Drawing on critical work by D.A. Miller, Joseph Allen Boone, Michel Foucault, and others, as well as on cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian conspiracy narrative tradition-a tradition which embraces classic Victorian works like Bleak House

Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric."

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has until recently been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, this study traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel. It draws upon popular, sociological, political and architectural history to illustrate how divorce reflects conflicting ideologies and notions of American identity. Focusing primarily on work by William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy and John Updike, Kimberly Freeman delineates a system of tropes particular to divorce in American...

This work contextualises and details Herman Melville's artistic career and outlines the relationship between Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Michael McLoughlin divides Melville's professional career as a novelist into two major phases corresponding to the growth and shift in his art. In the developmental phase, from 1845 to 1850, Melville wrote his five transcendental novels of the sea, in which he defended self-reliance, attacked conformity, and learned to employ transcendental symbols of increasing complexity. This phase culminates in Moby-Dick, with its remarkable matching of...

This text presents an exploration of the reinvented Utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that Utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as the political, and of criticizing the patriarchical social order. In her examination of two novels of the 70s - Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You and Joanna Russ's The Female Man - Teslenko provides a comprehensive account of the generic strategy of feminist Utopian fiction. women while working with the...

This text explores the importance of work and its role in defining and developing the self. Carolyn R. Maibor illustrates the connection between the construction of a substantive self and the call for women to have increased access to the professions and higher education. According to Maibor, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott demonstrate that valorizing the importance of work also validates the need for equality. Labour Pains challenges the traditional view of Emerson as being unconcerned with societal issues, and as growing more conservative over...

This book contributes to the body of postcolonial scholarship that explores the growth of imperial culture in the Romantic and early Victorian period by focusing on the literary uses of the figure of the Turk and the Ottoman Empire. Filiz Turhan analyzes Turkish Tales, novels and travelogues from c.1789-1846 to expose the three primary ways in which the Ottoman Other served as a strong counterimage of empire for both liberal and conservative writers. These elements include Turkey's commercial policies; its adherence to the harem system; and its oppressive treatment of the Greeks. Through...

This book focuses on the way in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four bestselling novels and their film adaptations: Marilyn French's The Women's Room, John Irving's The World According to Garp, John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale . According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent...

In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were...