Matute, Montero, and Etxebarria on Women’s Writing – Persistent Stereotypes

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Book SynopsisIn February 1943 intermarried Germans gathered in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse to protest the feared deportation of their Jewish spouses. This book examines the competing representations of the Rosenstrasse protest in contemporary Germany, demonstrating how cultural memories of this event are intertwined with each other and with concepts of identity. It analyses these shifting patterns of memory and what they reveal about the dynamics of the past–present relationship from the earliest post-unification period up to the present day. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the book provides insights into the historical debate surrounding the protest, accounts in popular history and biography, an analysis of von Trotta’s 2003 film Rosenstraße, and an exploration of the multiple memorials to this historical event. The study reveals that the protest’s remembrance is fraught with competing desires: to have a less encumbered engagement with this past and to retain a critical memory of the events that allows for a recognition of both heroism and accountability. It concludes that we are on the cusp of witnessing a new shift in remembering that reflects contemporary socio-political tensions with the resurgence of the far right, noting how this is already becoming visible in existing representations of the Rosenstrasse protest.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: Remembering Rosenstraße – The Rosenstraße Protest in Context – «Der eigentliche Streitwert»: The Rosenstraße Protest in Historical Debate – Changing (West) German Histories? Gernot Jochheim’s Protest in der Rosenstraße – Competing Biographical Memories: Nina Schröder’s Hitlers unbeugsame Gegnerinnen – From Screenplay to the Cinema Screen: Memory and Identity in Transition in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (2003) – Memorialisation in Rosenstraße: A Microcosm of Patterns of Remembering – Multiple Layers of Memory: Looking Towards Future Remembering.

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Book SynopsisTranslating from English to Japanese poses particular challenges for the translator, arising from the significant linguistic and cultural differences between the two languages. This book explores the various options and techniques available to and used by translators when translating from English to Japanese. The work is rich in both the theory and practice of translation and contains numerous examples from popular texts, ranging from classics to detective novels to science fiction. Drawing on these case studies, the author concludes that the translation of popular fiction has evolved in recent decades and developed as a new text type with its own textual and thematic characteristics. First among these is the preservation of cultural otherness and its representation in a way that is enriching to readers and translators alike.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: The Traditional Discussion of Equivalence and Its Relevance to the Japanese Context – Particular Challenges in Dealing with Translation between English and Japanese – Methodology of the Investigation and the Importance of a Systematic Text Comparison in Pop Fiction – Textual Analysis (I): Linguistic Domestication and Foreignisation – Textual Analysis (II): Cultural Domestication and Foreignisation – Stylistic Features of the Texts – Cultural Implications

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Book SynopsisBecoming Vampire is an interdisciplinary study of how the figure of the vampire in the twenty-first century has been used to create and define difference, not as either a positive or negative attribute, but as a catalyst for change and the exploration of new identity positions. Whilst focusing on the films Let Me In and Let the Right One In to highlight the referential and intertextual nature of the genre itself, it utilises a broad spectrum of methodological approaches to show how the many facets of the vampire can destabilise traditional categories of who we are and what we might become. This volume then provides a timely examination of the multifaceted and multivalent character of the vampire and the possibilities inherent within our interactions with them, making this study a consideration of what we might term ‘vampiric becomings’ and an exploration of why the undead ‘creatures of the night’ remain so fascinating to Western culture.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: The All-American, Un-American Vampire: Nationhood and the Vampire – It Made Me Do It!: Disorientation and Vampiric Objects – What a Girl Wants: Agency and the Becoming Female Vampire – The Vampire Survival Guide: ‘Reel-Life’ Vampires – The Vampire in Neverland: Nostalgia and Becoming-Child – Vampiric Invitations: Becoming with the Vampire

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Book SynopsisThis study of a novel by William T. Vollmann offers a port of entry into his fiction. Like other titles from his planned «Seven Dreams» collection, The Rifles deconstructs the historical novel. Following in the steps of the nineteenth-century English explorer John Franklin, the contemporary American character Subzero risks his life in the Arctic, looking for a way to transcend the history of colonization and his personal limitations. He ventures out on the permafrost of his memory, both private and collective, haunted by history as he revisits the Gothic genre. Deploying the poetry of an anachronistic errand into the white wilderness of snow and ice, in the wake of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab and Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator plays with avatars of the author as an explorer, a historian, a cartographer and a sketch-artist to encounter otherness, whether Inuit women or men, or fellow travelers who exchange with the authorial figure in his search for meaning. This critical analysis uses close-reading, ecocriticism, cultural studies and comparative literature to examine an innovative novel of the post-postmodern canon, by one of the finest contemporary American authors.Table of ContentsFrançoise Palleau-Papin: Introduction – Catherine Lanone: From Franklin's Narrative to Vollmann's EcoGothic Metafiction – Vincent Bucher: Putting Historical Enquiry to the Test – Françoise Palleau-Papin: Composition as Infinity – Sophie Chapuis: Narrative Voices – Madeleine Laurencin: Female Characters: Between Role and Representation – Christine Jorre-Johnston: Generic Hybridity – Françoise Palleau-Papin: Postface.

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Book SynopsisIn German-speaking modernity, Robert Musil may lay the last valid claim to the title of Universalgenie. Trained as a soldier, engineer, philosopher, and psychologist, he did not shy from investigations beyond his accredited purview. His work repurposes the conceptual inventories of literature, philosophy, science, law, medicine, politics, education, etc. to revisit classical questions of beauty, truth, and morality within an ultra-complex modern context. The answers he finds are not conclusive but suggestive and always invite re-examination. Musil studies, at its best, embraces his practice of multivalent inquiry, and the present essay collection endeavors to follow suit. Drawing from Musil’s fiction, essays, letters, diaries, and public addresses, the authors of this volume offer unexpected treatments of ideas that Musil examined and reveal previously overlooked links between those ideas and other authors, works, and movements. The contributions have a footing in fields such as psychology, sociology, and statistics; cover concepts like humor, identity, and love; and deal with literary epochs or theories ranging from Romanticism and Modernity to decadence and reader response.Table of ContentsBirthe Hoffmann: Eine menschliche Moderne? Robert Musils Versuch einer neuen Synthese auf dem Boden der Gestaltpsychologie – Sergej Rickenbacher: Von der Gefühlspsychologie zur Poetologie der ‚Stimmung‘. Musils Weiterschreiben von Carl Stumpf – Agnieszka Hudzik: Musil wiederbegegnet: Verführung als Interpretationsinstrument in «Vereinigungen» – Friederike Schläfer: «...sie fühlten alle diesen Dritten um sich stehen» Wie sich die Figur des Dritten zur Liebe verhält in Robert Musils Frühwerk – Florence Vatan: Statistics and the Novel: Robert Musil and Richard von Mises – Salvatore Pappalardo: Habsburg Loyalties as Intellectual Affinities: Non-National Allegiances in Robert Musil and Bernard Bolzano – Brett Martz: Der Fall Homo: Musil’s «Grigia» and Nietzsche’s «Der Fall Wagner» – Todd Cesaratto: Humor, Musil + the Romantics

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Book SynopsisAnorexia, bulimia, binge eating and troubled relationships with food and bodies have been depicted by writers across a variety of languages and cultures, since before the medicalisation of eating disorders in the late nineteenth century to the present day. This cross-cultural volume explores the fictional portrayal of these self-destructive yet arguably self-empowering behaviours in contemporary French, German and Italian women’s writing. Covering autobiography, fiction and autofiction, the chapters included here outline different aspects of the cultural encodings of anorexia in Europe today. Contributors analyse how literary texts not only recount but also interrogate wider cultural representations of eating disorders, particularly with regard to concepts of (gender) identity, the body, the relationship with the mother, and the relation between food and words. This volume seeks to draw out the multiple meanings of anorexia as both a rebellion against and conformity to dominant (and gendered) socio-political structures. It explores the ways in which contemporary women’s novels and memoirs both describe and, importantly, also redefine eating disorders in present-day Europe.Table of ContentsPetra M. Bagley/Francesca Calamita/Kathryn Robson: Eating Disorders: Disordered Eating? – Siobhán McIlvanney: «Impuissance» and «Culpabilité»: Reducing the Weight of Maternal Influence in Contemporary French Women’s Narratives of Anorexia – Petra M. Bagley: The Austrian Art of Starvation as Depicted by Anna Mitgutsch and Helene Flöss – Francesca Calamita: On the Verge of Emotional Hunger: Anorexia, Bulimia and Interpersonal Relationships in Present-Day Italian Women’s Writing – Teresa Ludden: Deviant Bodies and Eating Disorders in Ulrike Draesner’s Mitgift and Karen Duve’s Dies ist kein Liebeslied – Nathalie Morello: Anorexia, Anger, Agency: Investigating Quests for Self in Three Contemporary Narratives in French – Dearbhla McGrath: Trauma and Transformation: Eating Disorders in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes – Sonja Stojanovic: «J’ai mangé, j’ai mangé» [I ate and ate]: Accumulation and Excess in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes – Danila Cannamela: When Appearance Matters: A «Cover-Reading» of Briciole by Alessandra Arachi – Julie Rodgers: Double Voices and Splintered Selves: The Dialectic of Anorexia in Ying Chen’s Querelle d’un squelette avec son double – Anna Aresi: The Fine Line: Narratives of Recovery from Anorexia in Italian and American Memoirs – Kathryn Robson: Reading the Anorexic Body: Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Fiction – Petra M. Bagley/Francesca Calamita/Kathryn Robson: Writing Future Narratives of Eating Disorders

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Book SynopsisThis book offers a new, complex understanding of Indian writing in English by focusing its analysis on both Indo-Pakistani Partition fiction and novels written by women. The author gives a comprehensive outline of Partition novels in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh written in English as well as an overview of the challenges of studying Partition literature, particularly English translations of Partition novels in regional languages. Featured works include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, Meena Arora Nayak’s About Daddy, and Sujata Sabnis’s A Twist in Destiny. The book then moves on to a study of novels by women writers such as Githa Hariharan, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy, exploring their perspectives on sexuality, the body, and the diaspora.Table of ContentsContents: Indian Writing in English (IWE), an Overview: Gender and Politics – What is Indian Writing in English? – The Characteristics and the Issues – Indo-Pakistani Partition Novels: Identity Fallen Apart – The Overall Situation and the Issues – Partition Novels before Midnight’s Children: An Overview – Partition Novels after Midnight’s Children: An Overview – Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man: Gender and Conspiracy – Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: Enchantment, Fear, and Hostility aroused by Border Lines and the World Beyond – Midnight’s Children: A Narrative of Narcissist Failure – Meena Arora Nayak’s About Daddy: The Diaspora and Partition – Azad’s Memoir and Sujata Sabnis’s A Twist in Destiny: The Myth of the Founding of India/Pakistan – Women in Indian Writing in English: Sexuality, the Body, and the Diaspora – The Isolated Female Body: Sita’s Daughters and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Fasting, Feasting, among Other Novels – Female Bodies in Revolt: Githa Hariharan’s Representation of the Female Body – The Female Body in Jouissance: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things – Representation of the Diaspora: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

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Book SynopsisThis volume explores contemporary French women’s writing through the prism of one of the defining moments of modern feminism: the writings of the 1970s that came to be known as «French feminism». With their exhilarating renewal of the rules of fiction, and a sophisticated theoretical approach to gender, representation and textuality, Hélène Cixous and others became internationally recognised for their work, at a time when the women’s movement was also a driving force for social change. Taking its cue from Les Femmes s’entêtent, a multi-authored analysis of the situation of women and a celebration of women’s creativity, this collection offers new readings of Monique Wittig, Emma Santos and Hélène Cixous, followed by essays on Nina Bouraoui, Michèle Perrein and Ying Chen, Marguerite Duras and Mireille Best, and Valentine Goby. A contextualising introduction establishes the theoretical and cultural framework of the volume with a critical re-evaluation of this key moment in the history of feminist thought and women’s writing, pursuing its various legacies and examining the ways theoretical and empirical developments in queer studies, postcolonial studies and postmodernist philosophies have extended, inflected and challenged feminist work.Table of ContentsMargaret Atack/Alison S. Fell/Diana Holmes/Imogen Long: Introduction: Epistemologies, Politics, Fictions – Chloé Jacquesson: Le Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976) de Monique Wittig et Sande Zeig : une entreprise littéraire du savoir féministe ? – Emma Murdoch: (Re)Reading Trauma and Schizophrenia in the Work of Emma Santos – Beatrice Ivey: Hélène Cixous’s L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves: Gendering Memories of Colonialism in Algeria and India – Martina Williams: Looking Again at La Jeune Née: Feminine Poets in Hélène Cixous’s Voile noire voile blanche – Maribel Peñalver Vicea: La scène «primultime» de la mort : corps mourant, corps parlant ou les mécanismes de la greffe scripturale dans Homère est morte … d’Hélène Cixous – Gabrielle Parker: The Gendering of Space: A Study of Michèle Perrein’s Gemma lapidaire (1976) and Ying Chen’s Espèces (2012) – Stephanie Schechner: Marguerite Duras and Mireille Best: A Forgotten Literary Legacy – Annick Durand: Transgressing the Rules of Autobiography: Nina Bouraoui’s La Voyeuse interdite – Margaret Atack: Body, Narration, History: Valentine Goby’s Occupation Novels – Margaret Atack/Alison S. Fell/Diana Holmes/Imogen Long: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisWriting Travel investigates the ways in which two major Latin American authors, Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer, engage with travel and space in their literary work. Travel and space are structures of representation within which cultural traditions are interrogated, reassessed and reformulated and therefore fundamental to the understanding of the critical fabric of the texts themselves. The book enquires into the politics of representation in Bolaño’s and Saer’s work and the cultural and ideological implications at stake in «writing travel». Writing Travel comprises the first scholarly study of the work of Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer, with a focus on the thematic and formal representation of travel and space in their literature. It is an important contribution to the existing knowledge on the novels of the two authors, examining key and understudied aspects of their work.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: Desert Landscapes: A Travelling Dialogue with the Nation in Juan José Saer’s Las nubes – Stray Journeys: Travel in Roberto Bolano’s Los detectives salvajes – Juan José Saer’s El entenado and the Failures of the Conquest – Hidden in a Desert Cave: Reading and Disclosure in Roberto Bolano’s 2666 – The Event of Literature: A Reading of the Desert and Migration in Juan José Saer’s La ocasión.

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Book SynopsisHow does the experience of travel transform culture over time? This question is at the heart of this book, which brings together two main areas of scholarship: the cultural analysis of German literature and film and the emerging field of mobilities studies, which places movement and travel at the centre of human experience. The author grounds her analysis in two main concepts or ways of being: dwelling, or remaining in one place, which connotes stability, groundedness and permanence; and mobility, or travel to other destinations, which connotes movement, change and uncertainty. Travel Texts and Moving Cultures provides a comparison of travel writing from two significant periods of global social change: historical (1770–1830) and contemporary (1985–2010). The study includes literature such as Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World (1777), which recounts the young German scientist’s journey to New Zealand with Captain Cook; Erich Loest’s Zwiebelmuster [Blue Onion] (1985), which exposes the travel desires of East Germans before the Wende via a semi-autobiographical narrator; and Bernhard Schlink’s Die Heimkehr [Homecoming] (2006), which recontextualises and deconstructs Homer’s Odyssey in the present moment through a son’s search for his father. Whereas a culture founded on mobilities and a desire for travel emerges in the historical period, the contemporary period reveals an increasingly mobile world in which travel is regarded as a human right. The approach taken in this book sheds light on the ethics of ever-increasing mobility and problematises the possibility of homecoming.

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Book SynopsisBest known for his Gothic masterpiece Uncle Silas and the vampire story Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a prolific writer whose extensive body of work included historical, sensation and horror novels, poems and ballads, numerous stories of the supernatural, journalism and a verse-drama. While his name is well known to aficionados of the horror genre, much of his work still remains in the shadows. Indeed, despite his vampire creation, Carmilla, being the best-known female blood-sucker in the world, and despite an enormous scholarly and popular interest in the novella in which this character first appeared (an interest evident in the very large number of cinematic, televisual and even new media adaptations of the story), Le Fanu himself is almost completely unknown outside of the world of Irish Gothic scholarship, and most of his fiction remains difficult to obtain or is out of print. To celebrate the bicentenary of Le Fanu’s birth, this collection brings together established scholars and emerging researchers in order to shed new light on some of his less famous fiction and celebrate his influential contribution to the Gothic genre. The main aim of the collection is to read Le Fanu in the round, expanding the critical focus away from its current obsession with a small proportion of his work and taking account of the full extent of his writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Rose and the Key, Haunted Lives and A Lost Name, to his short stories and journalism. The collection also considers Le Fanu’s relationship to Victorian Ireland and especially Dublin from a number of different angles, as well as addressing his status as an ‘Irish’ writer of substance.Table of ContentsJarlath Killeen: Introduction: Forgetting Le Fanu? – Victor Sage: The Mask and the Void: Romantic Grotesque in Le Fanu’s Later Romances – Albert Power: Richard Marston of Dunoran: A Tragedy across Three Decades – Valeria Cavalli: The Cup of Madness: Religious Insanity in A Lost Name – Richard Haslam: Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’ and Irish Victorian Calvinism – Aoife M. Dempsey: Hyphenated States: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Settler Gothic Fiction – Raphaël Ingelbien: The Teller or the Tale? Narration, Genre and Irishness in ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ – Gaïd Girard: Growing a Voice: Le Fanu and the Laboratory of the Dublin University Magazine – Alison Milbank: Death and the Maiden: Theology, Gender and the Grotesque in Le Fanu’s Fiction – W. J. McCormack: The Bad Wall; or, Problems of History in Fiction

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Book SynopsisThis study considers male shame in contemporary writing by men, examining why shame is often considered a female emotion and therefore denied in men. The author’s comparative approach to the private experience of shame in novels by Hanif Kureishi, Philip Roth and Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki demonstrates the extent to which shame conditions male behaviour, protecting the powerful hierarchies existing between different kinds of masculinities. Using different conceptual analyses, the author exposes the damaging nature of the culturally sanctioned demand that men be «real men», which is often simply a call for violence. The book also examines shame more broadly as a means of social control, whether of women in patriarchal cultures or of people of different ethnic, sexual and class identities. Treating shame as both an individual and a social emotion, the author draws on perspectives from scholarship on shame in postcolonial, gender and feminist studies. Table of ContentsContents: Introduction: Why Male Shame? – Social and Historical Conditions of Shame – Exposing and Uncovering Shame in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy – The Shame of Being a Man in Philip Roth’s Everyman and Portnoy’s Complaint – Shame and Degradation in Raz. Dwa. Trzy – Conclusion and Implications for Practice.

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Book SynopsisThis book explores immigrant life writing and examines the complex relationship between the America imagined in the dreams of would-be immigrants and their ability to establish connections to actual places in America. The authors discussed in the book (Vasily Aksyonov, Mary Antin, Eva Hoffman, Edward Limonov, and Miriam Potocky-Tripodi) come to North America from different places in Eastern Europe and publish their books at different times of the 20th century, but for all of them an attachment to the new place begins before emigration. The initial stages of this process are imaginative – learning and dreaming about America, visualizing it as an ideal place – and the immigrants’ encounter with their new country is mediated by this idealized image of America. Although some immigrant autobiographers profess an immediate bonding to American places, the texts examined in this book demonstrate that the process of claiming a new place as one’s own is often rife with ambiguities and setbacks. Only by negotiating the gap between the dream and the encountered America can an immigrant begin to feel at home in the new place. At the same time, the bond to the home country can never be severed, and that rejected place becomes a reference point for comparisons or even a model for organizing the new environment. Briefly stated, immigrants maintain attachments to multiple places – physical, imagined, and remembered. Table of ContentsIntroduction – «That Alluring Land»: Eastern European and Russian Visions of America – Mary Antin Takes Possession of America – Eva Hoffman in the Land of Yearning – Vasily Aksyonov and Edward Limonov in the Land of Freedom – Epilogue – Bibliography

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Book SynopsisSince Forster’s death in 1970, many British novelists and film directors have acknowledged and even claimed the influence of the novelist of the English soul (in Woolf’s terms) and of a renewed faith in both human relationships and a quintessentially British liberal-humanism. After the ethical turn at the end of the twentieth century, British literature today seems to go back even more drastically to the figure of the individual human being, and to turn the narrative space into some laboratory of a new form of empowerment of the other’s political autonomy. It is in this context that the references to Forster are more and more frequent, both in British fiction and in academia. This book does not only aim at spotting and theorising this return to Forster today. Rather we endeavour to trace its genealogy and shed light on the successive modes of the legacy, from Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) onwards, to the novelisation of Forster himself by Damon Galgut. How can the principle of connection, of correspondences and echoes, which informed Forster’s private life and approach to writing so much, equally characterise the aesthetic and political influence of his œuvre?Trade Review«The book edited by Elsa Cavalié and Laurent Mellet is extremely broad and varied. It unites the works of seasoned Forsterians with those of young scholars embarking on their academic careers, as well as an impressive variety of critical approaches and fields in which Forster’s legacies can still be felt. Although apparently addressed primarily to Forsterian scholars, it should be, at least in part, equally interesting for scholars interested e.g. in contemporary gay fiction or adaptation studies, as well as in the writers indebted to Forster.» (Krzysztof Fordoński, Polish Journal of English Studies 3.2/2017)Table of ContentsJeremy Tambling: Civilization and Natural Depravity: On Forster, Melville, Lawrence, and Britten – Tim Mackin: Reconstructing Knowledge in A Passage to India – Aude Haffen: «Well, my England is E. M.»: E. M. Forster’s Legacy to the Auden-Isherwood Generation – Jean-Christophe Murat: The Issues of Liberal Humanism and the Condition of England from E. M. Forster to Angus Wilson – Jean-Michel Ganteau: He Cared: Forster, McEwan, and the Ethics of Attentiveness – Marie Laniel: Tracing «the Heart’s Imagination» in Contemporary British Fiction – Yi-Chuang Elizabeth Lin: The Subject/Object Commodity: From Forster’s Howards End to Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go – Christina Root: «Her Way of Walking»: Explorations of Nature and the Unseen in Forster’s Howards End and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways – Maaz Bin Bilal: E. M. Forster’s Place in the Long Discourse of Friendship – Catherine Lanone: «Common Garden Variety» or «Rare Bird»: the Persistence of E. M. Forster’s Singular Song – Niklas Fischer: In Timeless Company: E. M. Forster and J. M. Coetzee – Nour Dakkak: Walking, Strolling and Trailing: Ivory’s Adaptation of Movement in Forster’s Howards End – Susan Reid: «The Muddling of the Arts»: Modernist Rites and Rhythms in Forster, Woolf and McEwan – Julie Chevaux: E. M. Forster and the Obsession for Rhythm: Rewriting «The Story of a Panic» with «The Life to Come» – Alberto Fernández Carbajal: The Postcolonial Queer and the Legacies of Colonial Homoeroticism: Of Queer Lenses and Phenomenology in E. M. Forster, David Lean and Hanif Kureishi – Nicolas Pierre Boileau: Coupling: the «Lost Form» of 20th-Century Literature? Or Only Disconnect – Xavier Giudicelli: Creative Criticism/Critical Creation: E. M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst – José Mari Yerba: Forster’s Pastoral Legacy in Trauma Poetics: The Melancholic Neo-Pastoral in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star – Celia Cruz-Rus: Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014) in Context

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Book SynopsisThese eight texts deal with different perspectives on the relation between the regional short story, modernism and space. Seven of them concentrate on short prose (the short story and chronicle) and one deals with the novel. Four of them consider canonical pre-modernist and modernist Anglo-American authors and the other four Portuguese rustic and modernist short story writers. Their common point of departure is the notion that the representation of the world cannot be separated from its spatial context, and the effort to understand how space and landscape influenced the structure of narratives and were represented in some of them, mainly in short fiction. They draw attention to the importance of the underestimated regionalist short prose narratives, essentially from a comparative literary perspective, but also considering certain aspects of their social and cultural connections and dissonances. Table of ContentsHeidegger and Virginia Woolf: creating and interpreting the world – The hybrid genesis of the short story in Washington Irving’s The Alhambra – Regional dissonance: space and landscape in the short story cycle – K. Mansfield’s «The Escape»: an epiphany on impossibility – Regionalism in the Portuguese short story – Lisbon, the city manquée or nostalgia for another place – Narrative frames: Fialho de Almeida, Branquinho da Fonseca, Mário Braga and João de Araújo Correia – Landscape in rural space – Worldview and ambivalence in Portuguese regionalist short prose narrative

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Book SynopsisKriminalliteratur bietet seit längerem ein Forum für die Behandlung schon ‚klassischer‘ postkolonialer Themen. So lassen sich die ProtagonistInnen vielfach als hybride Subjekte beschreiben, und die Suche nach ‚historischer Wahrheit‘ bedarf einer anderen Substruktion als der einfachen Antithetik von Gut und Böse. Darüber hinaus sind die im Verschwinden begriffenen ehemals klar getrennten kolonialen Räume in postkolonialer Kriminalliteratur zwar solche des Kulturkonflikts; die ‚liminalen‘ Räume, die Kontaktzonen, mutieren aber keineswegs ersatzweise zu idyllischen Orten: Vielmehr sind sie gegen Konflikte ebenso wenig gefeit. Kriminalliteratur ist daher ein ideales Labor für postkoloniale Narrative, die Elemente postmoderner Ästhetik mit einem starken Interesse an sozialen Ungleichgewichten verbinden.Der Band versammelt zwölf auf Deutsch und Englisch verfasste wissenschaftliche Beiträge zum postkolonialen Kriminalroman sowie ein Interview mit dem südafrikanischen Krimiautor Deon Meyer. Table of ContentsFlorian Krobb: Afrika ermitteln: Drei Beispiele des neueren deutschen Afrika-Kriminalromans. Edi Graf: Löwenriss; Lena Blaudez: Spiegelreflex; Merle Kröger: Havarie – Carlotta von Maltzan: Farmüberfälle im südlichen Afrika. Zu Bernhard Jaumanns Steinland und Max Annasʼ Die Farm – Hanna Rinderle: „Lieblingsfach Foltern". Postkoloniale Gewalt in Wolfgang Herrndorfs Sand – Michaela Holdenried: Weiße Flecken kollektiver Erinnerung. Afrika als weiter Raum für die Kriminalliteratur (Mankell, Jaumann, Herrndorf)? – Rolf Annas: Migration ins südliche Afrika. Zu Kriminalgeschichten von Deon Meyer und Bernhard Jaumann – Tina Steiner: The Stranger’s Gaze. Defamiliarizing the Local in Hawa J. Golakai’s Crime Novels The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) – Catherine du Toit: Murder and Magic: Sorcery and Suspended Identity in Contemporary Crime Fiction – John K. Noyes: Peter Höner’s Africa novels – Eva Ulrike Pirker: "Beyond Race and Location": Mike Phillips’s Crime Fiction of the ‘Long’ 1990s – Barbara Korte: Magie und ,Dritter Raum‘ in den London-Krimis von Ben Aaronovitch – Joachim Grage: Ermittlungen in Lappland. Samen und Tornedalfinnen im schwedischen Kriminalroman – Stefan Hermes: «Die Sehnsucht nach den fernen Ländern und ihrer Buntheit". Zur Ambivalenz des Orientalismus in Friedrich Glausers Kriminalroman Die Fieberkurve (1937/38) – Carlotta von Maltzan: Interview with South African author Deon Meyer

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Book SynopsisCuatrocientos años después de su publicación, el Quijote cervantino sigue ejerciendo en el mundo entero una peculiar fascinación que se refleja en las más diversas expresiones artísticas. El presente volumen pretende contribuir a los estudios de recepción de la obra de Miguel de Cervantes desde un enfoque multidisciplinar e internacional, analizando la presencia de su obra y, en especial, de Don Quijote de la Mancha, durante los siglos XX y XXI. Los trabajos aquí editados se refieren a la figura de Don Quijote como mito literario, recogiendo textos de autores de diferentes países que estudian la impronta del autor manchego en ámbitos y géneros tan diversos como la literatura (novela de ficción y novela histórica, teatro, literatura infantil, novela gráfica y cómic), la música (jazz, ópera, cantata escénica, música incidental), los medios audiovisuales (cine, televisión, publicidad), la filosofía y la historia, centrando el foco de atención en la cultura occidental, pero sin olvidar la presencia de Cervantes en otras culturas, como la oriental o la árabe. A modo de anexo se publica, además, un texto inédito que hasta ahora era solo accesible en lengua árabe: el prólogo a la traducción a dicha lengua del Quijote, publicado aquí por vez primera en castellano.Table of ContentsPaloma Ortiz-de-Urbina: Introducción – Jean Canavaggio: Algunas aventuras de Don Quijote en Francia en el siglo XX – Esther Bautista Naranjo: Cervantes and Bradbury: Bibliocausts and Libresque Utopias in Times of Crisis – Lorena Silos Ribas: Una lanza por la libertad: el Quijote de Max Frisch – Tilman Klinge: Erich Kästner: Don Quichotte – eine Nacherzählung für Kinder? – María del Carmen Alonso Ímaz: Cervantes, de Bruno Frank: algunos mitos en su visión de la España de Felipe II – Pilar Úcar Ventura: 'El caballero del verde gabán' y cómo leer el Quijote en el siglo XXI – Matías Martínez: Don Quijote als Literaturcomic – Reduktion oder Transformation narrativer Komplexität? Die Quijote-Comics von Will Eisner, Rob Davis und Flix – Ingrid Cáceres Würsig: El Quijote en un cómic alemán: trasposición y actualización de la narrativa cervantina – Hans Christian Hagedorn: Sancho Panza en el jazz – Trevor Walshaw: Roberto Gerhard: the Knight of the Hidden Images – Gabriela Lendle: Die musikalische Rezeption des Pastoral-Topos und der Mythos des spanischen ‚pueblo’ in Roberto Gerhards Don Quixote – Jesús Ferrer Cayón: Un ingenioso hidalgo en América (2005): la recepción del mito cervantino en la cantata escénica de Samuel Máynez y Luis Bacalov – Carlos Alvar: Tradición e innovación: el Quijote en el cine – Heidi Grünewald: Die Präsenz des Mythos »Quijote« im Film Don Quichotte von Georg Wilhelm Pabst – Carmen María López López: Puesto ya el pie en el estribo: Notas sobre los mundos posibles cervantinos en El ministerio del tiempo – Delio de Martino: Mitos y leyendas de Cervantes en la publicidad – Magda Polo Pujadas: Don Quixote de Richard Strauss. Música y filosofía entre Apolo y Dionisio – Daniel Migueláñez Munilla: Don Quijote y el mito de la españolidad – José Antonio Guillén Berrendero: El honor, la nobleza y el Quijote en el siglo XX: Alfonso García Valdecasas y la recepción de los valores nobiliarios – Inmaculada Donaire del Yerro: "Psicología del Quijote y el quijotismo", de Santiago Ramón y Cajal: la respuesta de un intelectual ante la decadencia de España – Miguel Salmerón Infante: Cervantes y el dolor por el mito ausente – Carmen Valero-Garcés / Swangwan Traicharoenwiwat: Del mito del Quijote en Oriente y su traducción al tailandés – Emilio Sola: Cervantes y Argel

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Book SynopsisFurther to the first book, Writers of the Spanish Civil War: The Testimony of Their Auto/Biographies (2011), which featured the writings on the war (1936–39) of six key British and American authors: Gerald Brenan, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Laurie Lee, this new work studies the actions in the war of those physically involved and writings focused on the war, either at the time or later, by eight more foreign authors: Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Franz Borkenau, V. S. Pritchett, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Martha Gellhorn and Peter Kemp. In addition to comparing their autobiographies with what their biographers said, in order to show up any discrepancies, as had been done in the first book, here, the texts are scrutinized to detect use of stereotypes or adaptation of the material to other purposes in the writing. New perspectives are introduced now in that two of the authors are women, one writing from a distance but deeply affected by the war (Virginia Woolf) and one active in journalism on the spot (Martha Gellhorn), and our final author, Peter Kemp, went to Spain to fight on the side of the Nationalists under Franco as opposed to the Republicans.Table of ContentsJuan Antonio Díaz López: Virginia Woolf 1882–1941. The Death of Julian Bell and Three Guineas – Laura Torres Zúñiga: John Dos Passos 1896–1970. Dubious Films and Lost Friends – Melissa Leismer: Frantz Borkenau 1900–1957. Informed Perspective and Eyewitness Narrative: Microhistory in The Spanish Cockpit – Celia Wallhead: V. S. Pritchett 1900–1997. The Spanish Civil War at a Distance – Ricardo Marín Ruiz: André Malraux 1901–1976. Unveiling the Man and the Myth – Rosemary Masters: Arthur Koestler 1905–1983. A Homeless Mind – Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde: Martha Gellhorn 1908–1998. Objectivity Revealed: Propaganda and the Fifth Dimension in Martha Gellhorn’s Spanish Civil War Reportage – José Ruiz Mas: Peter Kemp 1915(?)–1993. A Francoist British Soldier and Writer in the Spanish Civil War

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Book SynopsisThis study of Voss by the Anglo-Australian Patrick White analyses the historical novel, set in the 1850s and concerning Voss’s exploration of the interior of Australia, as a parable of the writer’s exploration of the Australian historical, social and cultural context of the 1950s. The study employs a variety of critical apparatus including a post-structuralist and postcolonial approach, which also encompasses linguistics, sociolinguistics and comparative studies. This multi-level critical aid allows the examination of four levels of exploration utilised by the author. Following an analysis of the protagonist’s geographical movement into the desert and his personal transformation, the study moves on to an exploration of the narrative itself. It explores how the novel becomes subject to change, absorbing and contesting a variety of literary genres ranging from the ‘chronicle’ to the parable. Through this multi-level approach, the study demonstrates the variety of readings the novel stimulates and displays its rich intertextual and subtextual elements and links.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Chapter One: From «chronicle» to novel – Chapter Two: Maps/Mapping. Historicizing geography – Chapter Three: Towards le récit de voyage: the transit of the historical novel? From the European Imperial romance to the «hybridized» text – Chapter Five: From the imperial romance to the quixotic tragedy: the «chronicle» of the anti-epic in the southern hemisphere – Genre and gender: from the masculine European epic to the feminine native epic – From «chronicle» to legend – Conclusions – References

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Book SynopsisThis monograph is focused on the fictional works of Arnold Bennett whose literary role was very important in the history of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury novel in light of the debate between modernism and the traditional approach to the craft of fiction. After a long period of critical silence, this book reaffirms Bennett’s centrality through a sociohistorical and semiotic analysis of his most famous novels and short stories. In this sense, it offers a new reading of Bennett which may be a groundbreaking contribution to the discussion of the function of British fiction in the context of a multifaceted epistemic change.Table of ContentsFrancesca D'Alfonso - Fiction and realism according to Arnold Bennett- Character formation and narrative ambiguity in Anna of the Five Towns-Time and places in The Old Wives’ Tale-The "Grim Smile" of the Potteries: A Reading of "The Silent Brothers" and "The Death of Simon Fuge" -Accident: an adventure and its variations

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Book SynopsisDurs Grünbein is the most significant poet and essayist in German today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European and global perspective, and this volume seeks to present the poet and his work to the English-speaking world in all their significance and breadth. Written by a line-up of international scholars and critics, the volume offers highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grünbein’s substantial œuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, and engages with Grünbein’s works in the context of a number of relevant topics, such as ‘memory’, ‘urban life’, ‘mortality’, ‘love’, and ‘presence’; it also probes Grünbein’s sustained dialogue with the natural sciences and the visual arts.

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Book Synopsis

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