In this first book-length study of Ayn Rand's anti-utopia Anthem, essays explore the historical, literary, and philosophical themes presiding in this novella written in opposition to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union (and Nazi Germany). Written in 1937, published in 1938 in Britain, and subsequently in a revised form in the United States in 1946, Anthem investigates the importance of the ego and freedom, and the individual against the state. Editor Robert Mayhew has...

Drawing on the proceedings of two conferences organized to celebrate the centenary of John Berryman’s birth in 2014, John Berryman: Centenary Essays provides new perspectives on a major US American poet’s work by critics from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In addition to new readings of important aspects of Berryman’s development – including his creative and scholarly encounters with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats – the book gives fresh...

Best known for his Gothic masterpiece Uncle Silas and the vampire story Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a prolific writer whose extensive body of work included historical, sensation and horror novels, poems and ballads, numerous stories of the supernatural, journalism and a verse-drama. While his name is well known to aficionados of the horror genre, much of his work still remains in the shadows. Indeed, despite his vampire creation, Carmilla, being the best-known f...

This collective volume explores questions of space in contemporary literary texts from a range of theoretical perspectives. In addition to mapping the «spatial turn» in literary and cultural studies, this volume also brings together studies that apply spatial theory to the analysis of literary texts. Contributors tackle a broad range of themes, including how prose fiction addresses spaces of intimacy, abjection, espionage, discipline, madness, post-human identities, post-communist cities, ...

As far as Irish history is concerned, consuming Irish children was not only a matter for Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Late nineteenth-century Ireland saw the emergence of a thriving home-grown advertising industry, and the Irish child played a pivotal role in developing a nascent consumer state from the 1860s until 1921. Through extensive analysis of advertising copy, historical materials, ephemera and literature, this study links the child-centred consumer culture of Victo...

This groundbreaking volume argues that Carmen Martín Gaite and Carl Jung form an ideal combination. All the main features of the Jungian individuation process are present in the Spanish writer’s fairy tales: dreams, shadow figures, wise men and women, the Self, anima and animus. Martín Gaite has been described by the critic Salustiano Martín as trying to offer human beings a different way. In this accessible new study, Anne-Marie Storrs claims that this way is found through the process of ...

Inter-American literary study is an exciting and fast-growing area of comparative scholarship. The Americas are tied together by a common historical heritage and by a history of social, political, economic, and cultural interaction.As a contribution to this field, this book brings together the literatures and literary histories of English and French Canada, the United States, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The periods focused on include the Colonial Period, the Ninetee...

The relationship between biological thought and literature, and between science and culture, has long been an area of interest by no means confined to literary studies. The Darwin Anniversary celebrations of 2009 added to this tradition, inspiring a variety of new publications on the cultural reception of Darwin and Darwinism. With a fresh scope that includes but also reaches beyond the «Darwinian» legacy, the essays in this volume explore the range and diversity of interactions between bi...

Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (1913–1924) illustrates a change in the author’s conceptions of life, death, disease and Eros following World War I. Set in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, the novel’s main protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes into contact with three pedagogic figures who each represent a different attitude towards these themes. The humanist Settembrini, for example, affirms life but is repulsed by Eros, disease and death; the Jesuit ascetic Naphta glorifies erotic ...

In this study, Marinova examines the diverse practices of crossing boundaries, tactics of translation, and experiences of double and multiple political and national attachments evident in texts about Russo-American encounters from the end of the American Civil War to the Russian Revolution of 1905. Marinova brings together published writings, archival materials, and personal correspondence of well or less known travelers of diverse ethnic backgrounds and artistic predilections: from the qu...

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the eminent Russian-American writer and intellectual, is best known for his novels, though he was also the author of plays, poems, and short stories. In this important new work, Paul D. Morris offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov's Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. Morris' unique and insightful study re-evaluates Nabokov's poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the ...

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations,...