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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2017Asia in Western fiction
by Robin Winks
Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2023
The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction
by Rob Breton
Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2022Kate Atkinson
by Armelle Parey
This timely in-depth study of award-winning Kate Atkinson's work provides a welcome comprehensive overview of the novels, play and short stories. It explores the major themes and aesthetic concerns in her fiction. Combining close analysis and literary contextualisation, it situates her multi-faceted work in terms of a hybridisation of genres and innovative narrative strategies to evoke contemporary issues and well as the past. Chapters offer insights into each major publication (from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war) in relation to the key concerns of Atkinson's fiction, including self-narrativisation, history, memory and women's lives.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2012Narration in nineteenth-century French short fiction
Prosper Mérimée to Marcel Schwob
by Peter Cogman
The short fiction that flourished in nineteenth-century France has attracted relatively little critical attention compared with the novel. This study focuses on some key stories by major authors of contes and nouvelles from the late 1820s to the 1890s, taking as a starting-point, aspects of narrative technique as a way of exploring not just characteristic strategies of short fiction, but also the ends to which they were put: recurrent themes, and the vision of mankind. Each chapter looks in some detail at three or four stories, referring briefly to other tales for illustration. The underlying point that emerges from this study is that the interest of a tale lies in the telling, not the events. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2012French crime fiction and the Second World War
by Claire Gorrara, Bertrand Taithe, Penny Summerfield, Peter Gatrell, Max Jones, Ana Carden-Coyne
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July 1995Der Glasmensch und andere Science-fiction-Geschichten
by Marcus Hammerschmitt, Franz Rottensteiner, Marcus Hammerschmitt
Marcus Hammerschmitt schreibt Science-fiction-Erzählungen, die technologische Phantasie, psychologische Einsicht, Lust am gedanklichen Experiment und poetische Erfindungskraft vereinen. Wie Herbert W. Franke oder Peter Schattschneider basiert er seine Geschichten auf einer soliden Grundlage, entwickelt seine Szenarios und Fabeln spielerisch, verknüpft sie aber dramatisch mit den größeren Problemen von Ökologie einerseits und den Zweifeln und inneren Konflikten des einzelnen andererseits.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2021Sara Paretsky
Detective fiction as trauma literature
by Cynthia Hamilton
Sara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky's work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts - whether they be personal, institutional, or national - that authorise 'forgetting' of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky's achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction.
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Literature & Literary StudiesAugust 2023Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction
by Maryam Mirza
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2023
The politics of male friendship in contemporary American fiction
by Michael Kalisch
How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2017
Imperialism and juvenile literature
by Jeffrey Richards
Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this truer than in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. It both reflects popular attitudes, ideas and preconceptions and it generates support for selected views and opinions. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times: in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. It seeks to examine in detail the articulation and diffusion of imperialism in the field of juvenile literature by stressing its pervasiveness across boundaries of class, nation and gender. It analyses the production, distribution and marketing of imperially-charged juvenile fiction, stressing the significance of the Victorians' discovery of adolescence, technological advance and educational reforms as the context of the great expansion of such literature. An overview of the phenomenon of Robinson Crusoe follows, tracing the process of its transformation into a classic text of imperialism and imperial masculinity for boys. The imperial commitment took to the air in the form of the heroic airmen of inter-war fiction. The book highlights that athleticism, imperialism and militarism become enmeshed at the public schools. It also explores the promotion of imperialism and imperialist role models in fiction for girls, particularly Girl Guide stories.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2011An Historical Atlas of Staffordshire
by A. D. M. Phillips, C. B. Phillips
Within its ancient boundaries, Staffordshire is a county of diverse and contrasting historic landscapes. World-renowned industrial complexes sit alongside agricultural systems; castles rub shoulders with urban-industrial housing; the cathedral centre of a vast diocese lies close to the birthplace of primitive Methodism; overtly planned landscapes mingle with the uplands of the Moorlands and the heathlands of Cannock Chase. These many and varied landscapes are both products and reflections of a multiplicity of histories, and students of the county have been keen to explore and relate these pasts. However, no systematic attempt has previously been made to express these accounts in spatial form. This book seeks to demonstrate by maps the various histories that contribute to the diversity of Staffordshire. With its succinct discussions and detailed map presentations of these themes, incorporating new thinking and recent research, the atlas provides an innovative and major contribution to the study of the history of Staffordshire. ;
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FictionHANSEATIC RADIANCE - A FAMILY SAGA SET IN HAMBURG
by Miriam Georg
A turbulent era. An impossible love affair. A moving saga. Hamburg 1886. Lily, whose father is a ship owner, dreams of becoming a writer. During a ship-naming ceremony, Lily gives a short speech during which her hat is blown off her head. One of the workers tries to get it back for her and is badly injured. Lily is shocked that no one sympathises with the young man’s fate. Then Johannes Bolten comes to the ship owner’s villa to demand compensation for his injured friend. Lily wants to help and allows herself to be drawn into a dangerous game of hide-and-seek. She begins a passionate affair with him. But Jo, who comes from the notorious gangland area, has a secret that Lily must never discover…
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Family & home stories (Children's/YA)February 1905Little Women
by Louise May Alcott
Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth", but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well".[6]:34 According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2021Passing into the present
Contemporary American fiction of racial and gender passing
by Sinead Moynihan
This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of "black" subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship. The title promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.
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August 1987Science-fiction: ein hoffnungsloser Fall mit Ausnahmen
Essays. Band 3
by Stanisław Lem, Erik Simon
Dieser Abschlussband von Lems Essays enthält nur Arbeiten, die in der Insel-Ausgabe der Essays (1981) nicht enthalten waren. Stärker als die früheren Bände ist dieser persönlich bestimmt. Einmal handelt es sich um Essays, die autobiografisch sind oder sich auf das eigene Werk beziehen. Zum anderen gibt es Vorworte zu Rezensionen von Büchern und Autoren, die Lem menschlich besonders nahestehen: Szymon Kobyliński, Władysław Bartoszewski und Jan Józef Szczepański. Neben Rezensionen, die Lem deutsche RIAS Berlin schrieb, vornehmlich über populärwissenschaftliche und pseudowissenschaftliche Bücher, aus denen Lems rationalistische Denkhaltung offenbar wird, und spekulativen Aufsätzen enthält dieser Band auch einige von Lems scharfsinnigsten Kritiken zu Autoren, denen er sich geistesverwandt fühlt oder die ihm widerstreben: Dick, Borges, die Strugatzkis und eine scharfe Abrechnung mit der Gattung, der der Großteil von Lems eigenem Werk zugezählt wird: der Science-Fiction. Eine beachtliche Anzahl der Essays schrieb Lem gleich in deutscher Sprache. Weitere Essays von Stanisław Lem liegen in den Bänden Sade und die Spieltheorie und Über außersinnliche Wahrnehmungen vor.
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Teaching, Language & ReferenceFebruary 2020A writer's guide to Ancient Rome
by Carey Fleiner, Jerome de Groot
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