Books in the Critical Perspectives on English and American Literature, Communication and Culture series

The present volume focuses on explaining the strong impact that Japanese culture bore on Western intellectuals, Modernist literary writers and artists from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, and, conversely, the impact of Western modernity on Japanese cultural modernization from the Meiji Era onwards.

The study examines exploration in Voss. It shows that the novel absorbs (and contests) a variety of literary genres, starting as a "chronicle" and ending up as a parable. The literary transformation enables the reader to understand White's historical novel as a parable of the writer's exploration of Australia in the 1950s.

This collection explores the literary creativity of outstanding women writers of American, Canadian, English, and Irish origins. Each chapter offers an individual study of the writers' work and associated process of ageing.

Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities

Flaming Embers

This book is a major source for scholars of the latest American poetry. These exciting essays comprise energy and documented discussions on experimentalism, multiculturalism, hyperspace, and gender. Anthologies and little magazines form the matrix for this exploration on conceptual issues surrounding language. The author widens the perspective in which a great deal of writing forced the limits of poetry in this kind of publications. At the same time, he analyzes new contexts and enters into conversation with other sources for inspiration found through other disciplines such as social theory, philosophy, linguistics, and art generated at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Reflective, taut with alertness, and exploding the postmodern concept of word/object as a liberating experience, this book becomes a driving force to address poetry and challenging political issues with admirable depth.

Offers varied studies of the problematic construction of contemporary identities from a literary and cultural perspective. This book covers transcendental, relevant and polemic topics like the difficulty of growing up, classist and interracial struggles, narratives of displacement and exile, queering the world, power politics and the individual.

Brings together essays on six of the most important British and American writers who lived in or visited Spain in the 20th century and whose work bears the impact of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

This scholarly but accessible volume traces the impact of the enduring themes and key women characters from Arthurian tradition in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's artistic corpus. Combining literary and visual analysis, the author opens a double perspective upon the past to emphasize that the painter-poet's renditions on the legend of Camelot should not be read only as merely illustrative of pre-existing textual sources. Quite on the contrary, his personal take stands out as an eclectic exercise of revaluation providing additional insight into his professional preoccupations and view of the self. Unfolding in three sections, the book first focuses on the tragic love triangles in Malory's Le Morte Darthur, and so on Rossetti's portrayal of Guinevere and La Belle Yseult. Next, it considers the value of female mediating presences and inter-gender unity in the Grail Quest. The third set of chapters addresses Rossetti's view of chivalric paternalism and romantic rescue. For reasons of complementation and contrast, this last section also includes an analysis of the painter-poet's contribution to the stained glass series on the legend of Saint George and the dragon.

The difference between modernism and postmodernism has been object to constant revision from a variety of critical perspectives. This collection of essays on women's short fiction tackles anew this thorny distinction from the theoretical perspective sketched by a psychoanalytical philosopher.

This book argues that a profound shift can be found in the works of Virginia Woolf, from an early pursuit of the individual to a late pursuit of the collective. Evidence for this shift is found both in the narrative modes she employed and the methods by which thought is represented in the works themselves, and in ideas and ruminations found in Woolf's diaries and essays. The stylistic analysis covers works from The Voyage Out (1915) to the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941), and shows how several of the shorter pieces can be considered to be experiments with techniques that were fully employed in Woolf's longer, major fictions. This shift arises from changes in Woolf's concept of the conscious and unconscious over time, and the argument shows how she took deliberate steps to reflect these changes in her fiction. This framework provides key insights for new interpretations of her works.

This book questions the artistic, aesthetic, political and ethical legacy of E. M. Forster's novels. It covers Forster's literary, cinematic and musical legacies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and deal with many authors, such as Melville, Isherwood, Hollinghurst and Kureishi.

Further to the first book, Writers of the Spanish Civil War, on the war writing by some British and American authors, this second one studies the relevant work by eight more foreign authors: Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Franz Borkenau, V. S. Pritchett, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Martha Gellhorn and Peter Kemp.

The essays in this book explore the rhetoric of dissent in a range of texts that include letters, novels, poems and nonfiction, mostly focusing on selected works by such authors as Abigail Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Ovington, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

This volume discusses women in Nabokov. It has two parts: In the first one, there are biographical essays on the role of the real women in Nabokov's life and how their love and suffering are reflected in his prose. The second part deals with Nabokov's women in his fiction.

This book sheds new light on various interconnected aspects of the Gothic through the lens of converging critical and methodological approaches. With its interdisciplinary perspective, the authors explore the domains of literary, pictorial, filmic, televisual and popular cultural texts in English from the eighteenth century to the present day.