Dennis Walder – författare

'Sets out the London of the 1830s before you, streets, people, pleasures, low life, prisons' Claire TomalinCharles Dickens's first published book, Sketches by Boz is a funny and touching collection of observation, fancy and fiction showing the London he knew in all its complexity - its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons and, of course, the river Thames. His descriptions of everyday life and people seem to anticipate characters from his great novels - garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks, Scrooge-like bachelors - while his powers of social critique shine in his unflinching depictions of the city's forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes. This edition includes the original illustrations by George Cruikshank.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Dennis Walder

The four plays in this edition of Athol Fugard's best work are set among the people and in the place he knows most intimately - Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where he grew up. Each explores a close and tense family situation or relationship against the background of wider suffering and tensions, engaging our sympathies for South Africans of all races in their struggle to retain dignity and hope.

The five plays collected here offer a unique insight into the role of theatre in a situation of oppression. They were produced in close collaboration with their original black amateur casts, drawing on their lives and everyday experiences in the townships. They range from the early apprentice work of the brash but vital Sophiatown plays, No-Good Friday and Nongogo, to the freer, more urgent, and profound New Brighton plays, including the most famous Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island, and the previously unavailable The Coat.

Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Most historians point to the larger number of Union troops, for example, or the North''s greater industrial might. Now, in The South Vs. the South, one of America''s leading authorities on the Civil War era offers an entirely new answer to this question. William Freehling argues that anti-Confederate Southerners--specifically, border state whites and southern blacks--helped cost the Confederacy the war. White men in such border states as Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland, Freehling points out, were divided in their loyalties--but far more joined the Union army (or simply stayed home) than marched off in Confederate gray. If they had enlisted as rebel troops in the same proportion as white men did farther south, their numbers would have offset all the Confederate casualties during four years of war. In addition, when those states stayed loyal, the vast majority of the South''s urban population and industrial capacity remained in Union hands. And many forget, Freehling writes, that the slaves'' own decisions led to a series of white decisions (culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation) that turned federal forces into an army of liberation, depriving the South of labor and adding essential troops to the blue ranks. Whether revising our conception of slavery or of Abraham Lincoln, or establishing the antecedents of Martin Luther King, or analyzing Union military strategy, or uncovering new meanings in what is arguably America''s greatest piece of sculpture, Augustus St.-Gaudens'' Shaw Memorial, Freehling writes with piercing insight and rhetorical verve. Concise and provocative, The South Vs. the South will forever change the way we view the Civil War.

This text offers a unique combination of British, European, American and Post-Colonial perspectives on literary study from the 1920s to the present day. Carefully introduced and arranged to highlight the development of debates, it is designed to engage newcomers to the field with some of the main themes and issues that will concern them as readers of modern literary texts of all genres.The book provides material that is exciting, original, and above all accessible, rather than simply representative of a certain critical approach. It includes the views of leading critics such as Terry Eagleton, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Umberto Eco and Paul de Man, as well as the originating voices of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. In the second edition, there is an increased focus on questions of gender and identity and on recent debates, such as 'Literature and Nation' and 'Literature and Value'. The reach and relevance of the book has been extended, taking a more international voice, focusing on American and European writers and critics.

Print Culture in Southern Africa is concerned with the institutions and processes informing textual production, circulation and consumption in the region, over a broad historical period from the late 18th century to the present day. The book is organised around three closely related themes. Firstly, it presents original research into the formation of reading publics and the impact of reading cultures, by uncovering obscure but important reading communities and circuits of book distribution and reception. A second theme is the relationship between print and politics, with a particular focus on the networks of power: how control over the production and circulation of printed books has shaped literary and cultural development. The third theme is transnational print culture, and how the control exercised by publishers in Europe and America has shaped literature and society in southern Africa. Drawing together interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies, the collection encompasses a range of perspectives, including literary studies, anthropology, publishing studies, the history of the book and art history, and many of the chapters are based on previously unexamined archives and collections. The volume contributes to current debates and opens up new and exciting ways of furthering the study of postcolonial literature and African book history. The chapters included in this book were originally published in the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Print Culture in Southern Africa is concerned with the institutions and processes informing textual production, circulation and consumption in the region, over a broad historical period from the late 18th century to the present day. The book is organised around three closely related themes. Firstly, it presents original research into the formation of reading publics and the impact of reading cultures, by uncovering obscure but important reading communities and circuits of book distribution and reception. A second theme is the relationship between print and politics, with a particular focus on the networks of power: how control over the production and circulation of printed books has shaped literary and cultural development. The third theme is transnational print culture, and how the control exercised by publishers in Europe and America has shaped literature and society in southern Africa. Drawing together interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies, the collection encompasses a range of perspectives, including literary studies, anthropology, publishing studies, the history of the book and art history, and many of the chapters are based on previously unexamined archives and collections. The volume contributes to current debates and opens up new and exciting ways of furthering the study of postcolonial literature and African book history. The chapters included in this book were originally published in the Journal of Southern African Studies.

This book guides the student through the fundamentals of this enduring literary form. By using carefully selected novels and discussing a wide range of authors including Emily Dickinson and John Kincaid, the authors provide a lively examination of the particular themes and modes of realist novels of the period. This is the only book currently available to provide such a wide range of primary and secondary material and is the prefect resource for a literature degree.

This book guides the student through the fundamentals of this enduring literary form. By using carefully selected novels and discussing a wide range of authors including Emily Dickinson and John Kincaid, the authors provide a lively examination of the particular themes and modes of realist novels of the period. This is the only book currently available to provide such a wide range of primary and secondary material and is the prefect resource for a literature degree.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities provides an ideal starting point for understanding gender in the novels of this period. It explores the place of fiction in constructing gender identity within society at large, considering Madame Bovary, Portrait of a Lady and The Woman in White. The book continues with a consideration of the novel at the fin de siecle, examining Dracula, The Awakening and Heart of Darkness.These fascinating essays illuminate the ways in which the conventions of realism were disrupted as much by anxieties surrounding colonialism, decadence, degeneration and the 'New Woman' as by those new ideas about human psychology which heralded the advent of psychoanalysis.The concepts which are crucial to the understanding of the literature and society of the nineteenth century are brilliantly explained and discussed in this essential volume.

The importance of understanding Dickens's religion to obtain a full appreciation of his achievement has long been admitted; but this is the first critical study of the interaction between Dickens's religious beliefs and his creative imagination throughout his career. The novelist's religious beliefs are a pervasive and deeply felt presence in his works even if they are not always clearly thought out or expressed. Too discreet and humane to be as explicit, or as dull, as most of the professedly religious novelists of his time, Dickens nevertheless suggests in his own way a liberal Protestant belief, shot through with Romantic, transcendental yearnings, which undoubtedly appealed to a very wide range of readers. Dickens's religion is shown to be that of a great popular writer, who created a unique kind of fiction, and a unique relationship with his readers, by the absorption and transformation of less respectable contemporary forms, from fairy-tale and German romance to tract and print.Walder's thoroughly researched and lively book provides students of Dickens and the Victorian period with an original perspective on the novelist's methods and attitudes. He offers a judicious and informed exploration of Dickens's obsessive themes, from the 'fall' of innocence in Pickwick Papers, to the search for a religious 'answer' in Little Dorrit. Each chapter focuses upon the striking congruences revealed between individual novels, or groups of novels, and particular religious themes. The views expressed in Dickens's lesser fiction and non-fiction are drawn on throughout, as are those in the influential contemporary press.

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world, and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of "Bushman" song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world, and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of "Bushman" song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

In this original and accessible introduction to post-colonial literatures in English, Dennis Walder guides the reader through the historical, linguistic, and theoretical issues that inform post-colonial literary study.

Athol Fugard is widely recognised as one of the most important living dramatists, a total man of the theatre. Professor Walder's study asks how successfully the South African's dramatist's work continues the search for reconciliation and harmony in a country still haunted by its terrible past.

The importance of understanding Dickens's religion to obtain a full appreciation of his achievement has long been admitted; but this is the first critical study of the interaction between Dickens's religious beliefs and his creative imagination throughout his career. The novelist's religious beliefs are a pervasive and deeply felt presence in his works even if they are not always clearly thought out or expressed. Too discreet and humane to be as explicit, or as dull, as most of the professedly religious novelists of his time, Dickens nevertheless suggests in his own way a liberal Protestant belief, shot through with Romantic, transcendental yearnings, which undoubtedly appealed to a very wide range of readers. Dickens's religion is shown to be that of a great popular writer, who created a unique kind of fiction, and a unique relationship with his readers, by the absorption and transformation of less respectable contemporary forms, from fairy-tale and German romance to tract and print.Walder's thoroughly researched and lively book provides students of Dickens and the Victorian period with an original perspective on the novelist's methods and attitudes. He offers a judicious and informed exploration of Dickens's obsessive themes, from the 'fall' of innocence in Pickwick Papers, to the search for a religious 'answer' in Little Dorrit. Each chapter focuses upon the striking congruences revealed between individual novels, or groups of novels, and particular religious themes. The views expressed in Dickens's lesser fiction and non-fiction are drawn on throughout, as are those in the influential contemporary press.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities provides an ideal starting point for understanding gender in the novels of this period. It explores the place of fiction in constructing gender identity within society at large, considering Madame Bovary, Portrait of a Lady and The Woman in White. The book continues with a consideration of the novel at the fin de siecle, examining Dracula, The Awakening and Heart of Darkness. These fascinating essays illuminate the ways in which the conventions of realism were disrupted as much by anxieties surrounding colonialism, decadence, degeneration and the 'New Woman' as by those new ideas about human psychology which heralded the advent of psychoanalysis. The concepts which are crucial to the understanding of the literature and society of the nineteenth century are brilliantly explained and discussed in this essential volume.

Amid the Alien Corn is a vivid, stylishly written memoir that takes its narrator from the bewilderment of childhood and youth towards the unfolding of a mother’s secrets, long suspected from a pervasive sense of something missing at the heart of his family. The book charts the journey from personal and political disorientation in apartheid Cape Town to professional fulfilment in Britain, where the discovery of an identity framed by the author’s commitment to literary study prompts a quest to explore the relationship between the individual and their times. To understand the roots of his mother Ruth’s emotional detachment, the writer pursues the truth about a family entwined within the systems of oppression that devastated the lives of Black Africans and European Jews throughout the 20th century.