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.
Honorable Mention, Harry Levin Prize, 2022 (American Comparative Literature Association)Beyond English: World Literature and India radically alters the debates on world literature that hinge on the model of circulation and global capital by deeply engaging with the idea of the world and world-making in South Asia.
This first-ever English translation of Nur Baba - a classic of modern Turkish literature written by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu - offers a unique window into Sufi lodges, social dilemmas, and intellectual life in early twentieth-century Istanbul.
This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane.
The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction tracks the emergence of a new type of physically and/or spiritually wounded hero(ine) in contemporary fiction.
Margaret Atwood is an internationally renowned, highly versatile author whose work creatively explores what it means to be human through genres ranging from feminist fable to science fiction and Gothic romance.
This unique collection brings together essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, education, journalism, creative writing and literary criticism, to offer new insights into the writer, his work and his legacy.
The pioneering Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad was an iconic figure in her own day and has come to represent the spirit of revolt against patriarchal and cultural norms in 1960s Iran.
Through readings of novels, medical case studies, travelers' reports, photographs, and paintings, The Hypothetical Mandarin shows that in the West the connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "e;China.
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.
In Salman Rushdie's novels, images are invested with the power to manipulate the plotline, to stipulate actions from the characters, to have sway over them, seduce them, or even lead them astray.
This book offers an in-depth analysis of Keith Roberts's Pavane and explores why this work was instrumental to the evolution of the Science Fiction genre in British Literature.
Despite, or even because of their tumultuous history, Palestinians are renowned for being prolific cultural producers, creating many of the Arab world's most iconic works of literature.
The first to focus on the (re-)presentations of oil in dramatic literature, theatre, and performance, Oil and Modern World Dramas is a pioneering volume in the emerging field of Oil Literatures and Cultures, and the more established field of World Literatures.
The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors.
A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.
Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan gathers pioneering essays by major scholars in Filipino American Studies, American Studies, and Philippine Studies as well as historic documents on Carlos Bulosan's work and life for the first time.
This book identifies and explores the consistent link between negative depictions of education in novels and claims for the educative effects of reading them.
Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings - were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses - as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate.
Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays examines several lynching plays to foreground black women's performances as non-normative subjects who challenge white supremacist ideology.
The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies and Power interprets a wide variety of the most interesting Irish novels of the last ten years of the century from a perspective that focuses on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body.
In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st-century life.