Nicholas Birns

"Birns offers readings of Powell's entire oeuvre, including the novels Afternoon Men, Venusberg, and The Fisher King, and his journals, which appeared in print between 1995 and 1997. Looking especially closely at A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve-volume sequence of novels that is Powell's masterpiece, Birns sets the series in its social and historical context, emphasizing the role that both world wars and the cold war played in Powell's life and writing. He makes a particular study of the novel's dominating force - the arrogant, opportunistic Widmerpool, a social climber who delights in his own good fortune and gloats over the sufferings of others. While noting Widmerpool's central position, Birns illumines Powell's subtle aesthetic resistance, epitomized by minor characters and the voice of the narrator, against Widmerpool and his ilk.

Understanding Anthony Powell

Robert Dixon

Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia. In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.

Australia - United States Intellectual Histories

Reading Across the Pacific

This book surveys the hyperlocal in the works of authors such as Jane Austen, John Keats, and Charles Dickens. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.

The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

Bill Ashcroft

Theodore F. Sheckels

Margaret Harris

Ben Holgate

Joseph Cummins

Marc Delrez

Laura A. White

Salhia-Ben Messahel

Nathanael O’Reilly

Liliana Zavaglia

Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays is the first book to be published about the life and work of this major world author. Written by twelve leading critics from Australia, Europe and North America, these richly varied essays offer new ways of understanding Flanagan’s contribution to Tasmanian, Australian and world literature. Flanagan’s fictional worlds offer empathetic, often poignant, renderings of those whose voices have been lost beneath official accounts of history, stories from a small region that have made their mark on a global scale. Considering his seven novels as well as his non-fiction, journalism and correspondence, this collection examines the historical and geographical factors that have shaped Flanagan’s representation of Tasmanian identity. This collection offers new insights into a determinedly regional writer, and the impact he has had on a local, national and global scale.

Critical Essays

Richard Flanagan

Will H. Corral

Juan E. De Castro

The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel provides an accessible introduction to an important World literature. While many of the authors covered-Aira, Bolaño, Castellanos Moya, Vásquez-are gaining an increasing readership in English and are frequently taught, there is sparse criticism in English beyond book reviews. This book provides the guidance necessary for a more sophisticated and contextualized understanding of these authors and their works. Underestimated or unfamiliar Spanish American novels and novelists are introduced through conceptually rigorous essays. Sections on each writer include: *the author's reception in their native country, Spanish America, and Spain *biographical history *a critical examination of their work, including key themes and conceptual concerns *translation history *scholarly reception The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel offers an authoritative guide to a rich and varied novelistic tradition. It covers all demographic areas, including United States Latino authors, in exploring the diversity of this literature and its major themes, such as exile, migration, and gender representation.

Bolano and After

The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia’s distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward. Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice – one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it. Contrary to the despairing of the critics, Australian literary identity continues to flourish. And as Birns finds, it is not one thing, but many. "In this remarkable, bold and fearless book, Nicholas Birns contests how literary cultures are read, how they are constituted and what they stand for … In examining the nature of the barriers between public and private utterance, and looking outside the absurdity of the rules of genre, Birns has produced a redemptive analysis that leaves hope for revivifying a world not yet dead." - John Kinsella

A World Not Yet Dead

Contemporary Australian Literature

Roberto Bolaño as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist that highlights his connections with classic and contemporary masters of world literature and his investigation of topics of international interest, such as the rise of rightwing and neofascist movements during the last decades of the 20th century. But this anthology also shows how Roberto Bolaño's participation in world literature is informed in his experiences, identity, and, more generally, cultural location as a Chilean, Latin American and, more generally, Hispanic writer and man. This book provides a corrective to readings of his novels as exclusively "postmodern" or as unproblematically representative of Chilean or Latin American reality. Roberto Bolaño as World Literature thus helps readers to better understand such complex works as his monumental global five-part masterpiece 2666, his Chilean novels (Distant Star, By Night in Chile), and his Mexican narratives (Amulet, The Savage Detectives), among other works.

Roberto Bolaño as World Literature

Gale Researcher Guide for: J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Modern Fantasy is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Gale Researcher Guide for: J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Modern Fantasy

Rebecca McNeer

A fresh, twenty-first-century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive, and multicultural sense.

A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900

The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel provides an accessible introduction to an important World literature. While many of the authors covered—Aira, Bolaño, Castellanos Moya, Vásquez—are gaining an increasing readership in English and are frequently taught, there is sparse criticism in English beyond book reviews. This book provides the guidance necessary for a more sophisticated and contextualized understanding of these authors and their works. Underestimated or unfamiliar Spanish American novels and novelists are introduced through conceptually rigorous essays. Sections on each writer include: *the author's reception in their native country, Spanish America, and Spain *biographical history *a critical examination of their work, including key themes and conceptual concerns *translation history *scholarly reception The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel offers an authoritative guide to a rich and varied novelistic tradition. It covers all demographic areas, including United States Latino authors, in exploring the diversity of this literature and its major themes, such as exile, migration, and gender representation.

Nicholas Birns

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