In this ground-breaking study, Sabine Binder analyses the complex ways in which female crime fictional victims, detectives and perpetrators in South African crime fiction resonate with widespread and persistent real crimes against women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of crime novels written over the last decade, Binder emphasises the genre’s feminist potential and critically maps its political work at the intersection of gender and race. Her study challenges the perception of crime fiction as a trivial genre and shows how, in South Africa at least, it provides a...

In T. S. Eliot’s Ascetic Ideal, Joshua Richards charts an intellectual history of T. S. Eliot’s interaction with asceticism. This history is drawn from Eliot’s own education in the topic with the texts he read integrated into detailed textual analysis. Eliot’s early encounters with the ascetic ideal began a lifetime of interplay and reflection upon self-denial, purgation, and self-surrender. In 1909, he began a study of mysticism, likely, in George Santayana’s seminar, and thereafter showed the influence of this education. Yet, his interaction with the ascetic ideal and his...

This lively and fascinating new collection of European essays on contemporary Anglophone fiction has arisen out of the ESSE/3 Conference, which was held in Glasgow in September 1995. The contributors live and work in University English Departments in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the United Kingdom itself.
Essays on general theoretical aspects of the subject head and conclude the collection, and there are also essays on individual writers or groups of writers, such as John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Peter...

In recent years Yeats scholarship has been, to a large extent, historically-based in emphasis. Much has been gained from this emphasis, if we consider the refinement of critical awareness resulting from a better understanding of the intricate relationship between the poet and his times. However, the present author feels that an exclusive adherence to this approach impacts negatively on our ability to appreciate and understand Yeatsian creativity from within the internally located imperatives of creativity itself, as opposed to our understanding it on the basis of aesthetically constitutive...

The rhymed chronicles by Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng, written between c.1305 and 1338, form a unique pair in the history of English literature and historiography. Both were written in the North of England, both deal with the history of the kings of England from Brutus to the death of Edward I in July 1307. Yet the differences between them are significant. Langtoft wrote in Anglo-Norman with a specific purpose and a specific audience in mind. Robert Mannyng translated a large part of Langtoft's work into English for a very different kind of audience. Although he stayed close to his...

Complex and controversial issues have accompanied the development of English-language literature in Wales, generating a continuing debate over the nature of Welsh writing in English. The main issues include the claim of some Welsh-language writers to represent the only authentic literature of Wales, the question of whether or not an extended literary tradition in English has existed in Wales, the absence (until fairly recently) of a publishing apparatus for English-language writers, the rise of a Welsh nationalism committed to preserving the Welsh language, and the question of whether...

The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad's Under Western Eyes has a twofold origin. Over the past ten years, as an associate editor of the prospective Cambridge Edition of Under Western Eyes, the author, Keith Carabine, has worked on the genesis and composition of the novel in its several versions and on its literary, ideological, social, and historical contexts. At the same time during these years he has taught seminar courses on Conrad for undergraduates and on Conrad and Dostoevsky for postgraduates. This interpenetration of teaching and research constantly reminded the author that his many...