Since the 1960 publication of her first novel, "The Country Girls," award-winning Irish writer Edna O'Brien has been both celebrated and maligned. Praised for her lyrical prose and vivid female characters and attacked for her frank treatment of sexuality and alleged sensationalism, O'Brien and her work seem always to spawn controversy, including the past banning in Ireland of several of her works. O'Brien's attention to "women's" concerns such as sex, romance, marriage, and childbirth has often relegated her to critical neglect at best and, at worst, outright contempt. This essay collection...

Since the 1960 publication of her first novel, "The Country Girls," award-winning Irish writer Edna O'Brien has been both celebrated and maligned. Praised for her lyrical prose and vivid female characters and attacked for her frank treatment of sexuality and alleged sensationalism, O'Brien and her work seem always to spawn controversy, including the past banning in Ireland of several of her works. O'Brien's attention to "women's" concerns such as sex, romance, marriage, and childbirth has often relegated her to critical neglect at best and, at worst, outright contempt. This essay collection...

Opening a window into the most fascinating and, in many ways, most mysterious period in Christopher Isherwood's life, Kathleen and Christopher collects more than one hundred previously unpublished letters the young author wrote to his mother between 1935 and 1940. Composed while he was still a struggling writer, they offer a brilliant eyewitness account of Europe on the brink of war and an intimate look at the early career of a major literary figure.

Because Isherwood destroyed his diaries from these years, these letters--published for the first time and edited and introduced by Lisa...

Lisa Colletta uses psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humour to argue that dark humour is an important, defining characteristic of modernism. She brings together the usual suspects alongside more often overlooked writers and asks probing questions about the relationship between a dark humour that revels in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and resists easy definition and political usefulness and the historical and social circumstances of the period. Colletta makes the argument that probing deeply into the nature of humour or satire that define these social...

British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965 calls attention to the shifting grounds of cultural expression by highlighting Hollywood as a site that unsettled definitions and narratives of colonialism and national identity for prominent British novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and J.B. Priestley.

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection...

British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965 calls attention to the shifting grounds of cultural expression by highlighting Hollywood as a site that unsettled definitions and narratives of colonialism and national identity for prominent British novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and J.B. Priestley.