This accessible, lively, and informative study gives a clear, comprehensive overview of recent trends in American crime fiction. Building on a discussion of the immediate predecessors, Bertens and D'haen focus on the work of popular and award-winning authors of the last 15 years. Particular attention is given to writers who have reworked established conventions and explored new directions, especially women and those from ethnic minorities.

This highly accessible, lively and informative study gives a clear and comprehensive overview of recent trends in American crime fiction. Building on a discussion of the immediate predecessors, Bertens and D'haen focus on the work of popular and award-winning authors of the last fifteen years. Particular attention is given to writers who have reworked established conventions and explored new directions, especially women and those from ethnic minorities.

Ever since its appearance, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote has exerted a powerful influence on the artistic imagination all around the world. This cross-cultural volume offers important new readings of canonical reinterpretations of the Quixote: from Unamuno to Borges, from Ortega y Gasset to Calvino, from Mark Twain to Carlos Fuentes. But to the prestigious list of well-known authors who acknowledged Cervantes' influence, it also adds new and surprising names, such as that of Subcomandante Marcos, who gives a Cervantine twist to his Mexican Zapatista revolution. Attention is paid to...

In Literature for Europe? leading scholars from around Europe reflect on the role played by literature, and by the study of literature, in the constant re-negotiation and re-construction of cultural identities in Europe implied by the accession to the European Union, in the early years of the twenty-first century, of fifteen new member states, with the accession of a number of Balkan states impending, and Turkey waiting in the wings, while at the same time transatlantic relations of the EU to the USA are hotly debated, in politics as in culture, China and India awake as economic giants, and...

World Literature is not just a popular subject in its own right, but is infiltrating every aspect of literary study as the concept of 'national literatures', language and translation have been re-framed by World Literature. World Literature: A Reader offers the ideal introduction to the theories and debates surrounding World Literature through extracts from the essential texts and writers in the field. The Reader offers a number of different pathways through the material, all addressing the essential themes of globalization; cosmopolitanism; post/trans-nationalism; translation and...

The Canonical Debate Today. Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries re-enacts the canonical issues current in the '90s from a new perspective, triggered by the changes that occurred worldwide in understanding the concepts and the status of theory, in the legacy of literary studies within the field of humanities, and in cultural production and reception. During the last decade discussions of globalization mostly took into account its impact on the status of academic disciplines such as comparative literature or cultural studies, or the reconfiguration of national literary fields. These...

This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to and overview of 'World Literature'. Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism to postmodernism, Theo D'haen examines: the return of the term 'World Literature' and its changing meaning Goethe's concept of 'Weltliteratur' and how this relates to current debates theories and theorists who have had an impact on World Literature non-canonical and less known literatures from around the globe the possibility and implications of a definition of World...

From wide-ranging overviews of the entire region to close readings of specific works, this volume opens a fascinating window on the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, covering texts in the multiplicity of languages used in the wider Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and the region's many creoles. Authors and works discussed range from luminaries such as Derek Walcott to hitherto practically unknown works in Antillean creole languages. Underlying is the idea to foster the study of the Caribbean literary, artistic and visual text through a comparative lens, a firm...

While crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres, this is the first book to treat it in its full global is the first book to treat crime fiction in its full global and plurilingual dimensions, taking the genre seriously as a participant in the international sphere of world literature. In a wide-ranging panorama of the genre, twenty critics discuss crime fiction from Bulgaria, China, Israel, Mexico, Scandinavia, Kenya, Catalonia, and Tibet, among other locales. By bringing crime fiction into the sphere of world literature, Crime Fiction as World Literature gives...