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The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath
by Jo GillThe controversies that surround Sylvia Plath's life and work imply that her poems are more read and studied now than ever before. This Companion provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the place in twentieth-century culture of Sylvia Plath's poetry, prose, letters and journals. The newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars represent a spectrum of critical perspectives. They pay particular attention to key debates and to well-known texts such as The Bell Jar, while offering original and thought-provoking readings to new as well as more seasoned Plath readers.
The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
by A. David MoodyAn international team of leading T. S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully coordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays, while others assess the major aspects of his life and thought. Later chapters place his work in historical perspective. There is a full review of Eliot studies, and a useful chronological outline. Taken as a whole, this Companion comprises an essential handbook for students and readers of T. S. Eliot.
The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
by Terry GiffordThis is a story of the raw grief of a mother who loses her son and whose life is transformed in the process. Some people live life at a higher pace-and depths- than most of us . Adam Pinkerfield was one of those people and he was deeply loved by those he touched. Sadly one day he flew too high and didn't come back. This book is his mother Sharon's story of the trauma that followed and the multitude of experiences and learnings that came from this deeply sad event. Take several deep breaths before you enter with her, let yourself be touched, moved and even shaken as her story unfolds. Always remember, in every tragedy, however dreadful, hidden somewhere is a blessing. Leo Rutherford, Shaman and author.
The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship
by Neil Fraistat Julia FlandersAs more and more of our cultural heritage migrates into digital form and as increasing amounts of literature and art are created within digital environments, it becomes more important than ever before for us to understand how the medium affects the text. The expert contributors to this volume provide a clear, engrossing and accessible insight into how the texts we read and study are created, shaped and transmitted to us. They outline the theory behind studying texts in many different forms and offer case studies demonstrating key methodologies underlying the vital processes of editing and presenting texts. Through their multiple perspectives they demonstrate the centrality of textual scholarship to current literary studies of all kinds and express the sheer intellectual excitement of a crucial scholarly discipline entering a new phase of its existence.
The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
by Frank GradyChaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales, is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language.
The Cambridge Companion to The Essay (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
by Evan Kindley Kara WittmanThe Cambridge Companion to the Essay considers the history, theory, and aesthetics of the essay from the moment it's named in the late sixteenth century to the present. What is an essay? What can the essay do or think or reveal or know that other literary forms cannot? What makes a piece of writing essayistic? How can essays bring about change? Over the course of seventeen chapters by a diverse group of scholars, The Companion reads the essay in relation to poetry, fiction, natural science, philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, studies in race and gender, queer theory, and the history of literary criticism. This book studies the essay in its written, photographic, cinematic, and digital forms, with a special emphasis on how the essay is being reshaped and reimagined in the twenty-first century, making it a crucial resource for scholars, students, and essayists.
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land: The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land
by Gabrielle McintireT. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is often considered to be the most important poem written in English in the twentieth century. The poem dramatically shattered old patterns of form and style, proposed a new paradigm for poetry and poetic thought, demanded recognition from all literary quarters, and changed the ways in which it was possible to approach, read, or write poetry. The Waste Land helped to define the literary and artistic period known as modernism. This Companion is the first to be dedicated to the work as a whole, offering fifteen new essays by international scholars and covering an extensive range of topics. Written in a style that is at once sophisticated and accessible, these fresh critical perspectives will serve as an invaluable guide for scholars, students, and general readers alike.
The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser
by Leonard Cassuto Clare Virginia EbyTheodore Dreiser is one of the most penetrating observers of the greatest period of social change the United States ever saw. Writing as America emerged as the world's wealthiest nation, Dreiser chronicled industrial and economic transformation and the birth of consumerism with an unmatched combination of detail, sympathy, and power. The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume are written by a leading team of scholars of American literature and culture. They establish parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy
by Dale KramerThe Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy is an essential introduction to this most enigmatic of writers. These newly commissioned essays from an international team of contributors comprise a general overview of all of Thomas Hardy's work and specific demonstrations of his ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy's biography, aesthetics, his famous attachment to Wessex, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion and philosophy in the late-nineteenth century. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy's life, and a guide to further reading.
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann
by Ritchie RobertsonKey dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life are explored in this collection of specially commissioned essays. In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction, the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. These thematic explorations include his position as a realistic writer concerned with the history of his own times and as a commentator on German and American politics; his controversial reputation as an intellectual novelist; the literary techniques that enabled his challenging fictions to appeal to a wide audience; and the homosexual subtext running through his fiction and diaries. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students.
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon
by Brian Mchale Inger H. Dalsgaard Luc Herman Inger H. Dalsgaard Luc HermanThe most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon's fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon's fiction novel-by-novel from the 1960s to the present, including such indisputable classics as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. Part II zooms out to give a bird's-eye-view of Pynchon's novelistic practice across his entire career. Part III surveys major topics of Pynchon's fiction: history, politics, alterity ('otherness'), and science and technology. Designed for students, scholars and fans alike, the Companion begins with a biography of the elusive author and ends with a coda on how to read Pynchon and a bibliography for further reading.
The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy
by Donna Tussing OrwinBest known for his great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy remains one the most important nineteenth-century writers; throughout his career which spanned nearly three quarters of a century, he wrote fiction, journalistic essays and educational textbooks. The specially commissioned essays in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy do justice to the sheer volume of Tolstoy's writing. Key dimensions of his writing and life are explored in essays focusing on his relationship to popular writing, the issue of gender and sexuality in his fiction and his aesthetics. The introduction provides a brief, unified account of the man, for whom his art was only one activity among many. The volume is well supported by supplementary material including a detailed guide to further reading and a chronology of Tolstoy's life, the most comprehensive compiled in English to date. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard
by Katherine E. KellyThis collection of fifteen essays offers both student and theatergoer a guide to the stage plays, novel, and screenplays of one of the most celebrated British dramatists since Noel Coward. Readers will find that the general and accessible description and analyses in these essays makes the large body of Stoppard's writing clear and approachable while preserving its rich humor. This is the first collection of essays to appear in many years addressing all of Stoppard's major work. It provides insights into the recent plays, Arcadia and Invention of Love, as well as the first extended examination of his work for screen, including a discussion of his co-authored, academy award-winning screenplay Shakespeare in Love. Photographs from key productions, a biography and chronology complete the volume and prepare the reader for future work by this extraordinary writer.
The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison
by Justine TallyNobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.
The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature: Transnational American Literature
by Yogita GoyalFor two decades, the 'transnational turn' in literary studies has generated enormous comment and controversy. This Companion provides a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn in American literary studies. It situates the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, and hemispheric studies. Leading scholars open up wide-ranging examinations of transnationalism in American literature - through form and aesthetics, theories of nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and race, as well as through conventional forms of historical periodization. Offering a new map of American literature in the global era, this volume provides a history of the field, key debates, and instances of literary readings that convey the way in which transnationalism may be seen as a method, not just a description of literary work that engages more than one nation. Contributors identify the key modes by which writers have responded to major historical, political, and ethical issues prompted by the globalization of literary studies.
The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing
by Tim Youngs Peter HulmeThe Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing brings together specialists from Anthropology, History, Literary and Cultural Studies to offer a broad and vibrant introduction to travel writing in English between 1500 and the present. This comprehensive introduction to the subject features specially commissioned contributions, including six essays surveying the period's travel writing; a further six focusing on geographical areas of particular interest - Arabia, the Amazon, Tahiti, Ireland, Calcutta, the Congo and California; and three final chapters analysing some of the theoretical and cultural dimensions to this enigmatic and influential genre of writing. Several invaluable tools are also provided, including an extensive list of further reading, and a detailed five-hundred year chronology listing important events and publications. This volume will be of interest to teachers and students alike.
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women's Poetry
by Jane DowsonThis Companion provides new ways of reading a wide range of influential women's poetry. Leading international scholars offer insights on a century of writers, drawing out the special function of poetry and the poets' use of language, whether it is concerned with the relationship between verbal and visual art, experimental poetics, war, landscape, history, cultural identity or 'confessional' lyrics. Collectively, the chapters cover well established and less familiar poets, from Edith Sitwell and Mina Loy, through Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Jennings to Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland and Jo Shapcott. They also include poets at the forefront of poetry trends, such as Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Patience Agbabi, Caroline Bergvall, Medbh McGuckian and Carol Ann Duffy. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is aimed at students and poetry enthusiasts wanting to deepen their knowledge of some of the finest modern poets.
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry
by Neil CorcoranThe last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
by Shaun RichardsThe essays in this collection cover the entire range of Irish drama, from the late nineteenth-century melodramas (anticipating the rise of the Abbey Theatre) to the contemporary Dublin of theater festivals. In addition to studies of individual playwrights, the collection includes an examination of the relationship between the theater and its political context as reflected through its ideology, staging and programming. Including a complete chronology and bibliography, this collection will be an important introduction to one of the world's most vibrant theater cultures.
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
by Christos Hadjiyiannis Rachel PotterFor a long time, people had been schooled to think of modern literature's relationship to politics as indirect or obscure, and often to find the politics of literature deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. But twentieth-century writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This Companion tell a story of the rich and diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped – and also clashed. Covering some of the century's most influential political ideas, moments, and movements, nineteen academic experts uncover new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. Liberalism, communism, fascism, suffragism, pacifism, federalism, different nationalisms, civil rights, women's rights, sexual rights, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, neoliberalism: twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, events, and campaigns.
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature
by Evgeny Dobrenko Marina BalinaIn Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both migr literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and migr literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.
The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
by Timothy YuA new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.
The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses
by Sean LathamFew books in the English language seem to demand a companion more insistently than James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that at once entices and terrifies readers with its interwoven promises of pleasure, scandal, difficulty and mastery. This volume offers fourteen concise and accessible essays by accomplished scholars that explore this masterpiece of world literature. Several essays examine specific aspects of Ulysses, ranging from its plot and characters to the questions it raises about the strangeness of the world and the density of human cultures. Others address how Joyce created this novel, why it became famous and how it continues to shape both popular and literary culture. Like any good companion, this volume invites the reader to engage in an ongoing conversation about the novel and its lasting ability to entice, rankle, absorb, and enthrall.
The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature
by Gregory ClaeysSince the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
by Linda K. HughesThe Victorian period has a strong tradition of poetry written by women. In this Companion, leading scholars deliver accessible and cutting-edge essays that situate Victorian women's poetry in its relation to print culture, diverse identities, and aesthetic and cultural issues. The book is inclusive in method, demonstrating, for example, the benefits of both distant and close reading approaches, and featuring major figures like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti and over one hundred poets altogether. Thematically arranged, the chapters deliver studies on a comprehensive array of subjects that address women's poetry in its manifold forms and investigate its global context. Essays shed light on children's poetry, domestic relations, sexualities, and stylistic artifice and conclude by looking at how women poets placed their published poems and how we can 'place' Victorian women poets today.