20th Century Literature

Focusing on recent fictional and theoretical texts, Literary Music proposes literature, narrative fiction in particular, as a singular form of musical performance, in which ideas about music are constituted and explored. Stephen Benson considers works by Blanchot, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, and J...

In her study of Margaret Atwood, Ellen McWilliams explores how the Bildungsroman has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. Early works by Atwood are placed in dialogue with more recent novels, thus furthering our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fic..

Exploring how Margaret Atwood’s fiction reimagines the figure of the detective and the nature of crime, Jackie Shead shows how the author radically reworks the crime fiction genre. By revealing how her female protagonists confront their own complicity with hegemonic assumptions about gender, class a..

The first fully detailed, complete account in English of the fiction and films of France's best-known and most controversial woman writer. Leslie Hill throws new light on Duras' relation with feminism, sexuality and psychoanalysis...

Victoria Bazin's interpretations of Marianne Moore's poetry draw extensively on archival resources to trace her influences and to describe her own distinctive modernist aesthetic. Bazin argues that it was Moore's feminist adaptation of pragmatism that shaped her poetry, producing a complex response ..

Making use of recent masculinity theories, Joseph A. Kestner sheds new light on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Canonical authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner are examined alongside popular writers like A.E.W. Mason, W.H. Hudson, and John Buc..

Making use of recent masculinity theories, Joseph A. Kestner sheds new light on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Canonical authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner are examined alongside popular writers like A.E.W. Mason, W.H. Hudson, and John Buc..

Making use of recent masculinity theories, Joseph A. Kestner sheds new light on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Canonical authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner are examined alongside popular writers like A.E.W. Mason, W.H. Hudson, and John Buc..

This book studies the maximalist novels of Wallace, Baker, Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. It argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject..

May Sinclair was a central figure in the modernist movement, and this collection, the first on Sinclair's career and writings, provides valuable insights into Sinclair's complex texts. Individual essays engage with the cultural and literary phenomena Sinclair critiqued and influenced: the literary m..

Re-examining P.G. Wodehouse in the context of recent scholarship on the middlebrow, this collection attends to his self-conscious relationship to the literary marketplace and his role in moving musical comedy away from vaudeville’s lowbrow associations towards the sophistication of the Wodehouse sty..

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. In this new study, A. Robert Lee aims ..