You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Spooner traces the emergence of the Gothic subculture over the past few decades and examines the various aspects of contemporary society that revolve around the grotesque, abject, and artificial.
If the post of Poet Laureate was allocated on the basis of popularity, Carol Ann Duffy would have been the first woman to hold this prestigious post. Like Philip Larkin in his day, Duffy is both a poet respected by many academics and teachers, and widely read and enjoyed by children and adult readers of poetry. This is the first full-length collection of essays on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, approaching and exploring her work from a variety of literary theoretical perspectives, including feminism, masculinity, national identity, and post-structuralism. This lively anthology situates Duffy's poems in relation to current debates about the state, value and social relevance of contemporary British poetry.
For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last years Iris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values. But what has been missing from biographical accounts has been Murdoch's own voice—her life in her own words. Living on Paper—the first major collection of Murdoch's most compelling and interesting personal letters—gives, for the first time, a rounded self-portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers. With more than 760 letters, fewer than forty of which have been published before, the book provides a unique chronicle of Murdoch's lif...
European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960 sets out to challenge the tyranny of the Anglo-American narratives that have dominated critical histories of the Gothic so far. It argues that the Gothic novel did not simply derive from The Castle of Otranto, but that it has been forged in the crucible of translation. Focussing on Gothic writing in English, French, German, Russian and Spanish, the collection charts a rich process of cross-fertilization and, in particular, examines the importance of Anglo-French exchanges in the development of the Gothic novel within Europe and, subsequently, the US.
Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination is the first full-length evaluation of du Maurier's fiction and the first critical study of du Maurier as a Gothic writer. Horner and Zlosnik argue that the fears at the heart of du Maurier's Gothic fictions reflect both personal and broader cultural anxieties concerning sexual and social identity. Using the most recent work in Gothic and gender studies they enter the current debate on the nature of Female Gothic and raise questions about du Maurier's relationship to such a tradition.
This biography of Barbara Comyns reveals a twentieth-century author whose life was as extraordinary as her novels. Hundreds of unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose complicated life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society.
This volume contributes to the vibrant, ongoing recuperative work on women’s writing by shedding new light on a group of authors commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ – coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’ – locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst also forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths that have traditionally overshadowed them. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing in its own right, this volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, cl...
Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. Two time World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels capture the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world’s largest crime scene in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, and Patrick McGrath—all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the Gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, Olson shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, love, memory, sex, and suicidal urges. This book also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in the fiction of catastrophe from the early twenty-first century.
The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch’s novels – chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) – which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch’s philosophical writings, Weinberger’s private wr...
What happened after Mr. Darcy married Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice? Where did Heathcliff go when he disappeared in Wuthering Heights? What social ostracism would Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter have faced in 20th century America? Great novels often leave behind great questions, and sequels seek to answer them. This critical analysis offers fresh insights into the sequels to seven literary classics, including Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the Bronte sisters' Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.