Books in the Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature series

This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts from the 1940s to the present that experiment with both form and content.

This guide examines the production and reception of poetry by a range of women writers--predominantly although not exclusively writing in English--from Sappho through Anne Bradstreet and Emily Bronte to Sylvia Plath, Eavan Boland and Susan Howe.Women's Poetry offers a thoroughgoing thematic study of key texts, poets and issues, analysing commonalities and differences across diverse writers, periods, and forms. The book is alert, throughout, to the diversity of women's poetry. Close readings of selected texts are combined with a discussion of key theories and critical practices, and students are encouraged to think about women's poetry in the light of debates about race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and regional and national identity. The book opens with a chronology followed by a comprehensive Introduction which outlines various approaches to reading women's poetry. Seven chapters follow, and a Conclusion and section of useful resources close the book.

Introduces students to a wide range of modernist writers and critical debates in modernism studies

Introduces postcolonial literary studies through close readings of a wide range of fiction and poetryThis guide places the literary works themselves at the centre of its discussions, examining how writers from Africa, Australasia, the Caribbean, Canada, Ireland, and South Asia have engaged with the challenges that beset postcolonial societies. Dave Gunning discusses many of the most-studied works of postcolonial literature, from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, as well as works by more recent writers like Chris Abani, Tahmima Anam and Shani Mootoo. Each chapter explores a key theme through drawing together works from various times and places. The book concludes with an extensive guide to further reading and tips on how to write about postcolonial literature successfully.Key FeaturesClose analysis of texts including, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, J.M Coetzee's Disgrace, Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, and Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land, as well as poetry by Derek Walcott, Eavan Boland, Agha Shahid Ali, Chris Abani and others.Discusses important new themes in postcolonial literature including global Islam, postcolonial sexualities and the representation of military conflict.Includes a Chronology, a Guide to Further Reading, and Tips on Writing about Postcolonial Literature.

An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes.Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, the guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism; and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, the guide introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies. Key FeaturesPresents American literary modernism as emerging from a broad intellectual and philosophical landscapeExtends the timeframe, definition and intellectual parameters of American modernismProvides close critical and contextual analysis of more than thirty American writers and key texts including Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Featuring a wide range of authors - from canonical figures such as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Annie Proulx, to increasingly influential writers such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Gish Jen and Richard Powers - the book combines detailed readings of key texts with informative discussions of their historical, social and cultural contexts.

This guide combines detailed literary history with discussion of contemporary debates about Scottishness. The book considers the rise of Scottish Studies, the development of a national literature, and issues of cultural nationalism. Beginning in the medieval period during a time of nation building, the book goes on to focus on the 'Scots revival' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before moving on to discuss the literary renaissance of the twentieth century. Debates concerning Celticism and Gaelic take place alongside discussion of key Scottish writers such as William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Oliphant, Hugh MacDiarmid, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway and Liz Lochhead. The book also considers emigre writers to Scotland; Scottish literature in relation to England, the United States and Ireland; and postcolonialism and other theories that shed fresh light on the current status and future of Scottish literature.Key Features*Identifies the main trends in the emergence and development of Scottish literature, situating them in historical and cultural context*Discusses long-running debates about Scottish language and national identity through detailed readings of authors and texts*Introduces students to a variety of comparative and theoretical approaches which further develop an understanding of Scottish literature*Encourages reflection on questions of Scottish nationalism, cultural politics, canonicity and the rise of Scottish Studies

This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from 1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism, gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture.A comprehensive Introduction provides a historical context for the study of contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural events. This is followed by five chapters organised around the core themes: (1) Narrative Forms, (2) Contemporary Ethnicities, (3) Gender and Sexuality, (4) History, Memory and Writing, and (5) Narratives of Cultural Space.

This concise introduction to the literature of an exciting and influential period opens with an overview of the historical and cultural context in which English Renaissance literature was produced, and a discussion of its contemporary and subsequent critical reception. The following chapters survey the major Renaissance genres of drama, poetry and prose. Each chapter provides illustrative case studies of canonical and non-canonical key texts by authors such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Nashe, and Lady Mary Wroth. A guide to further reading accompanies each chapter, complemented by a section of student resources at the end of the book. The final chapter summarises significant developments in English Renaissance literary culture, and discusses the future direction of Renaissance literary scholarship.

New edition of bestselling introductory text outlining the history and ways of reading Gothic literature.This revised edition includes: A new chapter on Contemporary Gothic which explores the Gothic of the early twentieth century and looks at new critical developments An updated Bibliography of critical sources and a revised Chronology The book opens with a Chronology and an Introduction to the principal texts and key critical terms, followed by five chapters: The Gothic Heyday 1760-1820; Gothic 1820-1865; Gothic Proximities 1865-1900; Twentieth Century; and Contemporary Gothic. The discussion examines how the Gothic has developed in different national contexts and in different forms, including novels, novellas, poems, films, radio and television. Each chapter concludes with a close reading of a specific text - Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Silence of the Lambs and The Historian - to illustrate ways in which contextual discussion informs critical analysis. The book ends with a Conclusion outlining possible future developments within scholarship on the Gothic.

An important critical study of Canadian literature, placing internationally successful anglophone Canadian authors in the context of their national literary history. While the focus of the book is on twentieth-century and contemporary writing, it also charts the historical development of Canadian literature and discusses important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. The chapters focus on four central topics in Canadian culture: Ethnicity, Race, Colonisation; Wildernesses, Cities, Regions; Desire; and Histories and Stories. Each chapter combines case studies of five key texts with a broad discussion of concepts and approaches, including postcolonial and postmodern reading strategies and theories of space, place and desire. Authors chosen for close analysis include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, Thomas King and Carol Shields.

This book helps the reader make sense of the most commonly studied writer in the world. It starts with a brief explanation of how Shakespeare's writings have come down to us as a series of scripts for actors in the early modern theatre industry of London. The main chapters of the book approach the texts through a series of questions: 'what's changed since Shakespeare's time?', 'to what uses has Shakespeare been put?', and 'what value is there in Shakespeare?' These questions go to the heart of why we study Shakespeare at all, which question the book encourages the readers to answer for themselves in relation to their own critical writing.

This critical study of Asian American literature discusses work by internationally successful writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan and others in their historical, cultural and critical contexts. The focus of the book is on contemporary writing, from the 1970s onwards, although it also traces over a hundred years of Asian American literary production in prose, poetry, drama and criticism. The main body of the book comprises five periodized chapters that highlight important events in a nation-state that has historically rendered Asian Americans invisible. Of particular importance to the writers selected for case studies are questions of racial identity, cultural history and literary value with respect to dominant American ideologies.

Offers close readings of Middle English texts placed within the culture with which they interact.

Unlike the rigidly chronological approach of many introductions to children's literature, this title presents a genre-based approach which ensures that all the principal genres are covered in detail such as: fables, fantasy, adventure stories, moral tales, family stories, school stories and children's poetry.

This book provides a critical assessment of dramatic literature since 1995, situating texts, companies and writers in a cultural, political and social context. It examines the shifting role of the playwright, the dominant genres and emerging styles of the past decade and how they are related.Beginning with an examination of how dramatic literature and the writer are placed in the contemporary theatre, the book then provides detailed analyses of the texts, companies and writing processes involved in six different professional contexts: new writing, verbatim theatre, writing and devising, Black and Asian theatre, writing for young people and adaptation and transposition. The chapters cover contemporary practitioners, including Simon Stephens, Gregory Burke, Robin Soans, Alecky Blythe, Kneehigh Theatre, Punchdrunk, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Edward Bond, Filter Theatre and Headlong, and offers detailed case-studies and examples of their work.

A comprehensive introduction to the diverse English literature of this period this book examines the way in which social, intellectual and literary changes interacted. Taking major social change as its starting point, the guide explores how all genres of literary discourse were changed and opened up by new methods of serialisation, the increasing complexity of new contexts of consumption, and a pervasive culture of performance. The book offers essential readings of the work of canonical authors, while situating their writing in relation to writers whose work is stimulating new critical attention. The book opens with a chronology and an introduction that explores problems of locating and understanding the period. There are chapters on: the novel; theatricality; poetry; Victorian cultural criticism; and the relationship between the fin de sicle and the present. These chapters introduce key critical concepts such as 'realism', genres such as the dramatic monologue and 'sensation fiction', and areas of debate such as the relationship between science and literature, and women and writing. The detailed readings foreground regularly taught authors of fiction such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker; and poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. Key Features*A single, comprehensive and accessible undergraduate introduction to Victorian literature*A coherent yet complex narrative of literary changes and developments*A fresh and accessible introductory account of literary trends from 1830-1900*Essential resources and further reading highlighted*Promotes informed engagement with the canon and current critical debates and establishes pathways towards further reading and lesser-known authors