Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception. This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and short stories through considerations of mortality and death. Chapters explore the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole, through three main approaches. The first of these situates Beckett's thinking about death in his own writing and reading processes, particularly with respect to manuscript drafts and letters. The second on the death of the subject in Beckett links dominant 'poststructural' readings of Beckett's...
Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception. This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and...
Modernist troublemaker in the 1890s, Nobel Prize winner in 1920, and indefensible Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s and 40s, Knut Hamsun continues to provoke condemnation, apologia and critical confusion. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida and Sigmund Freud, Troubling Legacies analyses the heterogeneous and conflicted legacies of the enigmatic European writer, Hamsun. Moving through different phases of his life, this study emphasises the dislocated nature of Hamsun's works and the diverse and conflicting responses his fiction elicited from such figures as Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield,...
Modernist troublemaker in the 1890s, Nobel Prize winner in 1920, and indefensible Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s and 40s, Knut Hamsun continues to prov...
By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and excavates various districts of the;west country so as radically to redefine the;parochial while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification. Contributing to the growing research on space and place in Victorian and Modernist writing, Radford uses the analysis of these writers as a lens through which to inspect the relationship between rural periphery and...
By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and excavates...
By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American hard-boiled crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and true crime, crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer...
By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American hard-boiled crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes...
Adapting Detective Fiction is a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the role television detective fiction plays in this. It is about the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric, about the connection between the popular-cultural depiction of crime and criminality and how we come to understand human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is a detailed...
Adapting Detective Fiction is a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts. But ...
Organised around each decade of the post war period, this book analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 to the present. Each chapter identifies a specific genre in popular fiction for women which marked that period and provides case studies focusing on writers and texts which enjoyed a wide readership. Despite their popularity, these novels remain largely outside the 'canon' of women's writing, and are often unacknowledged by feminist literary criticism. However, these texts clearly touched a nerve with a largely female readership, and so offer a means of charting the changes in...
Organised around each decade of the post war period, this book analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 to the present. Each chapter iden...
The figure of the American Adam is a prevalent myth in US cultural history. Defined by R.W.B. Lewis in 1955 as "the hero of new adventure . . .an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources," the figure is discernable in the American renaissance writers and in the imagery of the frontiersman, cowboy, gangster as well as in the heroes of US action movies.
Focusing on the American Adam as a paradigm of masculine identity formation, this monograph examines how this fantasy...
The figure of the American Adam is a prevalent myth in US cultural history. Defined by R.W.B. Lewis in 1955 as "the hero of new adventure . . .an i...
Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences,...
Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. ...
Cross-Rhythms investigates the literary uses and effects of blues and jazz in African-American literature of the twentieth century. Texts by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed variously adopt or are consciously informed by a jazz aesthetic; this aesthetic becomes part of a strategy of ethnic identification and provides a medium with which to consider the legacy of trauma in African-American history. These diverse writers are all thoroughly immersed in a socio-cultural context and a literary aesthetic that embodies...
Cross-Rhythms investigates the literary uses and effects of blues and jazz in African-American literature of the twentieth century. Texts by James ...
