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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 StudiesMarch 2025Through the fiction of Phebe Gibbes (1764–90)
Women, alienation, and prodigality in the long eighteenth century
by Kathryn Freeman
Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.
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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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The ArtsJuly 2024Lifework
On the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, writing, and theory
by Moran Sheleg
Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the 'self' as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book's chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.
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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 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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The ArtsMarch 2025We all die at the end
Storytelling in the climate apocalypse
by Sam Haddow
We all die at the end offers a survey of contemporary end-of-the-world fiction, spanning literature, children's fiction, video games, theatre and film. It draws on eco-critical philosophy and narrative theory to show ways in which the climate crisis is reorienting storytelling in the face of foreseeable human extinction. In the process, it argues that such stories have a role to play in helping us come to terms with the severity and scale of the crisis that we face.
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2025Invasions
Fears and fantasies of imagined wars in Britain, 1871-1918
by Christian K. Melby
Invasions is an ambitious, new and authoritative study of one of the defining cultural products of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the outbreak of war in 1914 invasion-scare fiction had profoundly changed British society, becoming not just a vibrant part of popular culture, but a reference point among military planners, advertisers, and politicians. This intersection between politics and culture, between entertainment and war planning, sets invasion-scare stories apart as one of the most versatile and interesting fictional products in modern British history. Building on recent work in both history and literature studies, Invasions is the first study of invasion-scare fiction to examine both the form (that is, fiction) and the function (the political argument) of the genre.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJuly 2010Harriet Martineau
Authorship, society and empire
by Ella Dzelzainis, Cora Kaplan
Harriet Martineau responds to the strong revival of interest in her life and writing, exploring Martineau's controversial views through her innovative use of popular cultural forms-journalism, travel writing, didactic fiction, novels, translation, autobiography and history. This is the first collection of essays to revisit and reassess Martineau's leading place in Victorian culture and in the development of nineteenth-century liberalism. Distinguished contributors-including Isobel Armstrong, Lauren Goodlad, Catherine Hall, Deborah Logan and Linda Peterson-offer critical analyses of her trailblazing career as a professional 'woman of letters'. The essays collected here move from personal to global concerns in Martineau's oeuvre. The opening essays centre on her bold self-fashioning as a writer, while the second section focuses on the domestic complexities of laissez-faire liberalism in her economic and social vision. Finally, the volume analyses her provocative writings on race, Empire and history - from Atlantic slavery to the Indian Mutiny - demonstrating the international breadth and impact of a remarkable career. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2003The autobiography of a nation
The 1951 Festival of Britain
by Becky E. Conekin, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman
The first full-length study on the 1951 Festival of Britain. An examination of how Britain and Britishness were portrayed in the 1951's Festival's exhibitions and events. Covers the Festival's history and historiography, its purpose, its representations of the future and the past, the role of London and the 'local', the British Empire and finally its legacy. ;
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July 2025Intimate afterlives of empire
Memory and decolonisation in autobiography
by Astrid Rasch
Through close readings of almost twenty autobiographies written after the break-up of the British Empire, the book examines how individuals engage with the changing narrative landscape brought about by decolonisation. It considers the autobiographies less for what they may teach us about the moment remembered and more as windows on the act of remembering. This adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of the legacies of colonialism and how the ongoing process of decolonisation is reflected on the level of the individual. It argues that autobiographers are at once influenced by and seek to influence the cultural memory of empire and its legacies, and the authors' own position in both. Situated at the intersection of imperial/decolonisation history, memory studies, and life writing studies, the book uncovers this intimate afterlife of empire.
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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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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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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2009
Irish Literature Since 1990
by Michael Parker, Scott Brewster
