An interdisciplinary guide to the various concepts, practices and cultural products that have come to be known as 'postcolonial'. It provides an essential orientation map for undergraduates taking courses in postcolonial literature and theory and postcolonial studies.

This 1929 volume offers firsthand accounts of Haitian voodoo and witchcraft rituals. Author William Seabrook introduced the concept of the walking dead to the West with this illustrated travelogue.

Readers' Liberation addresses question of what we should be reading to obtain information, examining how past readers encountered the same problems that today's readers face, and how they dealt with them.

An engaging, thought-provoking, and polemical volume on what makes American literature what it is today.

A wide-ranging collection of essays from a celebrated master of the form.

A student-friendly guide to the life, work, context and reception of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

The reading, study and criticism of books has always been popular and never more so than now, with events such as the BBC's Big Read and the glamour and controversy attached to awards such as the Booker Prize giving literature a high profile.

Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, this book considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. It explores the connections between their theories, and gives attention to their work on various aspects.

This Sourcebook examines Dickens' novel within its literary and cultural contexts providing an ideal orientation in the novel, its reception history and the critical material which surrounds it.

An overview of the history and structure of irony, this guide traces its use through history, from Greek times to the Romantic period and on to the postmodern era. It looks closely at the work of Socrates and the more contemporary theorists; explores the philosophical, literary and political dimensions; and applies theories to literary texts.

What is an 'author'? This volume investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an 'author', and the impact that this has had on literary culture.

Provides an introduction to literary theory from basic information and orientation for the uninformed leading on to sophisticated readings. This book offers a guide to the major theories and theorists, including: humanism; structuralism; poststructuralism; psychoanalytic approaches; feminist approaches; ideology and discourse; and more.

Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial" for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. This guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's texts.

Literary history meets economic policy in this entertaining polemic on the ethical and potentially destructive power of terrible literature.

Discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the US nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.

Providing an overview of the history of the term and the different ways in which it is used, this book outlines the origins of elegy, and the characteristics of the genre. It examines the psychology and cultural background underlying works of mourning. It explores how the modern elegy has evolved, and how it differs from 'canonical elegy'.

Narratology is a systematic account of narrative techniques, methods, their transmission, and reception, in which Bal distills years of study of the ways in which we understand both literary and non-literary works.

Offers students an introduction to Tolstoy's literary works from his major novels to the shorter novels and texts, including "Hadji Murat" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". This guide also covers major themes including sex, death, authority and evil and offers an overview of Tolstoy's religious and philosophical thought.