An overview of 19th- and 20th-century writing from the British Isles shows a constant interplay between metropolitan centers and regional peripheries--an interplay that points to the basic importance of place and belonging in literary creation and evaluation. This volume examines the relationship between British literature--including poetry, fiction, biography, and drama--and regional consciousness in the Victorian and modern periods, introducing the reader to a range of responses to the profound feelings of belonging engendered by the sense of place. The works covered are a mixture of...

Stephen Wade offers a guide to major writers, their key works, and influential background factors including the postmodern, the master-narrative and metafiction. The themes, issues, and philosophies of writers including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are inter-related and wider literary and historical topics are alluded to and explained. Covering women's writing, novels, poetry, and drama, the author offers an informative and highly readable guide to the achievements of a key group of writers in twentieth-century American literature.

Wade Mainer (b. 1907) is believed to be the longest-lived country entertainer ever. His banjo lessons began in childhood and he played informally into his adult years, when he joined his brother, fiddler J. E. Mainer (1898-1971), in Mainer's Mountaineers. Music became their ticket out of the cotton mills in 1934. At the time, country styles were swiftly evolving from community-based performance into mass-market broadcast via radio, records, and the silver screen. Mainer's Mountaineers attracted radio sponsors and touring opportunities, allowing the brothers to become full-time...

Wade Mainer (b. 1907) is believed to be the longest-lived country entertainer ever. His banjo lessons began in childhood and he played informally into his adult years, when he joined his brother, fiddler J. E. Mainer (1898-1971), in Mainer's Mountaineers. Music became their ticket out of the cotton mills in 1934. At the time, country styles were swiftly evolving from community-based performance into mass-market broadcast via radio, records, and the silver screen. Mainer's Mountaineers attracted radio sponsors and touring opportunities, allowing the brothers to become full-time...

"The Beautiful Music All Around Us" presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented...