Literary studies: from c 2000 Books

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Book SynopsisCan form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature, Mitchum Huehls argues that art''s interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century, as some critics would have it, but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed, resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre, gesture, constructivism, and abstraction. Focusing on three particular domains (art, theory, and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed, Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner, Salvador Plascencia, and Sheila Heti are turning to

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Book SynopsisThe uncertainties and newness that surround us today prompt radical questions about ourselves and our relationship with the external world. How do and can we belong to the places and spaces of today? Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel describes current realities and suggests ways in which you can define yourself in an ever-changing world. Using the travel writings of V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick White, and D. H. Lawrence, Movement and Belonging demonstrates that authentic travel embracing changing boundaries and cultures enables you to create sites of belonging where you can find your sense of self.

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Book SynopsisBlack OutlawsTrade Review«Carlyle Van Thompson has done it again! An audacious literary and cultural critic willing to ask unflinching questions about the limits and liabilities of racialist logics, Thompson takes on four canonical African-American writers and their embattled Black male protagonists (Richard Wright’s Cross Damon, Chester Himes’ Charles Taylor, Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel Rawlins, and Ernest Gaines’ Jefferson) to thematize the traumatic implications of race-based marginalization. And he is the perfect guide for such an important journey through America’s psycho-racial landscape – bold, iconoclastic, confrontational, and unapologetic. Thompson carefully demonstrates the extent to which race-based vulnerabilities are fundamentally constituted by the naturalized realities of gendered differences and the seemingly effortless reproduction of legal and class hierarchies. If Du Bois famously framed a version of the Black American experience as a question of always being made to feel one’s status as a «problem», Thompson extends that insight by asking us to imagine such renderings of problematic blackness (of literally and figuratively «outlawed» black masculinities) as institutionalizing a definition of racial criminality that includes African Americans into the narrative of American life as a kind of constitutive exclusion. You’ve probably read all four of these authors before – many times. But you haven’t quite read them like this!» (John L. Jackson, Jr., author of ‘Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness’)

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsContents: Tracey L. Walters: Introduction – Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith – Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith – Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man – Maeve Tynan: «Only Connect»: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel – Susan Alice Fischer: «Gimme Shelter»: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels – Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s «Hanwell in Hell» – Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s «Hanwell in Hell» – Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation – Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of White Teeth.

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Book SynopsisModernist poetry, in its fragmented form, continues to intrigue readers. In this sequel to A Flowering Word (Peter Lang, 2000), Noriko Takeda clarifies the modernist schism's meaningful role as a productive furnace for both interpretive humanness and its own solid concretization. The discussed main works are Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade, T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and shorter poems in foregrounded lyricality by these two writers.

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Book SynopsisAmerica is now wholly given over to a d d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash Taking Hawthorne's famous 1855 complaint about women writers as a starting point for consideration, Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form is a collection of fourteen critical essays about the short fiction of British and American women writers. This anthology takes a feminist approach, examining the liberating possibilities for women writers of the form of the short story, a genre often associated with alienation or subversion (the writer Frank O'Connor describes the form as marginal or outlaw). Covering the work of selected women writers from the 1850s through the late twentieth century, this collection includes essays on well-known authors such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cynthia Ozick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, alongside essays on Harriett PrescottTable of ContentsContents: Ellen Burton Harrington: Introduction: Scribbling Women and the Outlaw Form of the Short Story – Robert Coleman: A Miniaturization of Epic Proportions: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s «Circumstance» – Ruth Stoner: Sexing the Narrator: Gender in Rebecca Harding Davis’s «Life in the Iron-Mills» – Miriam López-Rodríguez: The Short Story as Feminist Forum: Louisa May Alcott’s «Pauline’s Passion and Punishment» – Susan Prothro Wright: The Art of (Dis)Placement: Ruth Stuart and the Characterization of African Americans at the Turn of the Century – Winnie Chan: The Linked Excitements of L. T. Meade and… in the Strand Magazine – Scott D. Emmert: Naturalism and the Short Story Form in Kate Chopin’s «The Story of an Hour» – Margot Sempreora: Strategies of Self-Representation in «Natalie» by Alice Dunbar-Nelson – Vanessa Holford Diana: Zitkala-Ša and Sui Sin Far’s Sketch Collections: Communal Characterization as Resistance Writing Tool – Susana M. Jiménez-Placer: Laura’s Unconscious Rejection of the Short Story in Katherine Anne Porter’s «Flowering Judas» – Rachel Lister: «Beyond Human Reach»: Silence and Continguity in Katherine Anne Porter’s «Holiday» and «He» – Sue Brannan Walker: Flannery O’Connor’s «The Temple of the Holy Ghost» and «Parker’s Back» as Dermatology/Theology – Beth Ellen Roberts: Cynthia Ozick’s «The Pagan Rabbi» and the Seduction of the Storyteller – Karen Alexander: Breaking It Down: Analysis in the Stories of Lydia Davis – Gayle Elliott: Silko, Le Sueur, and Le Guin: Storytelling as a «Movement Towards Wholeness».

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Book SynopsisThe Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett's Own Way to Make Use of It expands upon the ideas and theories set forth in the author's Die eigentlich metaphysische Tätigkeit: Über Schopenhauers Ästhetik und ihre Anwendung durch Samuel Beckett, published (in German) in 1982 and hailed by Catharina Wulf in her book The Imperative of Narration (1997) as an excellent study and the most thorough enquiry into Beckett and Schopenhauer. In the last years of the twentieth century, new documents regarding Samuel Beckett's reading and thinking, especially important notebooks and letters, have become accessible to scholars. These documents show much more clearly than could ever be demonstrated previously that Beckett had a strong, lifelong interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy. There is no other philosopher to whom Beckett refers more often in his personal comments throughout the years of his writing up to his seventies; no Trade Review«(...) Pothast's fascinating and lucid analysis makes you want to read more about Beckett's relation to Schopenhauer. [Future Beckettians] will always find a sound foundation in Pothast's study, which - moreover - is a pleasure to read.» (Dirk Van Hulle, Journal of Beckett Studies)

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Book SynopsisMigrant Form examines the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Satyajit Ray for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and unsettling, aesthetics. Among the questions it engages are the following: What are the aesthetic moves through which art expresses its resistance to dominance and demands for conformity? How can we define anti-colonial aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different media such as literature and film? Contending that Joyce inaugurates an anti-colonial aesthetics of reconstitution, the book mines such aesthetics in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to propose a formal model for postcolonialism. It also draws on that exercise to consider how Rushdie extends a play with reconfigured forms into an overt politics in two of his novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses). Turning its attention to film, the book contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ra

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Book SynopsisCompleting the survey begun in Lams' Cornish Trilogy volume, Aspects of Robertson Davies' Novels discusses the Salterton and Deptford trilogies along with Davies' last two novels, Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. The apprentice effort Tempest-Tost and the journeyman's success Leaven of Malice were followed by Davies' first genuinely fine novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the story of a talented Salterton girl who becomes a world-famous soprano. The Deptford trilogy is discussed in terms of Northrop Frye's confession form as it appears in Fifth Business, and in variations of that form in The Manticore and World of Wonders. Although Davies' Jungian enthusiasms produced certain flaws to which readers have objected, Murther & Walking Spirits is by no means a failure; it is best understood as an implicit spiritual history of Canada which is adumbrated in the generational experience of a single Canadian f

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Book SynopsisGenerations of Irish playwrights have tried to assert the reputation of the stage Irish figure as other than comic, but each effort was in its turn assailed as buffoonery. Using post-colonial and performative theory, Buffoonery in Irish Drama demonstrates the ways the Irish struggled to create a sense of identity in a colonial structure, and it explores the distortion and appropriation of that new identity that elicit further calls to eradicate negative stereotypes. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of the reclamation efforts, Buffoonery in Irish Drama covers a wide range of well-known and obscure plays to show the trajectory of twentieth-century drama that brings us into a globalized twenty-first-century Ireland.Trade Review«This eminently readable study illuminates a lively panorama of twentieth-century Irish plays, examining them against the context of Ireland’s rich (and changing) culture and demonstrating the pervasiveness of central concerns. Kathleen Heininge’s thought-provoking approach is sophisticated and sensible. She has a wide-ranging familiarity with key theoretical and dramatic texts, a sharp awareness of audience and performance, and an ability to provide a coherent synthesis helpful for a range of readers. Heininge’s innovative analysis yields new ways of thinking about familiar plays and introduces a variety of less familiar plays about which we should begin to think. Buffoonery in Irish Drama is essential reading as background from which to consider the emergence of twenty-first-century Irish drama.» (Helen Lojek, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Boise State University, Idaho)

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Book SynopsisIndian Writers attempt to locate diasporic voices in the interstitial spaces of countless ideologies. The anthology provides a critical examination of dislocated diasporic subjects those who have adjusted to the dislocation well, those who have chosen the hybrid spaces for empowerment, those who are dragged forcefully to various territories, and yet those who gleefully inhabit trans-local spaces. A wide range of voices raise these critical questions: How do we read these voices? How are the voices received in various locations? Are these voices considered Indian? Do they represent Indianness, or some hybridized version of it? What is an authentic cultural identity? What, ultimately, is Indianness, or for that matter, any hard-won national or ethnic identity? Additionally, as more female writers are being read, both in the global south and in the north, the reception of these texts, particularly in an era of globalization, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in the UnitTable of ContentsContents: Aparajita De: Pariah or Messiah: Gogol Ganguly & the Problematization of Transnational Identity – Ronit Frenkel: Writing South Africa in Diaspora: Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding – Jaspal Kaur Singh: The Indian Diaspora in Burma and the Politics of Globalization in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and Mira Kamdar’s Motiba’s Tattoos – Ryan Paul Singh: «I want to be surprised when I hear your voice»: Who Speaks for Jasmine? – Sam Naidu: Life-Writing: The Migrating Selves of Meena Alexander – Alison Graham-Bartolini: The Advantage of Estrangement in Mukherjee’s Jasmine – Rajendra Chetty: Mapping Durban in Aziz Hassim’s The Lotus People – Christopher Larkosh: Reading ‘South Asia’ in Dangerous Times (And Other Lessons from the Future) – Charlie Wesley: The Function of «Good» and «Evil» in The Satanic Verses: A Query – Seri Inthava Luangphinith: Of Exile and Return: Exploring Fiji-Indian Literary Metaphors – Peter Simatei: Hybrid Identities and Cultural Pluralism in East African Asian Writing – James Gifford: Vassanji’s Toronto and Durrell’s Alexandria: The View from Across or the View from Beside?

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Book SynopsisThis book studies C.P. Snow's eleven-volume series of novels (Strangers and Brothers) as documents detailing the social and political life of mid-twentieth-century Britain, and points out the uses for the novels in the academic study of that time period. Both Snow and his central character, Lewis S. Eliot, started from unremarkable origins in terms of their mutual background in the lower reaches of the middle class, their dreams of success in their teen years, and their early professional education in a new, struggling academic institution in the mid-1920s. Neither could really be considered typical for men of their class. Eliot's working life would include being a very minor town clerk, a barrister, an advisor to a powerful industrialist, a Cambridge don, a moderately powerful civil servant, and finally, in early retirement, a writer. Eliot would befriend members of both the traditional and Jewish upper classes, scholars and brilliant scientists, powerful behind-the-scenes civi

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Book SynopsisFrieda Lawrence once remarked, Nobody seems to have an idea of the quality of Lawrence's and my relationship, the essence of it. The deep attraction was there and that was what counts. This insightful and original study investigates how one of the finest literary minds of the twentieth century experienced deep sexual attraction. In close readings of all of D. H. Lawrence's major novels, Douglas Wuchina charts the growth of sexual attraction between Lawrencian couples as it affects both body and spirit. The theoretical framework is not Foucault's or Lacan's or Bakhtin's but Lawrence's own, with frequent reference to his innovative theory of the chakras and his rejection of modern partnership marriage in favor of blood attraction. Drawing on a variety of sources, psychological and sexological in addition to literary this is one of the first studies to make extensive use of revealing drafts that have only recently become available in the Cambridge edition of Lawrence's works Destinie

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Book SynopsisBetween Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism offers excerpts from novels and short stories by some of the most important and established contemporary writers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rebecca Brown, Ana Castillo, Michelle Cliff, Edwige Danticat, Rikki Ducornet, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ha Jin, and Helena María Viramontes. Readers interested in one or more of these authors, and scholars interested in multicultural and transnational literatures, have the opportunity to look more deeply at cultural identity with regard to home, belonging, freedom, history, and memory because the characters embody the hybrid selves that are part and parcel of an often-conflicting world of cultural codes. Migrations, dislocations, displacements, exiles, and relocations are ever more frequently embodied in the world and, thus, through literature. Increased globalization has brought with it greater cultural hybridity and experiential interrogations of singular identiTable of ContentsContents: Alwin A. D. Jones: The Novel Witness(es): Re-membering after Trauma in Adichie’s «Ghosts,» Cliffʼs No Telephone, and Danticatʼs Farming of Bones – Lynn Diamond-Nigh: Spatial and Temporal Considerations in Rebecca Brown’s The Haunted House and Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland – Catherine Rainwater: Tears and Dry Howls: Grief and Displacement in Three Novels by Erdrich, Castillo, and Viramontes – Belinda Kong: Diasporic Exceptionality: Maxine Hong Kingston’s «The Brother in Vietnam» and Ha Jin’s «A Good Fall».

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Book SynopsisRomancing Theory, Riding Interpretation reaffirms the need to look into the productive inventiveness of theoretical approaches and the consequences that this might have on our understanding of literature. (In)fusion Approach is one deeply provocative example, pregnant with possibilities. Through an innovative cluster of essays, this book shows the romance that theory can bring into our interpretation of literature within the terrain of Salman Rushdie's fiction. It challenges the conventional, the reified, and the institutional ways of thinking and evaluation, leading to a fusion and frission of critical thought and traditions of ideas. Romancing Theory, Riding Interpretation, in its border-crossed, concerted, and compelling arguments, is sure to find its niche in courses on theory, reading habits of literature, postcolonial seminars, as well as in modules of interdisciplinary studies.Trade Review«Asserting that theory has consequences and requires responsiveness, Ranjan Ghosh gives us a volume that persuasively demonstrates the consequences of an (in)fusion approach to literary interpretation partly through the invited responses of critics who challenge, extend, and apply this hermeneutic theory. Ghosh skillfully sets up the demonstration with a provocative introduction that explains his (in)fusion approach as a creative cross-cultural appropriation of interpretive concepts and ideational correspondences. The collected essays then enact the very cross-cultural critical engagement Ghosh advocates, as they move from theory to practice beginning with theoretical comparisons to Foucauldean reception study and ending with an array of applied readings of Salman Rushdie’s novels. Romancing Theory, Riding Interpretation definitely shows that theory is alive and well in the so-called post-theory age.» (Steven Mailloux, President’s Professor of Rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University)Table of ContentsContents: Ranjan Ghosh: Romancing Theory, Riding Interpretation – Philip Goldstein: Reception and/or (In)fusion: Interpretation and Literary Institutions in the 21st century – Stephen R Yarbrough: Is (In)fusionism a Perspectivism or an Interactionism? – John W. P. Phillips: Hodos Infusion and Method – John de Reuck/Jenny de Reuck: (In)fusing Moments of Transient Alignment into Diverse Communities of Understanding – Timothy Clark: Green Infusion? – Joseph Pugliese: Fractal T®opologies: (Re-)citation, (Mani-)folds, Alterity: (In)fusing Midnight’s Children – Sara Upstone: (In)fusion and the ‘Postcolonial’: Salman Rushdie’s Shame as Ethical-Political Fiction – Naheem Jabbar: The Satanic Verses as Secular Transcendence – Allen Hibbard/Savitri Ashok: The Moor’s Last Sigh as Palimpstine, a Country of Fusions and Infusions – Juliette Taylor-Batty: Singular Multiplicity: The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Neelam Srivastava: Reading Fury as an Imperial.

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Book SynopsisThis book is a collection of wonderful and thoughtful essays that explore the theme of beautiful sanctuaries in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European literature. The book focuses especially on selected works by Percy Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, and James Hilton. These sanctuaries of light, natural beauty, and tranquility comfort, nurture, and soothe the heart, mind, and soul of the individual, and inspire creative expression.Trade Review«Hugo G. Walter presents a brilliant, lucid, and deeply learned study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European prose and poetry for the avid scholar and enthusiast of literature.» (Luisa Ferreira, Berkeley College) «This is a fascinating and an insightful examination of the artist’s triumph over the limitations of mortality. The breadth of scholarship in this excellent and important book is remarkable.» (Richard Schultz, Berkeley College)

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Book SynopsisThe Fabric of Subcultures reflects on the state of the postcolonial signature behind stylistic refinements a world of letters relatively dependent on the West for economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of postmodernism, with its suggestion of a happy melting pot of literature, this book exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence (of the letter) of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, the book develops the first clear model for understanding the real value of the republic of postcolonial letters (if it ever existed). It proposes a baseline from which we might measure the validity of the emergent, as opposed to residual, signature, while arguing for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving legitimacy to developing peopTrade Review«If you cannot imagine the study of literature as a practice of everyday life, read ‘The Fabric of Subcultures’. If you can, read it. A surprising lesson, it makes one smile and this might turn up hurting. And when it hurts, the pain might lead to a surprised joy. This is comparative literature at its unexpected best. ‘The Fabric of Subcultures’ means to be about people without power, and demonstrates what it stands for, who is not in power?» (V-Y Mudimbe, PhD)

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Book SynopsisAfricana Women Writers: Performing Diaspora, Staging Healing focuses on contemporary literary works, plays in particular, written after 1976 by Africana women writers. From a cross-cultural, transnational perspective, the author examines how these women writers emanating from Cameroon (Nicole Werewere Liking), Britain (Winsome Pinnock), Guadeloupe (Maryse Condé and Simone Schwartz-Bart), Nigeria (Tess Onwueme), and the United States (Ntozake Shange) move beyond static, conventional notions regarding blackness and being female and reconfigure newer identities and spaces to thrive. DeLinda Marzette explores the numerous ways these women writers create black female agency and vital, energizing communities. Contextually, she uses the term diaspora to refer to the mass dispersal of peoples from their homelands herein Africa to other global locations; objects of diasporic dispersal, these individuals then become a kind of migrant, physically and psychologically. Each author shares

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Book SynopsisThis book begins with a survey of R. F. Delderfield's knowledge of Napoleonic history as revealed in his three Napoleonic-era novels. Two commentaries follow: the first on English attitudes and actions in a London suburb during the Interbellum (1918-1939) in his novels The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War, and the second on his Craddock trilogy, set in Devonshire, dramatizing the English experience from the Boer War until the late 1960s.

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Book SynopsisThis book is an analysis of the social and political outlook of D.H. Lawrence as determined by the development and conflict of the social forces of his time. It discusses, specifically, the relationship between Lawrence's ideas, as an essayist and novelist, and the ruling ideology of imperialism, reaching the conclusion that Lawrence refused to face and oppose capitalist reality. He either escaped into an imaginary, anarchic utopia, or, more frequently, criticized capitalist relationships from the standpoint of a fascist, militaristic division into rulers and mob, aristocrats and plebeians. Lawrence's letters during the First World War provide the documents that reveal the genesis of his fascist outlook. The book also traces Lawrence's attitude towards socialism throughout his literary career and concludes that anti-socialism, with varying intensity, remained an essential part of his outlook. Certain assumptions, like a contempt for man as a social being and the existential division of

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Book SynopsisA poet's œuvre is typically studied as an arc from the first work to the last work, including everything in between as a manifestation of some advance or reversal. What if the primary relationship in a poet's œuvre is actually between the first and last text, with those two texts sharing a compelling private language? What if, read separately from the other work, the first and last books reveal some new phenomenon about both the struggles and the achievement of the poet? Drawing on phenomenological and intertextual theories from Ladislaus Boros, Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Peter Galison, Poets' First and Last Books in Dialogue examines the relevant texts of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. In each of these poets' first books, Thomas Simmons examines both the evidence of some new phenomenon and a limit or unsolved problem that finds its resolution only in a specific conversation with the final text.

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Book SynopsisCemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun considers the rhetoric of burial reform, cemeterial customs, and epitaphic writing in Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century through the Great War. The first half of the book studies mid- and late-Victorian responses to death and burial, including epitaph collections, burial reform documents, and fictional representations of burial and epitaph writing, especially in the novels of Charles Dickens. The second half studies the same discourse of burial, mourning, and epitaphs in select fiction, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and poems produced in response to World War I in order to understand how writing about individual memorialization changed in post-war British literature and culture.

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Book SynopsisC. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the most original and well-known literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh rereading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. The Feminine Ethos in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia' proposes that Lewis's highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions on sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of masculine classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly feminine spiritual heroism. His view that we are all feminine in relation to the masculine God a theological feminism that crosses gender lines means that qualities we tend toTrade Review«Presented in a clear and engaging literary style, Monika B. Hilder’s exhaustive study not only exposes the shortcomings of all sexist readings of Lewis’s works, but it also convincingly demonstrates how his theological feminism evenhandedly attributes the same range of characteristics to both genders. With this book, Hilder is making an essential contribution to Lewis studies.» (Rolland Hein, Professor Emeritus of English, Wheaton College)

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Book SynopsisMagnificent Houses in Twentieth Century European Literature is a collection of great and imaginative essays that explore the theme of magnificent and aesthetically interesting houses in twentieth century European literature. It focuses especially on important works by Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Siegfried Lenz, while also discussing other significant houses in modern European literature.Trade Review«A tour de force – creatively written and scrupulously researched. A must-read for any scholar of literature and culture.» (Luisa Ferreira, Berkeley College) «Hugo G. Walter writes with equal parts passion and insight. Here he has produced a dynamic and an excellent study of European literature.» (Michael Jacobs, Berkeley College)

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Book SynopsisThe novelist R. F. Delderfield's trilogy of English life in the second half of the nineteenth century portrays the social history of Adam Swann and his family, energetic people of differing talents and tempers involved in a kaleidoscopic range of social engagements. Born into a military family but shaken by his army experience in India, Adam returns to civilian life in England and creates an innovative goods-hauling service across the country. Adam's ten children are also innovators who provide the intellectual activity expressed by the phrase The Ethos of Britain. In the novels a whole country is energized by a handful of individuals who recognize and set out to solve a wide range of social problems such as, teenage girls being abducted into continental brothels, miners killed or maimed by underground hazards, factory hands enduring long hours tending unsafe machinery, and elderly couples evicted from their homes, separated, and starved. As Adam's observant wife Henrietta expresses i

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Book SynopsisC. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the most original and well-known literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh rereading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. The Gender Dance: Ironic Subversion in C. S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy, the second volume in a triad, proposes that Lewis's highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions on sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of masculine classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly feminine spiritual heroism. His view that we are all feminine in relation to the masculine God a theological feminism which crosses gendTrade Review«In her careful reading of Lewis and his critics, Hilder provides a nuanced and balanced approach, showing how often Lewis subverted the usual stereotypes, giving us a new understanding of Lewis’s fiction and a new way to think about gender – a viable Third Way.» (David C. Downing, R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College, author of Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy) «At long last, a serious study of the Cosmic Trilogy’s central theme, and one which is sufficiently thorough and nuanced to bring out the radical implications of Lewis’s views on gender. Carefully, thoughtfully, insightfully, Hilder moves beyond the Pavlovian superficiality of so many previous ventures into this field. An important and valuable contribution.» (Dr. Michael Ward, St Peter’s College, Oxford, author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis)

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Book SynopsisOne important legacy of colonialism is the separation of a culture from the land upon which its people live. Populations are displaced; topographical objects are renamed, and the land becomes a resource to be exploited. Starting with three landscapes viewed as threatening by the Europeans who colonized them, Imagined Topographies examines the ways artists, writers, and musicians distill new meaning in formerly colonized spaces through the articulation of landscapes that are homelands, not commodities. In the Irish bog Seamus Heaney explores legacies of violence, John Dunne looks at rural poverty and religious faith, and Catherine Harper creates art connecting landscape and gender. Influenced by the Amazon, Wilson Harris creates dense multi-layered Guyanese epics, Karen Tei Yamashita plays with the telenovela to explore the role of multinational corporations in deforestation, and in recordings Douglas Quin combines the natural world with the technological, raising questions of coTrade Review«‘Imagined Topographies’ is in every sense a vital work of materialist scholarship, alive to the way landscapes act as imaginative repositories for stories and meanings. Working across the arts, Jonathan Bishop Highfield is an astute interpreter of the complex topographies of colonial dispossession and creative repossession. This is an impressive, essential book that straddles postcolonial, visual, and environmental studies.» (Rob Nixon, Author of ‘Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor’) «With the lyrics of Bob Marley as signposts urging us to reflect on our existential condition and with a range of poets and writers, ‘Imagined Topographies’ takes us into some of the unanswered issues of coloniality and its traces upon our contemporary moment. Reminding us that colonial power is about conquest and dispossession and that decolonization is a time yet to arrive, this book takes us on a journey from Ireland to Guyana and Australia. The reading of Wilson Harris is original and we are treated to insights into how landscape repossessed becomes home. The text broadens the field of postcolonial theory and should be read.» (Anthony Bogues, Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University; Author of ‘Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom’)

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Book SynopsisC. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the best-known and most original literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh reading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C. S. Lewis and Gender proposes that Lewis's highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions of sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of masculine classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly feminine spiritual heroism. His view that we are all feminine in relation to the masculine God a theological feminism that crosses gender lines means that qualities we tenTrade Review«Monika B. Hilder’s carefully reasoned treatment of C. S. Lewis and women is the book for which the scholarly world has been waiting. It towers above other writing on the subject by virtue of the thoroughness of its scholarship, the breadth of context into which the question of Lewis and gender is placed, and the superior abundance of close reading of Lewis texts.» (Leland Ryken, Professor of English, Wheaton College) «In Monika B. Hilder’s ‘Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C. S. Lewis and Gender’ we find a thoughtful, nuanced, scholarly, and penetrating exploration of the increasingly popular discussion of Lewis’s understanding of gender. Hilder’s exciting new contribution to the debate is her argument that Lewis consistently affirms values associated with the feminine. Lewis’s ‘theological feminism’, according to Hilder, elevates spiritual heroism (characterized by imagination, passivity, care, submission, truthfulness, and humility) over the predominant Western notion of classical heroism (characterized by reason, autonomy, activity, aggression, conquest, deceit, and pride). In her study of Lewis’s theological feminism Hilder primarily addresses his fiction, although she does not overlook his non-fiction and poetry. ‘Surprised by the Feminine’ is a major new contribution to Lewis studies.» (Don W. King, Professor of English, Montreat College; Editor, Christian Scholar’s Review)

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