The literary canon of World War 1 - celebrated for realising the experience of an entire generation - ignores writing by women. To the sorrows that war has always brought them - the loss of husbands, lovers, brothers - the Great War added a revolutionary knowledge. And all the time they wrote - letters, poetry, novels, short stories, memoirs. This volume of mutually reflective essays brings this writing into literary focus and ensures that women's recent history and literature are neither forgotten nor undervalued.

The nine essays in this volume make significant contributions to the development of contemporary literary theory and demonstrate how a range of new approaches can be applied to modern British drama. In addressing the questions of power, subjectivity, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and the nature of the dramatic text, the contributors reveal how much modern drama can be re-read to discover its radically subversive characteristics. Their conclusions challenge accepted interpretations and suggest major revisions of the processes of understanding and staging drama.

This book contains a lively and wide ranging collection of critical essays on Black women's writing from Afro-American, African, South African, British and Caribbean novelists, poets, short story writers and a dramatist. The contributors are black and white, female and male, academics and readers who chart their engagement with and enjoyment of the texts of some of the key figures in black women's writing across several continents.

The book takes as its theme the relationship between literature and the contemporary means of production and distribution collectively termed 'the media' - in particular, film and television. The intention of the book is to explore and evaluate the mutual opportunities and restrictions in this relationship. In the grammar of our culture there seems to be an accepted opinion that print is superior in terms of cultural production to film, radio or television, that to read a book is somehow a 'higher' cultural activity than seeing a play on television or seeing a film. By the same token, a novel...

This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on a genre which has remained popular for nearly two hundred years: American horror fiction. There are essays on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P.Lovecraft, William Faulkner, Robert Bloch, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Suzy McKee Charnas, covering the period from 1798 to 1983. Each essay deals with a major figure in the genre, from Gothic orginators to modern feminist reworkings. A variety of reading strategies are employed to interrogate these texts, with feminist and psychoanalytic approaches well...

Children's literature is increasingly exposed to critical debate in England and America. There are indeed a number of histories and surveys of children's literature, but few works exist which discuss the contexts, ideologies and narrative structures of children's stories in a serious and detailed manner, or examine particular case-histories to see how the different forces interact. This is what this collection of essays attempts to do. The topics range from Little Women to Winnie the Pooh and from story forms such as 'The Adventure Story' to 'Fantasy'.

This book contains a lively and wide ranging collection of critical essays on Black women's writing from Afro-American, African, South African, British and Caribbean novelists, poets, short story writers and a dramatist. The contributors are black and white, female and male, academics and readers who chart their engagement with and enjoyment of the texts of some of the key figures in black women's writing across several continents.

This volume examines the dynamics and control of organized and corporate crime in their national and international contexts. Global developments since the Second World War have combined to produce social, economic and political environments which have increased both the profitability and destructive impact of systematic illegal activity. These articles challenge the simplistic assumption that crime is caused by bad individuals, acting alone or conspiring together, and that crime can be adequately dealt with by increasing conventional police activity. This assumption does not square with the...

The book surveys medieval literature from both a critical and an historical standpoint. Medieval literature is increasingly seen as an area of intense specialism which is to be treated differently from other areas of English Studies. The essays collected here try to overturn this perception in two ways. Firstly, there is a demonstration of the ways in which modern critical approaches and perspectives work with the medieval text. Secondly, the idea of the medieval is shown, historically, to be a discourse which has been given different symbolic values and served different social purposes.