This book offers a comprehensive overview of recent developments in American crime fiction, exploring America's dynamic, fragmented multicultural landscape and how this changing landscape has, in the process, transformed the codes and conventions of the crime novel.

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction offers an authoritative overview of contemporary British fiction in its social, political, and economic contexts. Focuses on the fiction that has emerged since the late 1970s, roughly since the start of the Thatcher era. Comprises original essays from major scholars.

Written by some of the world's finest contemporary literature specialists, the newly commissioned essays in this volume examine the work of more than twenty major British novelists.

This book offers a biographical guide to the modern literary scene. It is fully cross-referenced and containing guides to further reading.

Gothic images pervade contemporary culture, from popular interior decorating programmes to news stories of vampire-obsessed killers. This book seeks to analyse this trend. Why is Gothic perennially undergoing revival? What is its role in modern consumer culture? And is its popularity or its usefulness drawing to an end?

An examination of developments in contemporary narrative, placing them in the context of wider social, cultural and technological trends, using a case-study approach. Taking a case study approach, it traces key narrative developments in the context of a range of theoretical approaches, including multimodality, multilingualism and transliteracy.

A survey style introduction to contemporary Native American literature aimed at students with little or no experience of the subject, or of Native American culture or history.

Peter Childs offers accessible analyses of the work of twelve prominent contemporary British writers, including Hanif Kureishi, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson. This expanded second edition has been revised and updated throughout, and now also features a new chapter on the younger "generation" of novelists born in the 1970s.

A guide to the key issues in writing in Britain since the mid-1970s, including social change, gender, sexuality, class, history and ethnicity. Designed to address problems faced by students in the field of contemporary fiction, this text is organised to focus on major topics.

With 1,200 biographical-critical entries and nearly 100 topical articles all written by experts in the field, this single-volume reference covers 150 years of children's literature in many cultures. Biographical-critical entries include authors as well as illustrators.

Cormac McCarthy: A complexity theory of literature offers the first sustained analysis of complexity science in McCarthy's literary works. McCarthy's fiction makes a significant case study demonstrating how literature can help us imagine and grapple with complex systems and crises, from global economic inequality to climate change. -- .

Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought establishes the precise role political counsel played during the 'monarchy of counsel', from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the end of the English Civil War, and its relation to the discourse of sovereignty, through analysis of the relevant texts in their social and political contexts.

Our collective notion of the city and country is irresistibly powerful. The city as the seat of enlightenment, power and greed is in profound contrast with an innocent, peaceful, backward countryside. Examining literature since the sixteenth century, this book traces the development of our conceptions of these two traditional poles of life.

The seventeenth-century English collaborative authors Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were not only the most popular playwrights of their day but also literary figures highly esteemed by the great critics of the age, Jonson and Dryden. Concentrating on the passions of the royalty and high nobility in a courtly atmosphere, their dramas are now us

Courting the Wild Twin is a book of literary activism-an antidote to the shallow thinking that typifies our age. It challenges us to wake up, to revive our 'condition of wondering' and examine our broken relationship with the world

A wonderfully accessible handbook to the art of writing and reading poetry-itself written entirely in verse

This study of how poetry was collected in anthologies in Renaissance England reads canonical authors - Surrey, Spenser, and Sidney - alongside women and non-elite writers. Designed for English literature students, its innovative focus on the crafted book and recreation will also interest students of early modern history, book history, and musicology.

Terry Eagleton looks back across sixty years to an extraordinary critical milieu that transformed the study of literature

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include Mythologies and Camera Lucida. This work in the Barthes canon offers a discussion of the language of literary criticism.

Presents an anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a range of texts - both old and new - that draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.