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Provides an examination of the American dream in classic literary works.
Some of the greatest works of literature have wrestled with the task of illuminating the human experience of death. This new title discusses the role of death and dying in works such as Beloved, A Farewell to Arms, Lord of the Flies, Paradise Lost, and many others. Featuring approximately 20 essays, Death and Dying provides valuable insights on this recurring theme in literature.
The hero's journey, a quest that leads to self-discovery, has been central to literature since the earliest epics. Covering the role of the hero's journey in Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, Moby-Dick, and To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hero's Journey contains about 20 original and reprinted essays and critical analyses that discuss the role of the title's subject theme in a great work of literature.
Twenty essays examine the themes of exploration and colonization in literature, including works such as "The Iliad" and "Things Fall Apart."
Pat Barker is one of the most important authors of her time. Her fiction has won many awards – including the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the last novel in her celebrated Regeneration trilogy – and has attracted much critical attention. This stimulating Guide examines the key critical responses to the full range of Barker's fiction, from newspaper reviews and journal articles to revealing interviews and book-length scholarship. Merritt Moseley also explores the central themes which run through Barker's novels and the criticism, such as the issues of gender, class, social realism, violence and trauma. Tracing the development of Barker's fiction through the surrounding critical works, this is an indispensable volume for anyone with an interest in one of Britain's most popular and widely-studied contemporary writers.
In this book, Merritt Moseley offers a brief history of the Booker Prize since 1992. With a short chapter covering each year, we follow the change in criteria, the highs and lows, short lists, winners, and controversies of the Booker Prize. The book also functions as an example of literary criticism for each of the books involved, analyzing the judging process and the winning books. Exploring themes such as literary vs. popular fiction, the role of Postcolonial work in what began as a very "British" prize, the role of marketing, publishing, and the Booker organization itself, the book offers a crucial view into literary prize culture. The book spends time looking at exclusions, as well as the overall role and function of the literary prize. What books aren’t included and why? Why has the Booker become so significant? This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in, or studying, contemporary literature, literary prizes, literary culture and British literature, as well as publishing studies.
Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Global in scope, the book takes in everything from: * the latest 'Indo-chic' to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series * from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system *from Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian 'tourist novels'. This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.
"In this introduction to prolific British novelist Beryl Bainbridge, Brett Josef Grubisic provides a biographical sketch of the writer, discussion of her motivations and techniques, and a detailed survey of her fiction that places the works in the traditions of British black comedy, social novels, and historical fiction. In approaching her works, Grubisic maps Bainbridge's movement from social to historical novels, beginning with the comic historicism of Young Adolf and continuing to her most recent fiction, The Birthday Boys, Every Man for Himself, Master Georgie, and According to Queeney. Grubisic holds that in portraying historical events through a variety of narrative techniques or from oblique vantage points, Bainbridge's latest novels partially ally themselves with the style and ideological concerns of literary postmodernism while still recalling the defining view of hardship established in her youth."--BOOK JACKET.
The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within exami...
The Campus Novel – Regional or Global? presents innovative scholarship in the field of academic fiction. Whereas the campus novel is traditionally considered a product of the Anglo-American world, the present study opens a new perspective: it elucidates the intercultural exchange between the well-established Western canon of British and American academic fiction and its more recent regional response outside the Anglo-American territory.