Books in the Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature series

From Plato's dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant's relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. This book contains essays that examine the importance of food as a pivotal element - both materially and conceptually.

A collection of essays that provide a critique of the popular and powerful genre of confessional writing. Contributors discuss a range of poetry, prose and drama, including the work of John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Helen Fielding.

Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the literatures in English. This book, based on a plurality of theoretical frameworks, addresses this lack and initiates the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the English literatures.

A collection of essays that analyses the literary response to the coups, insurgencies and invasions that took place around the globe during the Cold War, and explores the thematic and stylistic trends in world writing prompted by Cold War hostilities. This volume focuses upon themes like representation, nationalism, political resistance, and more.

This book focuses on a little-known corpus of testimonial accounts published by French women deported to Nazi camps, and will be of interest to those studying modern French literature, women's studies and the Holocaust.

This unique essay collection considers the impact of New York on the life and works of Wallace Stevens. Stevens lived in New York from 1900 to 1916, working briefly as a journalist, going to law school, laboriously starting up a career as a lawyer, getting engaged and married, gradually mixing with local avant-garde circles, and eventually emerging as one of the most exciting and surprising voices in modern poetry. Although he then left the city for a job in Hartford, Stevens never saw himself as a Hartford poet and kept gravitating toward New York for nearly all things that mattered to him privately and poetically: visits to galleries and museums, theatrical and musical performances, intellectual and artistic gatherings, shopping sprees and gastronomical indulgences. Recent criticism of the poet has sought to understand how Stevens interacted with the literary, artistic, and cultural forces of his time to forge his inimitable aesthetic, with its peculiar mix of post-romantic responses to nature and a metropolitan cosmopolitanism. This volume deepens our understanding of the multiple ways in which New York and its various aesthetic attractions figured in Stevens'' life, both at a biographical and poetic level.

In countries worldwide, the Cold War dominated politics, society and culture during the second half of the twentieth century. Global Cold War Literatures offers a unique look at the multiple ways in which writers from Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America addressed the military conflicts, revolutions, propaganda wars and ideological debates of the era. While including essays on western European and North American literature, the volume views First World writing, not as central to the period, but as part of an international discussion of Cold War realities in which the most interesting contributions often came from marginal or subordinate cultures. To this end, there is an emphasis on the literatures of the Second and Third Worlds, including essays on Latin American poetry, Soviet travel writing, Chinese autobiography, African theatre, North Korean literature, Cuban and eastern European fiction, and Middle Eastern fiction and poetry.With the post-Cold War era still in a condition of emergence, it is essential that we look back to the 1945-89 period to understand the political and cultural forces that shaped the modern world. The volume¿s analysis of those forces and its focus on many of the `hot spots¿ ¿ Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea ¿ that define the contemporary `war on terror¿, make this an essential resources for those working in Postcolonial, American and English Literatures, as well as in History, Comparative Literature, European Studies and Cultural Studies. Global Cold War Literatures is a suitable companion volume to Hammond's Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict, also available from Routledge.

In Salman Rushdie¿s novels, images are invested with the power to manipulate the plotline, to stipulate actions from the characters, to have sway over them, seduce them, or even lead them astray. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture sheds light on this largely unremarked ¿ even if central ¿ dimension of the work of a major contemporary writer. This collection brings together, for the first time and into a coherent whole, research on the extensive interplay between the visible and the readable in Rushdie¿s fiction, from one of the earliest novels ¿ Midnight¿s Children (1981) ¿ to his latest ¿ The Enchantress of Florence (2008).

Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature is the first anthology to focus on literary criticism of working-class American literature. The literature examined is from the 1850s to the present and includes work in several genres. Several prominent scholars have contributed, and emerging scholars are represented as well.

Drawing on the extraordinary wealth of scholarly and critical material on John Milton's life, works and influence, this collection of reprinted articles brings together the most illuminating scholarship that has been written about Milton.