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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 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 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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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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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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Historical fictionMADAME CLICQUOT AND THE HAPPINESS OF CHAMPAGNE
by Susanne Popp
Between self-realisation and love: the story of the woman behind the famous champagne brand Veuve Clicquot. The French champagne city Reims in 1805: despite resistance from her family, young widow Barbe-Nicole Clicquot takes over the champagne and wine production from her late husband - and turns out to be a talented winemaker. But it is the time of the Napoleonic Wars and business is not going well. Supported by her employee Louis Bohne and the German accountant Christian Kessler, Barbe-Nicole nevertheless manages to get her company started, develops a new production process and thus gives champagne its seductive tingle. Enchanted by her esprit, both men develop feelings for her - but it is only as a widow that Barbe-Nicole can run the company under her name ...
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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 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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The ArtsJanuary 2019Contemporary Spanish cinema
by Barry Jordan, Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas
Contemporary focus, right up to date with material from 1980s and 90s. Wide-ranging analyses of major directors, themes, genres and issues, including historical film, genre cinema, women in film and autonomies.
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The ArtsJune 2017Terry Gilliam
by Peter Marks
Terry Gilliam presents a sustained examination of one of cinema's most challenging and lauded auteurs, proposing fresh ways of seeing Gilliam that go beyond reductive readings of him as a gifted but manic fantasist. Analysing Gilliam's work over nearly four decades, from the brilliant anarchy of his Monty Python animations through the nightmarish masterpiece Brazil to the provocative Gothic horror of Tideland, it critically examines the variety and richness of Gilliam's sometimes troubled but always provocative output. The book situates Gilliam within the competing cultural contexts of the British, European and American film industries, examining his regular struggles against aesthetic and commercial pressures. He emerges as a passionate, immensely creative director, whose work encompasses a dizzying array of material: anarchic satire, childhood and adult fantasy, dystopia, romantic comedy, surrealism, road movie, fairy tale and the Gothic. The book charts how Gilliam interweaves these genres and forms to create magical interfaces between reality and the illuminating, frightening but liberating worlds of the imagination. Scrutinising the neglected importance of literature and adaptation in Gilliam's career, this study also observes him through the lenses of auteurism, genre, performance, design and national culture, explaining how someone born in Minnesota and raised in California came to be one of British television and film's most compelling figures.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2025Reassembling the social interior
Historical spaces from contemporary viewpoints
by Helen McCormack, Jennifer Gray, Anne Nellis Richter
At the intersection of heritage, design history and contemporary art, this book offers new perspectives on the way historical interiors are encountered by, and viewed and presented for, present-day audiences. Many studies have highlighted the historical significance and meanings embedded in the landscape, architecture, decoration and objects to be found within houses and homes. But what about the social meanings of these spaces? Central to this book is the idea that in reflecting, remaking and reimagining historical interiors, the contributions of artists, designers and craftspeople should be foregrounded in constructing ideas of authenticity, transparency, and materiality in the making process. The chapters present a range of case studies that reflect upon on how historical interiors are remade and reimagined by looking in and out; at how a reassembling of spaces ought to avoid 'a shrinking definition of the social itself' (Latour, 2005). Surveying a range of interior 'types' from a number of historical periods, the book includes contributions from practitioners, scholars and makers. From digital reconstructions of a seventeenth-century Belgian constcamer to the interior and exterior worlds of specific historical figures, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Beatrix Potter, the book considers how these spaces have powerful significance for contemporary audiences, particularly in ways that are relatable to shared experiences of work, leisure, family, community, power and politics. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of interiors and collections, museology, archaeology, architectural history, art, and design history, as well as curators and caretakers of historical sites, spaces and objects.
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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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Comparative politicsJuly 2013Abandoning historical conflict?
by Peter Shirlow, Jon Tonge, James McAuley, Catherine McGlyn
