Contributions to the Study of World Literature – serie

In the growing field of children's literature theory in criticism, this volume presents critical international perspectives on changes and innovation in this discipline. The recent new status of children's literature, and the growth in children's literature research internationally have led to exciting advances in both form and content. This collection comprises a selection of papers given by prominent experts. Reflecting on past decades, contributors trace and analyze important developments in children's literature as the dawn of a new millennium offers its readers a multitude of representations and responses to a changing world.Each of the book's eighteen chapters represents a unique aspect of children's literature theory. Topics range from an analysis of the children's literature as creative act, changing interpretations of different genres, and the impact of shifting race relations and socio-political developments on children's literature. This presentation of international perspectives on children's literature theory and criticism by leading authorities will be a valuable resource for scholars of children's and comparative literature.

Abba Rubin explores the relationship between the history of a minority--the English Jew--and its depiction in literature. He begins with an historical investigation of the composition of the Jewish community at the time of the Jews' return to England in 1660 and the differing conditions in London and in the provinces. Rubin looks at the relationship between the English Jew and his Christian countryman. Subsequent chapters examine the depiction of the Jew in English literature from the Restoration to the 1830s.

Ross Shideler offers an in-depth introduction to the works of Per Olov Enquist and discusses the writer's central themes and the imagery and motifs he uses to develop them. This in-depth study begins with a brief introduction to the social and literary backgrounds that are the foundations for Enquist's writing. His work is presented in chronological fashion beginning with his early psychological novels written in the tradition of the French nouveau roman and proceeding to his highly regarded documentary novels and popular plays. Shideler traces Enquist's fascination with modern man's isolation and his attempt to find connections in history to explain the dilemma. Other psychological, social, and political themes are examined and analyzed in this first critical study concentrating entirely on Enquist's work.

In twenty-eight essays, Frey and Griffith, members of the English faculty at the University of Washington, examine many of the traditional and new children's classics. The authors explore the relationship between the writer's lives and the stories they tell. Purposes and literary techniques are also discussed. Each essay provides the reader with the authors' answers to the question: What special qualities make this book a classic? Fairy and folk tales and fantasy; works by Dickens, Craig, Collodi, Alcott, Twain, Kipling, Potter, Wilder; and poetry of Lear and Stevenson are included. Teachers of children's literature will find these essays useful for helping students understand the characteristics of the classic literature of childhood. The book is recommended for college and university libraries and for large and medium-sized public library collections. The Journal of Youth Services in LibrariesSeeking to restore our appreciation for the classics of children's literature, the authors of this book offer fresh and lively interpretations of twenty-eight of the most beloved works in the Western tradition. Through individual essays on representative and well-known rhymes, tales, domestic and picaresque novels, romances, talking-animal stories, and semi-autobiographical narratives, the authors help us to understand why such works continue to appeal to both children and adults. Treating each work as a literary production deserving of attention in its own right, the authors explore its emotional significance and enduring themes. They discuss the writer's purposes and literary techniques and investigate the relationship of specific literary works to the lives of their creators. Bibliographic information on texts, collections, and critical literature is supplied.

The contributors to this volume represent acknowledged experts in the field as well as a number of promising young scholars. They provide a thorough examination of how Romantic authors grappled with the problem of describing the connections between consciousness, unconsciousness, and language in their endeavor to capture this interplay in their art. As this collection bears witness, the Romantics sought to discard old ideas about language and literature and to mold new forms in their search to recover, in both literature and life, the sense of human possiblity. The essays, while strikingly diverse in topic and approach, explore this broad issue and come to a surprisingly similar conclusion: for Romantic writers, genuine consciousness, whatever it might imply about self-awareness, not only made it possible for an individual to affiliate with something outside himself, but even made such bonding necessary.

This brilliant study of Verne's three cycles (1850-62, 1862-86, 1886-1916) analyzes the works from a biographical, sociohistorical, ideological, and narratological point of view. With a deep focus on Verne's pedagogical slant, Evans demonstrates convincingly the parallels between the French author's aim to `de-alienate' science and his aim to valorize learning, knowledge, and reading (his heroes conquer more knowledge for themselves and for the world). ChoiceThis first modern American study of Jules Verne offers a wide-ranging reappraisal of a very familiar but often misunderstood author and his works. In spite of his status as one of the most translated novelists of all time, Verne and his Voyages Extraordinaires have long been neglected in American literary scholarship. This book seeks to reaffirm Verne's significant contribution to the development of early science fiction through a detailed investigation of his romans scientifiques. Evans has focused his study on the didactic dimension of Verne's narratives, which were originally intended to teach the rudements of science and morality to French youth through the medium of popular fiction.

This volume demonstrates that many scholars and stage directors firmly believe Schiller is very much a writer for the twentieth century. The essays provide a scholarly perspective on Schiller's relevance as a role model for twentieth-century writers and offer in-depth discussions of his idealism, his political views, and his neoclassicism, against the backdrop of the unbalanced and politically turbulent epoch in which he lived. Specific works are examined in light of their particular focus and relevance in drama and history. Part II offers new insights into Schiller's aesthetics, his lyrical subjectivity, his significance for German authors and his relation to such German thinkers as Kant, Jung, and Schlegel.

The artistry of nonfiction is the great unexplored territory of contemporary criticism. Although the American book clubs now emphasize nonfiction and The New York Times Book Review publishes almost three times as many reviews of nonfiction as fiction, critical appreciation of this work has lagged behind. The Art of Fact is the first comprehensive examination of five of today's most popular and important nonfiction artists: Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. By discussing contemporary literary nonfiction in relation to the early prose narrative forms and to the news/novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the opening chapter defines the discourse known as literary or artistic nonfiction. Dr. Lounsberry then describes four characteristics of literary nonfiction and grounds these characteristics in contemporary works.The five chapters which follow this introduction thoroughly examine the works of five prominent, contemporary nonfiction artists. While critics to date have tended to focus on only one or two of each writer's works, these chapters trace themes across each writer's entire body of work and even project likely future directions, given current artistic trajectories. Also addressed is the role of literary nonfiction in the American literary tradition and how each of the five writers exemplifies a strand of nonfiction narrative. The Art of Fact draws from personal interviews with Gay Talese and John McPhee and includes new interpretations of the works of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer as well as unpublished material from Gay Talese's current book-in-progress. The Art of Fact is a timely call for critical appreciation of the artistry of nonfiction and offers valuable insights to both students and fans of contemporary nonfiction.

This volume presents a new aspect in the study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: a case study of the publishing history of his works. Since Doyle's works before 1890 could not be copyrighted in the United States, various unauthorized versions of Holmes stories appeared in print in America from 1890 through 1930. Picking up where other bibliographers left off, Redmond traces the origins and subsequent printings and reprintings of these pirated manuscripts, relating the American editions to their sources and to each other. The American issues are described in detail, with defects and inconsistencies clearly documented.More than just a list of editions, this book is a detective story in the history of Sherlock Holmes. The author provides extensive descriptive lists of the American editions of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, raising such questions as who pirated from whom and why textual mistakes have lasted for ninety years. The study looks at the copyright background that enabled piracy to occur, the printing processes that corrupted the text, some of the firms involved in this piracy, and the various issues of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four and the relationships among them. Also included is a genealogical tree that traces the editions of these novels and detailed examples of their textual variations. The work provides a further inquiry into the history of Sherlock Holmes, as well as serving as a fascinating study of American publishing at the turn of the century. It will be an invaluable publication for collectors of Holmes material and students of publishing history, and an important addition to academic and public libraries.

Why are so many fictional characters named Anna (or a variant), and what does this signify? The startling prevalence of Hannah/Anna/Anne moves from biblical literature (Old Testament Hannah and New Testament St. Anne) to classics (Anna Karenina and Anne Elliot) to popular fiction (Anna Dunlop in Sue Miller's The Good Mother), children's literature (Anne of Green Gables), films (Hannah and Her Sisters), and horror (Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's Misery). Does this represent a conscious or unconscious search for the ultimate or missing mother harking back to mythical and religious traditions?Here twenty-two essayists--literary scholars, writers, historians, classicists, feminist theorists--rise to the challenge, examining Annas in individual literary works or making intriguing connections. Universals and particulars are sorted out as the related names and themes cross time, culture, gender, and racial borders. In the process, much new and fascinating literary criticism is revealed about dozens of authors, including Anthony Trollope, John Berryman, Sean O'Faolain, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Sexton, Arnold Bennett, Doris Lessing, Tillie Olsen, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mona Simpson, Mary Lavin, and, yes, Sigmund Freud.

Adopting the concept of diaspora--literally dispersal, or the scattering of a people--to the historical and contemporary presence of people of Indian subcontinental origin in other areas of the world, Emmanuel Nelson uses this paradigm to analyze Indian expatriate writing. In Reworlding, Nelson has commissioned fourteen critical essays by as many scholars to examine major areas of the diaspora--among them Britain, the United States, Canada, Trinidad, Fiji, Singapore, East and South Africa--and prominent literary figures, including Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Kamala Markandaya, Bharati Mukherjee, and Raja Rao.Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the various literary traditions within the Indian diaspora share certain common resonances engendered by historical connections, spiritual affinities, and racial memories. Individually, they provide challenging insights into the particular experiences and writers. At the core of the diasporic writing is the haunting presence of India and the shared anguish of personal loss that generate the aesthetics of reworlding underlying and unifying this body of literature. This collection will be of value to scholars and students of Indian writing in English, postcolonial writing in general, and the literature of exile and immigration.

A clear emphasis on literary antecedents of the Canterbury Tales differentiates this book from most criticism of Chaucer's work. Katharine S. Gittes finds a blending of two frame narrative traditions in the Canterbury Tales, one that originated in India and the Near East and the other in ancient Greece. To illustrate this dual literary tradition, Gittes compares Chaucer's work to a selection of pre-Chaucerian frame narratives that influenced his form directly or indirectly, and other narratives contemporary with Chaucer, that, in their likenesses or differences, illuminate the methodology of the Canterbury Tales.Covering materials written in eight different languages, Framing the Canterbury Tales includes discussion of the Indian-Arabic Panchatantra, Boccaccio's Decameron, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and both Eastern and Western versions of the Book of Sinbad. Gittes addresses the relationship between the framing stories and the tales, the degree of open-endedness in theme and structure, aesthetic principles, didactic elements, the significance of prologues and epilogues, the travel/pilgrimmage motif, the function of the narrator, and the degree of characterization in both Eastern and Western frame narratives. An examination of Eastern and Western elements in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reveals the existing tension between the two, and the ingenious way Chaucer responds to and makes the most of this tension. Eastern features include the open-endedness, the random ordering of tales, and the mode of narration; Western elements include the dramatic features, the grouping or pairing of tales, the symmetry and the recurring motifs. In examining different cultural outlooks and a variety of different, non-literary disciplines, Gittes expands the field of Chaucer criticism. Her book will interest students and scholars of diverse cultures and literary periods, as well as Chaucer enthusiasts.

This study analyzes the role of the sentenia (proverb, maxim, adage) in the rhetorical process of invention and, particularly, Shakespeare's use of the proverb as a master theme. The plays have a characteristic structure in which the thematic statement is initiated in the early scenes and then repeated, with variations, throughout. In Hamlet, for instance, the sententia all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity is exemplified and concretized in scene after scene.Donker demonstrates that Shakespeare was a product of his schooling in Tudor England in which simple proverbial material was considered to be the substance of moral philosophy, the subject to be developed, varied, and amplified in school exercises. He was also following the dictate of Horace in Ars poetica that moral philosophy was the proper subject of the poet, that the adage was to be the theme of fiction, to be modulated in a wide range of registers and tones throughout the work, Shakespeare was using the adage as central to the process of invention. Previous scholars have analyzed the sententia as a hallmark of style in Shakespeare's plays, but not as the controlling theme. This is a well explicated argument that will be of interest and value to Shakespearean scholars and students of the history of rhetoric, with broader applications to the study of Greco-Roman and Elizabethan cultures, the history and theory of drama, and humanistic studies.

Through his art, D. H. Lawrence exhorted people to recognize their potential for creative change and to energize it toward a more fulfilling mode of existence. Author Paul Poplawski seeks to define Lawrence's concept of creativity and explores its use as a central structuring principle of his ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic thought. Viewed in relation to his basic religious beliefs, the concept of creativity provides us with an integrated perspective on his art. Poplawski considers biographical elements of Lawrence's religious formation and traces the path of transmittal of these ideas into the early fiction and particularly The Rainbow. He then continues to demonstrate how religious views and aesthetic theory coalesce in the later works. He also engages critical dialogue by investigating counter-creative trends of elitism and sexism in the corpus.

As the British empire expanded throughout the world, the English language played an important role in power relations between Britain and its colonies. English was used as a colonizing agent to suppress the indigenous cultures of various peoples and to make them subject to British rule. With the end of World War II, many countries became gradually decolonized, and their indigenous cultures experienced a renaissance. Colonial mores and power systems clashed and combined with indigenous traditions to create postcolonial texts.This volume treats postcoloniality as a process of cultural and linguistic interplay, in which British culture initially suppressed indigenous cultures and later combined with them after the decline of the British empire. The first section of this book provides an introductory overview of English postcoloniality. This section is followed by chapters discussing postcoloniality and literature from an historical perspective in particular countries around the world. The third section gives special attention to the literature and culture of indigenous peoples. A selected bibliography concludes the work.

What better introduction could there be to Finnegans Wake, perhaps the most difficult literary work ever written, than the Sherlock Holmes stories, perhaps the most readable and popular stories ever written? James Joyce made extensive use of Sherlockian material in his work; indeed, Jenkins argues, this use goes to the core of the meaning and structure of Finnegans Wake.In this exhaustive and entertaining analysis, Jenkins provides the specific references to Holmes' adventures in the Wake and examines the context in which they occur and how they relate to the larger Wake themes. Readers of world literature, especially Joyce and Doyle scholars and students, will find this a fascinating and useful volume.

Joining two seemingly irreconcilable opposites, money and art, this edited collection analyzes the treatment of money in various forms of literature. The volume begins with chapters analyzing money in terms of language and culture, and then turns to money in history, showing how money has been influenced by, and has changed, history. Using the theories developed in the first two sections, the chapters that follow consider the literatures of Russia and America, French literature, and English literature.In Part I, contributors look at such themes as money in Christian culture and the pervasive influence of money on language. Part II considers Queen Elizabeth I's use of money for propaganda, money shortages in 18th-century France, and banking in 19th-century America. The following sections provide the major focus of the work--the theme of money in literature. American and Russian literature are considered in essays on the work of Alexander Pushkin, Henry James, and William Carlos Williams. Part III, on French literature, looks at the work of Moliere, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, and Andre Gide. The final, long section analyzes money's appearance in English literature, including the work of Shakespeare, George Herbert, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker.

This valuable new addition to Melville studies offers a ground-breaking interpretation of Melville's last published novel, one of the most complex texts in American literature and a work that has long been noted for the divergent critical views it has elicited. Reading the novel as a generic hybrid of narrative satire and apolyptic vision, Cook situates the novel in its implicit theological, historical, and biographical contexts: he examines the novel's relation to Melville's heterodox ideas of the deity, to the increasingly commercialized cultural milieu of antebellum America, and to Melville's own life and literary career. Uncovering a wealth of new data on the novel's satirical applications, including its covert use of Melville's friends and family for character models, Cook offers a compelling reading of The Confidence-Man - one that is sure to influence our future conception of its creator.

Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction presents an advanced introduction to the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, focusing on the concepts of carnival, dialogism, and historicism. The discussion of Bakhtin pays particular attention to the impact of his historical context in the Soviet Union and to the importance of his own dialogic mode of discourse. Bakhtin's ideas are then placed in dialogic relation to the works of several important writers of modern Russian fiction, including Vassily Aksyonov, Ilf and Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Andrei Bitov, and Sasha Sokolov.

The contributors to this collection of essays address children's literature as an art form, rather than an educational instrument, as has been the traditional approach. Scholars from 10 different countries present a variety of approaches to the history of children's literature, including views on sociological, semiotic, and intertextual models of its evolution. Other issues explored include influence and interaction between stories and their countries of origin. This strong presentation of international perspectives on children's literature will be a valuable resource for scholars of children's and comparative literature.

Since 1950, when his short stories first appeared, Kurt Vonnegut has published almost 50 short stories, 13 novels, two plays, and a teleplay. He has remained one of the shrewdest commentators—and often harshest critics—of American society, challenging the complacency of the Eisenhower years, watching the Kennedy's with admiration, and disliking Nixon. He has remained one of the most important chroniclers of American life, his message often foreboding though rarely gloomy. Yet he occupies an ambiguous place in American letters. The 14 essays in this collection seek to chronicle Vonnegut's career as it moves through changing times.The volume opens with a chronology of Vonnegut's life and three interviews with him. The essays consider his career, combining interest and readability for the general reader with critical commentary for the more serious scholar. The essays consider Vonnegut's later work or are retrospectives reevaluating aspects of his career. Some discuss individual works, particularly later novels, but most consider the ways Vonnegut pursues a theme or technique, the ways his mind works both in the construction of the novels and in the ideas embodied in them. There is also an Appendix discussing Vonnegut's most recent creative enterprise, graphic art, with 12 illustrations of his most recent art work.

In the last 50 years, Latin American literature has become one of the primary focuses of U.S. intellectual attention. This behind-the-scenes account focuses on the efforts of those Americans—publishers, critics, editors, and writers—who brought recognition to Latin American writing. Rostagno explores how the promotion and reception of Latin American literature in this country involve such issues as North American literary tastes and publishing strategies and are part of a larger and more complex picture of inter-American cultural and commercial relations. This fascinating story of the creation of an international audience for a literature explores the roles of critic Waldo Frank, publishers Blanche and Alfred Knopf, editors Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón, and the Center for Inter-American Relations.

Using a broad range of literature to examine the political culture of white South Africa, Peck finds both a preoccupation with political issues and a dislike for politics. The literature examined ranges from South African propaganda, through a variety of bestsellers—adventure stories and mystery novels written by authors such as Wilbur Smith and James McClure—to self-conscious literary works of the canonical white South African authors such as Alan Paton, André Brink, and Nadine Gordimer. The study gives attention to anti-political features of the liberal tradition that dominated South African writing, and to the failure of writers who undermined that tradition to generate a more positive view of politics. The morbid fascination with politics that is found across the full spectrum of creative writing is a reflection of the circumstances in which writers found themselves, but it is still a worrisome feature of the white South African political culture.

Among the narrative traditions of the Middle Ages, the Robin Hood legend holds a unique, important, and often overlooked position. Robin Hood's uniqueness and importance begins with his status as the only English contribution to world mythology. His is also the only lasting myth to arise from the High Middle Ages and the last Western legend to achieve a sustained international appeal. Several Robin Hood ballads survive from the Middle Ages, and from the 15th to the 17th centuries he figured prominently in folk drama. Since then, he has appeared in numerous proverbs, placenames, operas, novels, children's stories, films, and television series. A tale told so often must be profoundly significant to the society that retells it. Yet in spite of its importance and popularity, the legend of Robin Hood has received surprisingly little study. This book overviews the genesis and development of the Robin Hood legend from the Middle Ages to 1700.As is appropriate for a work that bridges the divide between the worlds of fiction and history, this volume incorporates the strengths of both historical and literary approaches, respecting both the circumstances of the historic setting and the legend's status as a fictive creation. The principal focus of the book is the interaction between the text and the social context in which the legend arose and developed. The first two chapters examine the early Robin Hood tradition, including the initial nondramatic manifestations of the legend and the later dramatic representations. The volume then looks at the transformation of the legend in the 16th and 17th centuries and considers how the various elements of the legend interacted with each other and with society as a whole.

Much attention has been given to Joyce's life in Dublin and Paris, but his productive years in Trieste have not received the same attention. In a thoroughly documented account, Hartshorn presents a clear, accessible study of Joyce's love/hate relationship with the city, the work he produced there, and the influence of Trieste on his writing.The book begins with a brief overview of Trieste's history prior to Joyce's arrival in 1904, and follows Joyce's life there until World War I, a period in which he completed ^IDubliners^R and ^IA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man^R, and began ^IUlysses^R. Joyce then departed for the safety of Zurich and the book concludes with his brief return of eight months to Trieste in 1919. Hartshorn has drawn from many previously untapped sources, providing a fascinating look at Joyce's Trieste years that no other Joyce biographer has yet to reveal.

John R. Maze presents a penetrating psychoanalytic reading of Virginia Woolf's novels from first to last. Underlying their elegant, imaginative, mysterious texture there is revealed a network of sibling rivalry, incestuous attraction and exploitation, sexual repulsion, bizarre fantasies, anger, and fatal despair.Woolf's feminism and pacificism, based on her conscious insight into an authoritarian society, were given passionate conviction by her resentment and irrational guilt over her half-brothers' sexual aggression against her as a vulnerable girl. This found its place in repressed animosity toward her idealized mother, whom she blamed not only for failing to protect her, but also for trying to impose the Victorian female sexist orthodoxy. Deeper still was the childhood conviction that her mother was complicit in the fantasied genital injuries—exacerbated later, she felt, by the males in her life—which prevented her from having children, as her envied sister had. Maze's approach not only reveals the intimate processes of Woolf's imagination, but yields a deeper and richer reading of her texts. An important study for all students and scholars of British 20th-century literature, feminist literary criticism, and critical theory in general.

The eighteenth century was a time of great cultural change in Britain. It was a period marked by expeditions to the New World, Africa, and the Orient, and these voyages were reflected in the travel literature of the era. It was also a period in which seventeenth-century empiricism and the scientific method became dominant, and in which society became increasingly secular. Fundamental to the eighteenth-century worldview was the notion of the Great Chain of Being, in which all creatures and their Creator stood in a hierarchical relationship with one another. The years from 1660 to 1833 witnessed both Britain's participation in slavery and the appropriation of the Great Chain of Being by social anthropologists and political leaders. With the rise of the slave trade, blacks were brought to Britain against their will, where they were enslaved. At the same time, intellectuals of the period tried to place these slaves within the hierarchical frame provided by the Great Chain of Being.The presence of slavery in Britain aroused much debate among blacks and whites alike, and the literature of the eighteenth century reflects that debate. This book examines representations of blacks in eighteenth-century British literature to illuminate the discussions about race during that period. The volume begins with a discussion of Alexander Pope's popularization of the Great Chain of Being in his Essay on Man, which argued the universal ranking of humanity and which provided an intellectual foundation for slavery. It then examines the works of several white canonical writers, including Defoe, Addison and Steele, Swift, and Sterne, to see how blacks are portrayed in their works. The volume also examines works by African-British writers, such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who expose exclusionary practices among some theologians; Ignatius Sancho, whose Letters show how slaves were taught to be grateful, and how those lacking gratitude were considered inhuman; and Olaudah Equiano, who shows how racial hierarchies function as a literary trope, particularly in travel literature. The final chapter, on The History of Mary Prince, examines the interaction of race and gender.