Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismShortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa SocietyA history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to todayWhy do books have chapters?
The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre: the condition of culture novel.
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth's atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction.
"e;Writers from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, and other countries represent an ethnically diverse culture with roots in eastern Europe as well as Spain.
This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century.
Speculative fiction--both science fiction and fantasy--reflects, among other things, the fears of the culture that created it, contributing (perhaps unconsciously) to our efforts to prevent our fears from coming true.
With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work.
Sex and the Citizen is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that draws on current anxieties about "e;legitimate"e; sexual identities and practices across the Caribbean to explore both the impact of globalization and the legacy of the region's history of sexual exploitation during colonialism, slavery, and indentureship.
First published in 1979, this title presents the basic facts and the background information needed by a modern reader of Robinson Crusoe, as well as a careful exploration of the structure and style of the work itself.
Superheroes are enjoying a cultural resurgence, dominating the box office and breaking out of specialty comics stores onto the shelves of mainstream retailers.
The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday).
This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust.
In this stimulating history of the ideas behind George Eliot's novels, Bernard Semmel explores Eliot's imaginative use of the theme of inheritance, as a metaphor for her political thinking.
This is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the American short story that includes an historical overview of the topic as well as discussion of notable American authors and individual stories, from Benjamin Franklin s The Speech of Miss Polly Baker in 1747 to The Joy Luck Club .
This book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity.
A diverse and multinational volume, this book showcases the passages of Joseph Conrad's narratives across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the transtextual and transcultural elements of his fiction.
Miguel de Cervantes conceived his final work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1617), as a great prose epic that would accomplish for its age what Homer and Virgil had done for theirs.
First published in Germany to popular and critical acclaim, this is a unique portrait of the life and work of Theodor Fontane, the greatest German novelist of his age, as well as a major poet and theater critic and much loved travel writer.
Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present examines the most important authors of Western literature: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marlowe, Goethe, Joyce, Eliot, Mann, Bulgakov and Pasternak, who based their works on one or other of the two key myths of the West, Ulysses and Faust.
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth provides a comprehensive, must-have survey of interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the major American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Beyond her most famous creation-the nightmarish vision of Frankenstein's Creature-Mary Shelley's most enduring influence on politics, literature, and art perhaps stems from the legacy of her lesser-known novel about the near-extinction of the human species through war, disease, and corruption.
While globalization is often credited with the eradication of 'traditional' constraints tied to gender and caste, in reality the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s has led to a decline in freedom for many female, Dalit, and lower class Indians.
