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Subject Area: Literature - Twentieth Century
Bykau, Vasil2010 0-7734-3813-0 364 pages
This book is one of few works by a Soviet writer that provides an honest portrayal of the life of a Soviet foot soldier on the Eastern front in World War II. Aside from the brilliant depiction of life at the front, it reveals how members of Stalin’s secret police transformed themselves into war heroes and began to resurrect Stalinism, following the War. Understandably, Bykau’s novel was res non grata and not published in its entirety until after the demise of the Soviet Union.
Wegener, Larry Edward
2015 0-7734-4264-2 332 pages
Flota, Brian
2009 0-7734-3828-9 344 pages
This work examines how writers in the San Francisco Bay Area worked to develop a multiculturalist American literature. This study counteracts popular narratives of multiculturalism’s boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s by showing that a large group of culturally eclectic writers in the Bay Area were re-envisioning American identity through a multiculturalist looking glass many years earlier.
Mead, David G.
2002 0-7734-7224-X 384 pages
Jack Vance is widely regarded as one of the great writers of imaginative literature of the 20th century. For over 50 years, readers have been enthralled by the richness and exoticism of his imagined worlds. This encyclopedia lists and defines all the people, places, and things invented by Jack Vance for his fiction in English. It provides a ready reference for scholars working with the critical literature on Vance, and makes it possible for readers and critics to identify and locate details in stories that are out-of-print or unavailable, as well as providing a wealth of data for scholars interested in the working of Vance’s creative imagination. The Encyclopedia contains more than 15,600 terms from Vance’s science fiction, fantasy, and detective-adventure riction, and excludes only the work written by Vance as “Ellery Queen.”
Hidalgo-Calle, Lola
2024 1-4599-1295-9 158 pages
With this second book we are pleased to introduce four Spanish women writers of the twenty-first century. Each of the authors from this select group is currently writing and publishing in Spain. Here we present a selection of their works in Spanish and translated into English. It also should be mentioned that these writers also publish in a variety of genres such as novel, poetry, essay and drama.
McDermott, James Dishon
2006 0-7734-5899-9 168 pages
Throughout literary history, committed writers have sought to rebuke the inauthenticity of excessively ‘full’ discourses by deploying a minimalist literary style. In their texts, these literary minimalists substitute absence for those linguistic structures that are critical to the authority and integrity of the full text. In the postmodern period specifically, writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver, and David Mamet have used this literary style of contextualized fearlessness as a means of criticizing and reforming philosophical, literary, social, or political practices perceived to be inauthentic by virtue of their wasteful foundationalism. Rather than merely diverting or reassuring the reader, each writer seeks to create edifying texts that not only raise doubts about essentialist platitudes but also alert the reader to the possibility of authentic self-transformation through a reckoning with contingency. In using an austere style to challenge a set of foundationalist discursive practices, Wittgenstein addresses metaphysical philosophy and its claims to logocentric Truth; Brautigan, the discourses of Beat writing and Abstract Expressionism and their claims to noncontingent selfhood; Carver, Reaganite propaganda and its claims to essentialist community; and Mamet, mass-media entertainment and its claims to cultural hegemony.
Chowdhury, Purna
2007 0-7734-5347-4 348 pages
This work is about the narration of nation in the novels of Salman Rushdie and in post-Rushdie Indo-English fiction. It is an attempt to evaluate the articulation of national identity in these narratives as part of their endeavor to forge a postcolonial rupture with colonial history. While the tradition tries to retrieve its right to narrate its own story, the deep contradiction at the heart of these narratives is expressed in their conventions by which the “native” makes his reappearance in the postcolonial context and versions of nation often emerge as the underbelly of their colonial counterparts. While such projections of national identity may be a part of the still continuing colonial cultural legacy, the literary and academic success of such “exotic” ventures play no less significant a role in the production and proliferation of these narratives, mostly published in the West.
Boon, Kevin A.
1997 0-7734-8553-8 200 pages
This volume presents the principles articulated in chaos theory as rewarding methods for examining literature. The first section examines the shift from modernism to postmodernism, dating the transition to the bombing of Hiroshima. The second section redefines anterior definitions of chaos and functions as an introduction to the fundamental tenets of chaos theory. The third section deploys chaos theory as a critical approach in its examination of Vonnegut's fiction, resolving a recurrent paradox in existing Vonnegut scholarship: how a body of fiction that repeatedly focuses on death camps, unjust prosecutions, vicious and elitist ideological practices, war, greed, futility, and failure, can remain affirmative.
Lewis, Leon
2002 0-7734-7310-6 188 pages
This is the first full-length critical study of an unusually versatile and accomplished author, discussing at length all the most ambitious novels of William Kotzwinkle. In addition to individual analytical examinations of his most prominent work, including The Fan Man and his exceptionally successful adaptation of the film E. T. The study identifies patterns of coherence, recurring themes and subjects, and strategies of comic invention. “If the critical void concerning the career and writings of contemporary author William Kotzwinkle has been inadequately noted, Leon Lewis’s study demonstrates that such attention is overdue. His book goes far toward filling this void, and it should inspire further research into this author’s significant work. . .in a worthy display of the uses of criticism, Lewis briskly and judiciously assumes the promotional role renounced by Kotzwinkle, highlighting the author’s accomplishments and identifying themes, issues, and images that unify his diverse productions into a consistent and conscientious career. . . . Lewis draws delightful examples especially from his subject’s comic writing, and his critical style often enlarges, combines, or riffs on these examples in the style of a humorous yet helpful kindred spirit. . . . Lewis crafts a field of reference as fresh as it is serious, ranging from Rimbaud to Rambo, from the high-cultural icons of Joyce, Valery, Cocteau, and Davenport to Hollywood’s Aliens and a redemptive review of Kotzwinkle’s characterization of Clark Kent ( in his screenplay for Superman III) as ‘everyklutz’. Lewis’s prose is vigorous yet measured, shifting from essential quotation to characteristic paraphrase and commentary, without the theoretical clutter that in many similar studies distracts from the textual subject. . . . This confluence of primary texts, authorial commentary, contemporary review, and a willingness to acknowledge yet question critical assumptions makes Lewis’s ground-breaking study a conscientious foundation on which future scholarship will build.” – Craig White
Walker, Sue Brannan
2013 0-7734-4499-8 296 pages
An intelligent and provocative study exploring how the dynamic between nature and humanity animates many of Dickey’s major works. Its aim is to show the ways in which Dickey seeks to understand how it is possible for beings “to be” and what this means in terms of self-realization. This intelligent study makes a major contribution to our understanding of a major poet and helps us to see James Dickey’s poetic and fictional corpus in an entirely new light.
El-Meligi, Eman
2015 1-4955-0290-2 244 pages
This book analyzes how Edward Said’s critical and cultural theory, together with his practical criticism, dismantles the Myth of the Authenticity of canonical, Orientalist and imperialist discourse. Said’s interdisciplinary informs the multiple approaches of this present study. Therefore, the first chapter uses the theoretical and critical, while the second tends to use the textual, biographical and hermeneutical. The third chapter focuses on the historical, as related to phenomenological hermeneutics. Indeed the three chapters, like Said’s work, attempt to employ postcolonial notions and poststructuralist techniques, necessary for “deconstructing” the myth of authenticity of Western discourse and for offering a counter-narrative. The fourth and fifth chapters of this book lend themselves to cultural studies, exactly as Said did in the books discussed in these chapters.
To dismantle the Myth of Authenticity, Edward Said consecutively tackles five interrelated epistemological fields related to imperialism: literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, the media, and ideology and politics. The first two interrelated aspects, researched in the first and second chapters of this book, underline works like The Letters and Shorter Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1964) Beginnings (1975), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994). Cultural Studies is crystallized in his seminal work Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), a work accredited by various critics to have inaugurated the whole field of postcolonial studies. His achievement is highlighted in the third chapter of this book. Said extends his search afterwards from critical theory and literary texts and travelogues to the media, as in his Covering Islam (1981), discussed in Chapter Four of this study. This naturally leads Said to focusing on the ideological and political aspects in, for instance, The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), The End of the Peace Process (2000) and Culture and Resistance (2003). This aspect is surveyed in Chapter Five, which also links ideology and politics to hybridity and harmony as the only alternative, as is clear in his Parallels and Paradoxes (2002) and Freud and the Non-European (2003).
García-Corales, Guillermo
2008 0-7734-5189-7 188 pages
This study examines the detective narrative of Ramón Díaz Eterovic with a particular emphasis on his novels published between 2001 and 2007. The book proposes an original and relevant analysis of Díaz Eterovic’s literary work by positing that his novels confront the dominant discourses of culture, politics, and histiography through the integration of the hard-boiled and so-called social novel. The result is a critical look at Chile’s democratic transition in the post-dictatorial era (1990-2007).
Mead, David G.
2002 0-7734-7313-0 486 pages
Jack Vance is widely regarded as one of the great writers of imaginative literature of the 20th century. For over 50 years, readers have been enthralled by the richness and exoticism of his imagined worlds. This encyclopedia lists and defines all the people, places, and things invented by Jack Vance for his fiction in English. It provides a ready reference for scholars working with the critical literature on Vance, and makes it possible for readers and critics to identify and locate details in stories that are out-of-print or unavailable, as well as providing a wealth of data for scholars interested in the working of Vance’s creative imagination. The Encyclopedia contains more than 15,600 terms from Vance’s science fiction, fantasy, and detective-adventure riction, and excludes only the work written by Vance as “Ellery Queen.”
Mead, David G.
2002 0-7734-7222-3 172 pages
García, Hugo Valenzuela
2009 0-7734-4676-1 376 pages
This is the first ethnographical work on Malaysia written in the Spanish-speaking world, and one of the few contributions to the study of the culture and economy of Southeast Asia made in Spain. It makes at this point a relevant contribution to the understanding of the process of underdevelopment and the interconnection between policy and economy in a context of unequal, highly competitive, ethnic and intra-ethnic relationships. In Spanish.
Marsh, David
2014 0-7734-4507-2 276 pages
This book identifies the historical and social context of the experience of exile and the degree to which the condition of being exiled influenced literary production of those forced to undergo it.
A fascinating study examining how the legal governmental policy of “exile” can act as a catalyst in the transformation of the person ‘exiled’ from martyr to hero and how the exile process becomes the social –historical instrument that inspires the creative writing of great Italian masterpieces in poetry, rhetoric and philosophy.
Coates, John
2002 0-7734-7096-4 216 pages
Explores the link between G.K. Chesterton's style and characteristic arguments and the political, ideological and artistic changes of the early twentieth century which continue to shape our lives. The complex effects of the Modernist Revolution and conflicts within Liberalism found in Chesterton and attentive and highly intelligent observer, able to perceive and diagnose the coming crisis.
Murphy, Robin M.
2010 0-7734-3695-2 180 pages
This study explores classic rhetorical traditions and modern composition pedagogies that best suit post-9/11 students. This work utilizes concrete examples and includes a guide for instructors on bringing cultural artifacts into their writing classrooms. This work will appeal to scholars in Pedagogy, New Media, and Literacy Studies as well as Composition and Rhetoric.
Levitt, Annette Shandler
1993 0-7734-9353-0 186 pages
An understanding of the novel's multiple intertexts (Blake, other artists, socio-political and feminist issues), as well as its interdisciplinary approach and sophisticated narrative technique make possible a totally new reading of The Horse's Mouth and a recognition of it as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, while revealing Intertextuality as perhaps the most meaningful approach to literature today. Material from the Osborn Collection of Joyce Cary Manuscripts (included as an appendix) clarify his working process and choice of intertexts.
Tenenbaum, David
2009 0-7734-4700-8 264 pages
This study addresses the changes in literary depictions of remorse fostered by modernist literature’s response to normative ethical standards. Certain twentieth-century authors believed that the High Modern Period demanded a reconsideration of how individuals may hope to achieve the same social responsibility dictated by traditional values in light of a greater awareness of fundamental human impulses.
Koski, Raija
1992 0-7734-1968-3 420 pages
This volume is a carefully chosen collection of texts which are theoretical, poetic, analytical, and critical. The voices of creative writers, professional translators and university scholars offer a range of perspectives on contemporary Quebec women writers. In the light of postmodernism, their texts offer readings, appreciations and celebrations of new and experimental writing in the feminine from Quebec over the past thirty years. In addition, the bibliography brings together a wealth of information on these writers. In French.Les discours féminins . . . examine la problématique et les fruits de la jonction, dans un contexte spécifiquement québécois, des deux grands mouvements sociaux, théoriques et littéraires d'aujourd'hui: le féminisme, et le postmodernisme. Le livre fait entendre les voix émouvantes et étonnantes de Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Daphne Marlatt et France Théoret, et fait lire les textes de quatorze spécialistes de la littérature québécoise dont Janet Paterson, Karen Gould, Louise Forsyth, Lori Saint-Martin. Les auteur-e-s du livre nous offrent l'étude de l'oeuvre d'une ou de plusieurs écrivaines ou écrivains; elles s'intéressent aux genres littéraires et à la traduction; elles se penchent sur la question épineuse de la théorie dans l'émergence d'une littérature et d'une culture au féminin, et aussi sur les significations problématiques des termes "féminisme" et "postmodernisme". Ce livre représente un état présent de la plus grande pertinence et utilité, une exploration collective, sous plusieurs perspectives, d'une problématique complexe et tout à fait actuelle.
James, Meredith K.
2005 0-7734-6198-1 116 pages
This study explores the importance of the literary “reservation of the mind” in twentieth century native American literature. The book examines the contradictory nature of what the literary reservation space means primarily in the works of Sherman Alexie, but also includes discussions of works by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. Authors often recreate reservation space in positive ways, so their characters are able to survive colonial imposition and administration. The book deals with how Native authors reconcile fragmented identities with the landscape, and how damaging perceptions and policies regarding Native peoples have contributed to the “reservation of the mind.”
Quinn-Sánchez, Kathryn
2006 0-7734-5887-5 216 pages
This study demonstrates how the original, exclusive portrayals of the “ideal” nation and its “ideal” citizens are carried into the Post-Revolutionary era, whereby, authors such as Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Samuel Ramos, Rodolfo Usigli, and Xavier Villaurrutia view their society as a system that has segregated rather than unified individuals into one nation. Hence, the State’s legitimacy and authority to imagine what is considered “the ideal” is questioned explicitly, as is the authenticity of its foundational imaginings. The book responds directly to Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions (1991). While Sommer’s premise equates the writing of the romantic union of lovers from different backgrounds to the eventual success of the nation, this work exploits and expands the interdependent relationships between ideology, literature and the Mexican State that essentially guaranteed the failure of successful nation building. Moreover, this text exposes this failure through analyzing how twentieth-century Mexican authors and their works reject and contest the positivist legacy of the original foundational fictions.
Francisco, Edward
2016 1-4955-0479-4 356 pages
The literary relationship of physicians Robert Coles and Walker Percy may be one of the most important connections in the history of modern American letters. This book not only captures a friendship or union of like minds, but it synthesizes approaches pointing to a new science of “thirdness,” one accounting for the triadic nature of human beings as sign maker-receivers. The book advances both man’s quest to locate a science capable of uniting fields of knowledge and reconciling Cartesian dualism. And understanding how their orientations toward language and being combined to provide the blueprint for constructing a science of semiotic, or sign making, subsuming all science.
Buehrer, David
2014 0-7734-0060-5 240 pages
A new look at presenting the psycho-social complexes that drive the fictional characters’ sense of selfhood in the works of Banks, Johnson and Crews. These contemporary American writers seek to restore a humanistic viewpoint to such figures in an age of “post-human” devolution of identity.
Erickson, Leslie Goss
2006 0-7734-5911-1 260 pages
This study explores the concept of every man and every woman as hero. Using three models of the heroic journey, this book identifies and delineates female and male heroes in a variety of works and genres of postmodern American culture. Joseph Campbell’s thesis as set forth in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) maintains that regardless of manifestation, the heroic journey is one core myth describing venturing human beings as they progress through levels of consciousness to individuation, self-actualization, and enlightenment. Exploring that assertion, the study also uses two post-Campbell models, Carol S. Pearson’s archetypal model The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By (1986) and Susan A. Lichtman’s gender specific model, Life Stages of Woman’s Heroic Journey: A Study of the Origins of the Great Goddess Archetype (1991). These theories are applied to twentieth-century works from various cultures – Latin American, African American, and Anglo-American – and various genres – literature, film and drama. This work will appeal to scholars in a variety of areas including those researching identity, psychological development, and consciousness evolution in literary characters and how that development is influenced by the cultures and systems within which those characters live.
Powrie, Phil
1997 0-7734-8580-5 100 pages
Translation (with introduction and bibliography) of René Daumal's two short stories, written in 1925-26. Mugle is written automatically in the style of the surrealists. The text's interest is twofold: it is a cluster of intertexts, paraded and parodied, grouped into two major areas. First, the urban perambulation which combines Lautréamont and the surrealists and a philosophico-religious cluster combining Bernanos and an eclectic reworking of major philosophers. Second, the text is a rigorous philosophical allegory of liberation, predicated on the struggle of consciousness to free itself, related to Daumal's 'fundamental experiment' with the drug carbon tetrachloride. The stories are allegories of self-destruction and self-destructing writing.
Parker, Juli L.
2011 0-7734-1458-4 444 pages
This collection examines the meaning, construction and deconstruction of the murdering woman. These essays suggest that the ways in which gender, race, class and sexuality play into representations of women murderers is key to understanding the patriarchal underpinnings of our judicial system as they apply to women criminals.
Tulloch, Hugh
2000 0-7734-7483-8 360 pages
This study takes six interwar commentators – Aldous Huxley, Dennis Brogan, J. M. Keynes, Harold Laski, Bertrand Russell, and D. H. Lawrence – and deploys a variety of methodologies (political science, law, philosophy, economics, fiction and literary criticism). It seeks both to shed light on the intellectual ambience of the period while, simultaneously, depicting America itself as it was interpreted by these six visitors.
Chiappini, Ligia
2012 0-7734-3953-6 456 pages
This collection of centenary conference essays examines and analyzes the literature of João Guimarães Rosa and his impact on literature.
El-Meligi, Eman
2012 0-7734-3047-4 360 pages
This book compares the literary styles of two authors from vastly different cultural and national heritages. Tawfiq Al-Hakim is an Egyptian and V.S. Naipaul is from Trinidad. The cultures are different but their literary techniques bear an affinity to one another. The author showcases how cultural differences are depicted in these novels, while also revealing a shared set of literary conventions utilized by these talented authors. Both draw on mythology and Jungian archetypes which are fertile ground for critical analysis that juxtapose them.
Azouqa, Aida O.
2019 1-4955-0718-1 248 pages
While Adaptations register the Arabian Nights' resiliency to fit numerous literary modes, the book demonstrates that understanding the spirit of their hypertext has merited their magical realist novels in achieving their fictional purposes. Accordingly, the novels examined in this book use the varied elements of the Arabian Nights to break away from conventions of realism. The categories of the Arabian Nights in general, and its marvelous in particular, invariably suggests that novelists used to them either to subvert the discourses of colonial archives of discovery, or the transgression of institutionalized censorship.
O'Brien, Eugene
1998 0-7734-8237-7 300 pages
This study seeks to redefine the notions of Irishness and of Irish identity which have been current in cultural and socio-political discourse since the beginning of this century, and secondly, it offers readings of the work of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce which demonstrate their similar negative epistemologies of identity. It is part of the work’s argument that cultural and aesthetic writings have seminal influences on the political infrastructure of the modern nation, and so the book analyzes the political import of cultural and literary movements. In what is possibly the first such project in terms of Irish studies, it offers a critique of essentialist and foundationalist views of Irishness as Gaelic, Catholic, and nationalist, through the application of the theoretical writings of Theodore Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. Given the current conflicts of identity in Northern Ireland, this is a timely study which sheds light on the mindsets which create mutually exclusive notions of identity.
Kazak, Ihar [Igor Gregory Kozak]
2021 1-4955-0834-X 156 pages
Dr. Kozak collects 13 short humorous stories by Russian author, Arkady Averchenko. They make light of the sad and hard conditions of post World War I Europe and Russia.
McCarthy, Kevin M.
1996 0-7734-8902-9 260 pages
This work profiles 14 important writers who live in and write about the state of Florida. The five novelists, four historians, three environmentalists, and two folklorists have made important contributions to twentieth-century literature and have written extensively about the state. This book of profiles was based on extensive interviews with each writer, with a careful analysis of their written work, and with professional reviews by others in their fields. The result is the first in-depth analysis of this complete group, an important contribution to regional literature. Writers examined: E.W. Carswell, Harry Crews, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Hampton Dunn, David Kaufelt, Stetson Kennedy, Eugene Lyon, Richard Powell, Jack Rudloe, Marjory Bartlett Sanger, Herrell Shofner, Frank Slaughter, Patrick Smith, Charlton Tebeau.
Alexander, J.H.
1976 0-7734-0281-0 235 pages
Stunkel, Kenneth R.
2003 0-7734-6558-8 312 pages
This monograph provides a readable exposition of Lewis Mumford’s views on dozens of issues with continuous, selective reference to his published works. Mumford produced more than 30 books and 3000 articles from 1914 to 1982. Added to this vast corpus are the many books and articles about him in multiple languages. This study elucidates his thoughts about history and its meaning, human nature and its development, science and technology, cities and their culture, art and architecture, and more. It highlights his ideas while integrating Mumford’s words into the exposition, providing an intellectual map. An Appendix includes a personal memoir of the author’s meetings with Mumford.
Ryder, Mary Ruth
1990 0-88946-113-9 312 pages
Reveals the full import of Cather's translation of classical myths into her own time and place
Byron, Kristine A.
2007 0-7734-5367-9 316 pages
This book considers issues of gender and representation through an analysis of twentieth-century female revolutionary figures from Ireland, Spain, Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Since revolutions (and their siblings—civil wars) occasion social transformation under often chaotic conditions, they open up space for the potential transformation of gender relations. These women’s life writings illustrate gender relations in flux, expose the political symbolism of the strong woman at moments of nation formation and transformation, and display the multiple ways that gender enters into literary, historical, and visual narratives.
Tylee, Claire
2000 0-7734-7455-2 300 pages
Part of the significance of this collection of essays comes from its geographical and historical spread: it ranges globally across drama from France, Germany and Australia as well as UK and USA, and it demonstrates the continuing effects of the war o the cultural memories of the disparate nations involved, including Ireland, Germany, Canada and Scotland at the end of the 20th century. It not only makes available original historical research, the results of delving in the police censorship archives in Paris and in the Birmingham Reference Library’s Great War collection, it also demonstrates the fruitfulness of carious critical approaches.