The Grimm brothers fairy tales have long fascinated readers with their violence and frank sexuality. Three of Britain s most important novelists, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A. S. Byatt, have shared this fascination. Their fiction explores the darker themes of fairy tales bestiality, cannibalism, and incest and finds within them reasons to be optimistic about our fractured modern world."

Islands, both literal and figurative, recur in fiction authored by many prominent Canadian women writers. Using a critical lens based on Northrop Frye and Julia Kristeva, this book closely examines fourteen novels by eight twentieth-century authors, emphasizing works by L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. Several of the novels, such as Montgomery s Anne of Green Gables, Laurence s A Jest of God and The Diviners, Atwood s Surfacing and Bodily Harm, Alice Munro s The Lives of Girls and Women, and Gabrielle Roy s The Tin...

In a historical period of international and global frames of literary investigation, In Their Own Terms is a timely and valuable contribution to cross-cultural forms of dialogue between non-American modes of analysis and US American literary studies. It is a wide-ranging and provocative look into American literary historiography that engages readers in analytical examinations of US literary histories considered landmarks in their field, from the early nineteenth-century work of Samuel L. Knapp to the newly completed Cambridge volumes. It focuses on texts that have had a decisive...

"Repression and Expression" opens with several studies that clarify aspects of French thought and ideology from the Romantic pomp surrounding the executioner to Maurras on conspiracy. Other articles examine themes and techniques in fiction and theater (Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola, and Valles). The section on -Revolutionary Pleasures- focuses on modes of expression during the Directorate, the July Revolution, and the political banquets of 1847. The final section groups studies on themes and conventions in poetry (Baudelaire, Gautier, Laforgue, Mallarme) with theoretical...