Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers

In most cultures, women are in charge of meals and the rituals and customs surrounding meals.

Between 1814 and 1819 Walter Scott published a remarkable sequence of eight historical and regional novels, beginning with Waverley and culminating in The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose.

Women had been writing long before the French Revolution, but the reactionary character of the 1790s infused their work with a public importance and an urgency.

Impressive in scope and erudition, Christopher Knight's Uncommon Readers focuses on three critics whose voices - mixing eloquence with pugnacity - stand out as among the most notable independent critics working during the last half-century.

Much of the critical writing on the fiction of Alice Munro has explored and emphasized Munro's 'realism'.

James Joyce's use of ten one hundred-letter words in Finnegans Wake has always been an intriguing feature of that novel.

In 1996, Ignazio Silone, one of the most beloved folk heroes of the Italian Left, a novelist and a high-ranking Communist Party member, was unmasked as a secret supporter of the Fascist movement.

The mother's advice book represents a distinctly female literary genre appearing in seventeenth-century England.

For forty years, scholars have had access to a vast array of documents that reveal the stages by which a few modest episodes grew into the vast and complex structure the world reveres as Marcel Proust's unique novel, A la recherche du temps perdu.

Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante's Divine Comedy.

With the recent selection of Frank Parker Day's 1928 novel Rockbound as CBC's 2005 "Canada Reads" winner, interest in the life and work of Day has never been greater.

Although the Russian novelist and playwright Leonid Leonov had published extensively before 1917 he considered that his literary career began only in 1922 with the short story Buryga.

First published in 1985, this volume of letters follows Susanna Moodie from her Suffolk girlhood and her experience as an aspiring young writer in London, through her emigration to Upper Canada and five decades of Canadian life.

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"The Remnants of Nation" is a ground breaking book that introduces a new genre called 'poverty narratives' to study literature and popular culture in the larger context of economic and literary disenfranchisement.

Expressionism continues to fascinate scholars, and in fact has recently passed through yet another revival.

In Proust and Emotion, Inge Crosman Wimmers proposes a new approach to A la recherche du temps perdu that centres on the role of affect.

This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself.

Femininity in colonial societies is a particularly contested element of the sex/gender system; while it draws on a conservative belief in universal and continuous values, it is undermined by the liberal rhetoric of freedom characteristic of the New World.

In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Byron's doctor.

James Joyce’s writings have been translated hundreds of times into dozens of different languages.

In Playing the Hero, Ann Dooley examines the surviving manuscript versions of the greatest of the early Irish sagas, the Táin Bó Cuailnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley), and creates a picture of the cultural conditions and literary mind-sets under which medieval scribes recreated the text.

A reexamination of Pasolini life and work as a poet, novelist, filmmaker, journalist and cultural theorist reflecting new developments in semiotics, post-structuralist theory, and historical research on Italian literature and film.

Romance was a theme that ran through much of Northrop Frye's corpus, and his notebooks and typed notes on the subject are plentiful.

During the interwar period, shifting attitudes toward empire dovetailed with women's achievement of citizenship, placing women at the centre of debates about what England would be.

French authors in the eighteenth century traditionally used music to enhance literary love scenes.

"Utopia" has a strong claim to be the most misunderstood book ever written; its name has been hijacked by countless idealistic schemes having little in common with More's own assessment of social possibilities.

The detective story centres on unravelling two questions: whodunit?

This book examines the representation of masculinities in the fictions and autobiographies of some of Canada's most exciting writers, including Austin Clarke, Dany Laferrière, Neil Bissoondath, Michael Ondaatje, Ven Begamudré, and Rohinton Mistry, to show how cross-cultural migration disrupts assumed codes for masculine behaviour and practice.

Marian Engel was a writer's writer – an iconoclast, deeply admired and loved by a generation of Canadian authors and critics.

James Joyce has written that 'the man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics is on the cutting edge of an original and exciting new trend in Joycean studies, as it combines the study of literature, technology, and communication to reveal James Joyce as 'a key figure in the history of cyberculture.

Looking at five of Italo Calvino's often neglected early novels: The Young People of Po, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight, and The Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963, contain a sustained meditation on the role of the intellectual and on the irreducible ethical and political dimension of literature.

The writings of Italo Svevo (1861-1928), who was a pioneer of the modernist novel in Italy, are being revived in both Italian and English.

Writing at first anonymously and later under the pen name Pierre Loti, French author Julien Viaud (1850-1923) produced a series of fictions that sympathetically portrayed male same-sex desire and its accompanying societal conflicts.

London was once the hub of an empire on which 'the sun never set.

The religious context of Northrop Frye's criticism is virtually inexhaustible in its reach and implication.

Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe.

Authorial studies, or 'career criticism' is a new and distinctive branch of interpretive methodology that explores various paths of European careers, particularly literary careers.

When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, she was in her sixtieth year.

While Umberto Eco's intellectual itinerary was marked by his early studies of post-Crocean aesthetics and his spectacular concentration on linguistics, information theory, structuralism, semiotics, cognitive science, and media studies, what constitutes the peculiarity of his critical and fiction writing is the tension between a typically medieval search for a code and the hermeneutic representative of deconstructive tendencies.

In an imaginary dialogue with his editor, Carlo Emilio Gadda wrote that 'the world is baroque', adding that as a writer he had simply 'perceived and depicted its baroqueness.

Award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields has garnered praise from scholars and an international audience of readers.

Thomas King is the first Native writer to generate widespread interest in both Canada and the United States.

Theories of sight and spectatorship captivated many writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century and, in turn, helped to define both sexual politics and gender identity.

Balzac's monumental work, La Comédie humaine, consists of a wide range of novels, stories, and other writings which, he maintained, were to be read and understood as a whole.

In 1990 Hervé Guibert gained wide recognition and notoriety with the publication of "À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)".

Because German literary criticism tends to be strongly historicist in character, modern and postmodern German narrative has remained relatively unexplored by poststructuralist critics.