Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature.
Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals.
George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) was one of the most important writers of the European nineteenth century, as well as a pioneering translator of challenging and controversial Continental thinkers, and an influential editor and essayist.
Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family is a wide-ranging survey of the prolific literary career of one of the most popular English writers of the 20th century.
Having emerged as one the leading contemporary British writers, David Mitchell is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan.
A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Cormac McCarthy, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field
Employing Salman Rushdie as a guide to a historicized contemporary, this study offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the plurality of cities along his transnational trajectory.
Asked in 2006 about the philosophical nature of his fiction, the late American writer David Foster Wallace replied, "e;If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works.
Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years.
Since its first publication in 1948, one of Vladimir Nabokov's shortest short stories, "e;Signs and Symbols,"e; has generated perhaps more interpretations and critical appraisal than any other that he wrote.
Brings together leading critics and novelists with some of the finest contemporary novels to answer probing questions about the role of the modern novel.
Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, American Gothic Fiction includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements.
Mapping the largely neglected history of autofictional literature, and describing developments against socio-historical changes, cultural trends, and philosophical-psychological discussions around self and mind, this book both explores and historicizes autofiction's contemporary boom.
Even after the upheavals wrought by Theory, literary criticism has generally ignored the act and experience of reading itself, proceeding as though something so fundamental to our experience of texts could be taken for granted.
Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose Saramago.
In this original, interdisciplinary approach to evil in French literature, Damian Catani links literary depictions of evil with cultural events to chart a history of the concept in some of the most important texts in modern literature.
In this original, interdisciplinary approach to evil in French literature, Damian Catani links literary depictions of evil with cultural events to chart a history of the concept in some of the most important texts in modern literature.
A collection of original essays by well-known Atwood scholars offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of three well known Atwood texts.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition explores Toni Morrison's construction of alternative and oppositional narratives of history and places her work as central to the imagining and re-imagining of American and diasporic identities.
Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination.
Henry James's ghost story novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a key gothic text and is one of the most popular James texts for undergraduate study.
A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Don DeLillo, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field.
Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have been drawn into exhaustive analyses of what went wrong in "e;the terrible 20th Century"e;, as Winston Churchill dubbed it.
Bringing together leading international scholars of contemporary fiction and modern women writers, this book provides authoritative new critical readings of Angela Carter's work from a variety of innovative theoretical and disciplinary approaches.
Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years.
'The foreigner' is a familiar character in popular crime fiction, from the foreign detective whose outsider status provides a unique perspective on a familiar or exotic location to the xenophobic portrayal of the criminal 'other'.
In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the political situation in both the United States and abroad has often been described as a "e;state of exception"e;: an emergency situation in which the normal rule of law is suspended.
