Product Description: Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike . The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics...read more

Product Description: Drawing on the provocative recent work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction illuminates the vital and subversive role of literature in rewriting notions of the sacred. Abigail Rine demonstrates through careful readings how a range of contemporary women writers - from Margaret Atwood to Michèle Roberts and Alice Walker – think beyond traditional religious discourse and masculine models of subjectivity towards a new model of the sacred: one that seeks to reconcile the schism between the human and the divine, between the body and the word...read more

Product Description: “Challenges the unhelpful polarization of Lawrence and Joyce in much twentieth-century literary criticism and offers intriguing alternatives to what is surely a reductive approach to the achievements of both writers.”—Fiona Becket, author of The Complete Critical Guide to D...read more

Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel charts how novelists imagined changing forms of citizenship in twentieth-century Britain. This study offers a new way of understanding the constitution of the nation-state in terms of the concept of citizenship. Through close readings, it reveals how major authors such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, and Monica Ali presented political struggles over citizenship during key historical moments: the advent of democracy, the emancipation of women, the rise of social-welfare provision, the institution of the security state during World War II, and the emergence of multicultural citizenship during postwar immigration. This serves as the first full-length monograph to map the interrelations between literary production and public debates about citizenship that shaped Britain in the twentieth century.

Product Description: Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike...read more

Product Description: This book locates a literary study of the goddess in Lawrence, Fortune and Hughes within a narrative in which some modern men try to confront their yearning anger toward women by embracing goddess religion. The author argues that his chosen writers each helped this narrative to emerge, The book (a) offers Lawrence readers a new angle on his preoccupation with the goddess; (b) introduces Dion Fortune (virtually unknown outside her cult following) as an important twentieth century writer on marginality and sexuality; and (c) shows how Ted Hughes' narratives of the suffering- goddess (in Gaudete and Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being especially) relate forwards to his own Birthday Letters and backwards to Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover...read more

Product Description: Insistence of the Material engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, Christopher Breu examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production...read more

Product Description: This genealogy of the 'odd woman' compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction and auto/biography from the 1850s to the 1930s.Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, yet were also hailed as 'women of the future'...read more

Product Description: The Postsecular Imagination presents a rich, interdisciplinary study of postsecularism as an affirmational political possibility emerging through the potentials and limits of both secular and religious thought. While secularism and religion can foster inspiration and creativity, they also can be linked with violence, civil war, partition, majoritarianism, and communalism, especially within the framework of the nation-state...read more

Product Description: This book offers a significant statement about the contemporary British novel in relation to three authors: Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. All writing at the forefront of a generation, these authors sought to resuscitate the novel's ethico-political credentials, at a time which did not seem conducive to such a project...read more

Product Description: Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight...read more

Product Description: The collection brings together experts in the field of twentieth-century writing to provide a volume that is both comprehensive and innovative in its discussion of a set of newly canonical texts. The book includes new applications of philosophical and critical thinking to established texts...read more

Product Description: Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s- 1990s focuses on fin-de-siècle British and postmodern American fictions of apocalypse and investigates the ways in which these narratives demonstrate shifts in the relations among modern discourses of power and knowledge.

Product Description: This is the first book about the literature of the Irish in London. By examining over 30 novels, short stories and autobiographies set in London since the Second World War, London Irish Fictions investigates the complex psychological landscapes of belonging and cultural allegiance found in these unique and intensely personal perspectives on the Irish experience of migration...read more

Product Description: This book considers how contemporary British children’s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public...read more

Product Description: Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007 is the authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last 25 years. Meticulously researched, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some of Ireland’s most eminent writers...read more

Product Description: From the early years of the nineteenth century, cultural pessimists imagined in fiction the political forces that might bring about the destruction of London. Periods of popular protest or radicalism have generated novels that consider the methods insurgents might use to terrorise the metropolis...read more

Product Description: Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J...read more

Product Description: British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965 calls attention to the shifting grounds of cultural expression by highlighting Hollywood as a site that unsettled definitions and narratives of colonialism and national identity for prominent British novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, P...read more

Product Description: The end of the twentieth century was marked in Britain by a renewal of academic and public interest in the Great War, which remains one of the most defining historical events in British national consciousness. Focusing on questions of memory, this book examines some of the First World War narratives that were published during what has been called the late twentieth-century «war books boom»...read more

Product Description: The grotesque in contemporary British fiction reveals the extent to which the grotesque endures as a dominant artistic mode in British fiction and presents a new way of understanding six authors who have been at the forefront of British literature over the past four decades...read more

Product Description: The increased visibility of the Irish novel in recent years has been one of the outstanding developments in contemporary Irish literature. This development has coincided with a period of significant change in Ireland as a whole. The Irish Novel 1960-2010 is the first book to study how the novel has been involved in discussing the seeds of change and the response to change as it evolved...read more