Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated. Feminist literary theory has deliberately transgressed traditional boundaries between literature, philosophy and the social sciences in order to understand how gender has been constructed and represented through language. This lively and thought-provoking Companion presents a range of approaches to the field. Some of the essays demonstrate feminist critical principles at work in analysing texts, while others take a step back to trace the development of a particular feminist literary method. The essays...

Jacques Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at a time when it faced certain intellectual decline. Focusing on key terms in Lacan's often difficult, idiosyncratic development of psychoanalysis, this volume brings new perspectives to the work of an intimidating influential thinker.

The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume establish new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Hawthorne. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on Hawthorne's classic works, and on topics such as Hawthorne's relationship to history, women, politics, and early America. It brings together a team of leading international scholars to offer the most comprehensive introduction available to Hawthorne's work and life.

In addition to ensuring broad coverage of Jonathan Swift's writing by including early, as well as more well-known later works, this Companion offers access to current critical and theoretical issues concerning the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift's problematic relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland, and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicized age.

Satire as a distinct genre was first developed by the Romans and regarded as completely 'their own'. This Companion's international contributors provide a stimulating introduction to the genre and its individual proponents aimed particularly at non-specialists. Roman satires are explored both as generic, literary phenomena and as highly symbolic and effective social activities. Satire's transformation in late antiquity and reception in more recent centuries is also covered.

Well-known scholars review Mary Shelley's work in several contexts (literary history, aesthetic and literary culture, the legacies of her parents) and also analyze her most famous work-- Frankenstein. The contributors also examine Shelley as a biographer, cultural critic, and travel writer. The text is supplemented by a chronology, guide to further reading and select filmography.

In addition to covering the "detective" fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, this collection of British and American crime fiction considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. Ranging over the last three centuries, it includes chapters on the analysis of crime in eighteenth-century literature; French and Victorian fiction; women and black detectives; crime on film and TV; and police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form.

The essays in this collection cover the entire range of Irish drama, from the late nineteenth-century melodramas (anticipating the rise of the Abbey Theatre) to the contemporary Dublin of theater festivals. In addition to studies of individual playwrights, the collection includes an examination of the relationship between the theater and its political context as reflected through its ideology, staging and programming. Including a complete chronology and bibliography, this collection will be an important introduction to one of the world's most vibrant theater cultures.

Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature over the last fifty years. In addition to providing a unique introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, this Companion introduces the reader to significant precursors such as Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, as well as vital contemporaries and successors (including among others, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.) The volume includes a chronology and guide to further reading and will prove invaluable to students and teachers.

Combining scholarship covering one hundred fifty years of novel writing in the U.S., newly commissioned essays examine eighty African American novels. They include well-known works as well as writings recently recovered or acknowledged. The collection features essays on the slave narrative, coming of age, vernacular modernism, and the post-colonial novel to help readers gain a better appreciation of the African American novel's diversity and complexity.