Alice Munro
Alice Munro

Author: Coral Ann Howells

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1998-10-15

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780719045592

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Alice Munro is Canada’s greatest short story writer. This book, the first full length study of her work published in Britain, explores the appeal of Munro’s fictions of small-town Canadian life with their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossip and scandal. This is a world of open secrets, and Howells highlights Munro’s distinctive storytelling methods which combine the familiar and the unfamiliar, slipping between realism and fantasy to make visible what is usually hidden within everyday life. These are women’s narratives, full of silent female knowledge--of female bodies, love stories and romantic fantasies as well as female casualties. Munro takes up the traditional subjects of women’s fiction through her stories’ significantly female plots, stories of entrapment and escape attempts, where secrecy and silence become strategies of resistance. Munro’s enthusiasm for the work of other women writers from Emily Brontë and L. M. Montgomery to Eudora Welty is emphasized as Munro continues to experiment with the short story form, creating worlds which are both "touchable and mysterious."

The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction
The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Author: M.A. Orthofer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0231518501

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A user-friendly reference for English-language readers who are eager to explore contemporary fiction from around the world. Profiling hundreds of titles and authors from 1945 to today, with an emphasis on fiction published in the past two decades, this guide introduces the styles, trends, and genres of the world's literatures, from Scandinavian crime thrillers and cutting-edge Chinese works to Latin American narco-fiction and award-winning French novels. The book's critical selection of titles defines the arc of a country's literary development. Entries illuminate the fiction of individual nations, cultures, and peoples, while concise biographies sketch the careers of noteworthy authors. Compiled by M. A. Orthofer, an avid book reviewer and the founder of the literary review site the Complete Review, this reference is perfect for readers who wish to expand their reading choices and knowledge of contemporary world fiction. “A bird's-eye view of titles and authors from everywhere―a book overfull with reminders of why we love to read international fiction. Keep it close by.”—Robert Con Davis-Udiano, executive director, World Literature Today “M. A. Orthofer has done more to bring literature in translation to America than perhaps any other individual. [This book] will introduce more new worlds to you than any other book on the market.”—Tyler Cowen, George Mason University “A relaxed, riverine guide through the main currents of international writing, with sections for more than a hundred countries on six continents.”—Karan Mahajan, Page-Turner blog, The New Yorker

Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie

Author: Catherine Cundy

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9780719044090

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Literary criticism of Rushdie's work outside of special journals and periodicals.

Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing

Author: Alice Ridout

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-20

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1441192646

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Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction", and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

Amy Tan
Amy Tan

Author: Bella Adams

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2005-07-22

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780719062070

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The first study of Amy Tan's entire oeuvre, with individual chapters on The Joy Luck Club, The kitchen god's wife, The hundred secret senses and The bonesetter's daughter. The book offers close readings of her work in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality.

Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje

Author: Lee Spinks

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1847795854

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Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work. The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer. As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison

Author: Jill L. Matus

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1998-09-15

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780719044489

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This is an illuminating and original introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, focusing on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. Jill Matus approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history. She argues that Morrison sees African-American history--from the times of slavery to the continued racial oppressions of the twentieth century--as a history of traumatic experience, and explores how this powerful storyteller bears witness to a painful yet richly enlivening past. Morrison's novels are known for their great lyric power, but they often dwell on scenes of horror, and Matus emphasizes the uneasy relations of memory, pain and pleasure in literature. In doing so, she sheds new light on Morrison as a contemporary writer working at a time when literature is being urgently explored for its capacity to memorialize and testify. Direct and accessible, this critical study highlights the political and historical contexts of Morrison's work, offers close readings of each of the novels, and concludes with a critical overview of the field of Morrison studies.

Women and Contemporary World Literature
Women and Contemporary World Literature

Author: Deborah Fillerup Weagel

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9781433104831

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Many women in cultures throughout the world exhibit resilience and power in the face of obstacles and vicissitudes. From colonial New Spain to postcolonial Africa and India, Women and Contemporary World Literature examines ways in which women in literature function within their specific culture and circumstances to confront the challenges they encounter. In spite of fragmentation in their lives - much like quiltmakers - they piece together the scraps of their existence to form an integrated and complete whole. With its focus on power, fragmentation, and metaphor, and a strong interdisciplinary approach, this book offers a unique perspective to scholars, teachers, and students of comparative literature, contemporary world literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, women's studies, interdisciplinary studies, and literature and cultural studies.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

Author: J. D. McClatchy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1996-06-25

Total Pages: 690

ISBN-13: 0679741151

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This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are: Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin Chile--Pablo Neruda China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting El Salvador--Claribel Alegria France--Yves Bonnefoy Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos India--A.K. Ramanujan Israel--Yehuda Amichai Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa Mexico--Octavio Paz Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal Nigeria--Wole Soyinka Norway--Tomas Transtromer Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott