Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that "the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula," the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizab...

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry.This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic...

In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry’s most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been “written.” After a fire broke out in Lowry’s squatter’s shack, all that remained of In Ballast to the White Sea were a few sheets of paper. Only decades after Lowry’s death did it become...

The 1940 Under the Volcano—hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece—differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry’s 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, The 1940 Under the Volcano takes its rightful place as part of Lowry’s exciting 1930s/early-40s trilogy. Scholars have only recently begun to pay s...

Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, stud...

J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two BookerPrizes. The present volume makes critical views of this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre.

Adam's summer is off to a disappointing start. His so-called "best friend" has bailed on him, choosing to stay behind to care for a sick dog, instead of joining Adam and his family at the seaside campground as planned. Adam is furious with Billy for abandoning him, impatient with his mother for her artistic obsessions, and embarrassed by his dad's lame attempts at being funny. At least an ever-changing cast of new summer friends proves to be an entertaining distraction: Joey, the shoe-thie...

“Your life story didn’t begin with you. It reaches back to the beginning of time. You rose from the bodies of your ancestors. You’re the witness to their existence.” There is nothing more alive than the sea, nothing more deadly . . . Two childhood friends, Maggie and Elizabeth, are irrevocably joined by their love for one man lost on the Southern Cross, a brother to one and a groom-to-be of the other. Lives of families come into focus against the background of the island of Newfoundland, t...

The shocking true story of the institutionalization and abuse of children and adults with intellectual and physical handicaps in Canada’s oldest provincial institution in Orillia, Ontario. Daisy Lumsden and her family were such victims, along with over ten thousand children, including infants, and adults with intellectual disabilities committed over the last century to the institution now known as Huronia Regional Centre, formerly the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-Minded. The time frame of ...

“An extraordinary achievement . . . a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside.”—The New York Times Book ReviewA classic of postwar American literature, Last Exit to Brooklyn created shockwaves upon its release in 1964 with its raw, vibrant language and startling revelations of New York City's underbelly.The prostitutes, drunks, addicts, and johns of Selby’s Brooklyn are fierce and lonely creatures, desperately searchin...