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"Naked Lunch" was banned, castigated, and recognized as a work of genius on its first publication in 1959, and fifty years later it has lost nothing of its power to astonish, shock, and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, it is the Black Book of the Beat Generation, the forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture, and a progenitor of postmodernism and the digital age. A work of excoriating laughter, linguistic derangement, and transcendent beauty, it remains both influential and inimitable.This is the first book devoted in its entirety to William Burroughs masterpiece, bringing together an international array of scholars, artists, musicians, ...
Theories of authorship and material culture provide the framework for this study. It maps Anglo-American authorship as it shifts from a theoretical to a more material approach to its study in contexts recognized as key to its development: the nineteenth-century literary market-place, twentieth-century experimentalism and postmodern culture.
A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.
Edmund Burke prided himself on being a practical statesman, not an armchair philosopher. Yet his responses to specific problems - rebellion in America, the abuse of power in India and Ireland, or revolution in France - incorporated theoretical debates within jurisprudence, economics, religion, moral philosophy and political science. Moreover, the extraordinary rhetorical force of Burke's speeches and writings quickly secured his reputation as a gifted orator and literary stylist. This Companion provides a comprehensive assessment of Burke's thought, exploring all his major writings from his early treatise on aesthetics to his famous polemic, Reflections on the Revolution in France. It also examines the vexed question of Burke's Irishness and seeks to determine how his cultural origins may have influenced his political views. Finally, it aims both to explain and to challenge interpretations of Burke as a romantic, a utilitarian, a natural law thinker and founding father of modern conservatism.
This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women’s writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women’s writing and women’s experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and berea...
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the earliest and most influential works in the western historiographical tradition. It provides an unfinished account of the war between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her allies which lasted from 431 to 404 BC, and is a masterpiece of narrative art and of political analysis. The twenty chapters in this Companion offer a wide range of perspectives on different aspects of the text, its interpretation and its significance. The nature of the text is explored in detail, and problems of Thucydides' historical and literary methodology are examined. Other chapters analyse the ways in which Thucydides' work illuminates, or complicates, our understanding of key historical questions for this period, above all those relating to the nature and conduct of war, politics, and empire. Finally, the book also explores the continuing legacy of Thucydides, from antiquity to the present day.
This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.
The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a pa...
The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.
Each generation revises literary history and this is nowhere more evident than in the post-Second World War period. This 2011 Companion offers a comprehensive, authoritative and accessible overview of the diversity of American fiction since the Second World War. Essays by nineteen distinguished scholars provide critical insights into the significant genres, historical contexts, cultural diversity and major authors during a period of enormous American global political and cultural power. This power is overshadowed, nevertheless, by national anxieties growing out of events ranging from the Civil Rights Movement to the rise of feminism; from the Cold War and its fear of Communism and nuclear warfare to the Age of Terror and its different yet related fears of the 'Other'. American fiction since 1945 has faithfully chronicled these anxieties. An essential reference guide, this Companion provides a chronology of the period, as well as guides to further reading.