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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2017Asia in Western fiction
by Robin Winks
Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.
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2024My Italy with Berlusconi
And what has become of it. Essays, conversations, reports
by Michaela Namuth
The political era of media entrepreneur and multi-billionaire Silvio Berlusconi began in 1994. German journalist Michaela Namuth also arrived in Rome at that time. He became prime minister, she became a freelance correspondent for various newspapers. She spent the long period of his government with him. During this time, the populist Berlusconi not only paved the way for a far-right government, he was also an ice-breaker for other right-wing populists in Europe and elsewhere. What else happened during and after Berlusconi's time in power is told in 20 chapters of articles, reports and interviews. The result is a colourful mosaic of contemporary Italy. It is about publishing, design, crime fiction, the mafia, a women's factory, the south and Nutella. Under Berlusconi, the country has changed. Many speak of “Berlusconisation”, by which they mean the gradual weakening of democracy. It is a critical book, but also a declaration of love to a contradictory country whose name still has a special ring to many ears.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2023The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction
by Rob Breton
Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 1997The Italian Resistance
An anthology
by Philip Cooke
Anthology of key extracts, in Italian - both literary and non-literary.. Introduction and notes in English.. Contains material which would mesh well with various standard set texts, such as Pavese, Bittorini, Calvino, Viganò.. A unique selection - no competing Italian edition. ;
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Family & home stories (Children's/YA)February 1905Little Women
by Louise May Alcott
Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth", but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well".[6]:34 According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 1994Italian women writing
by Sharon Wood
How has it happened that from being politely ignored or marginalized just half a century ago, women writers in Italy are now at the centre of literary activity? To what extent does writing by women reflect the successes and failures of Italy in the post-war period? What form did the feminist movement in Italy take, and how did this affect what - and how - women wrote? And how are women who write responding to a more fragmented post-modern age? These are just some of the questions asked of the relationship between women and fiction in post-war Italy in this anthology. It includes stories by Cialente, Ginzburg, Ortese, Morante, Romano, Maraini and Duranti as well as Bompiani, Sanvitale, Mizzau, Scaramuzzino, Capriolo and Petrignani. The thirteen stories presented offer a range of style and content indicative of the wealth and diversity of writing by women, and their reading is supported by critical notes and an extensive vocabulary. This is a clear and challenging introduction to the rich field of women and fiction in Italy. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2022The quiet contemporary American novel
by Rachel Sykes, Sharon Monteith
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2012Narration in nineteenth-century French short fiction
Prosper Mérimée to Marcel Schwob
by Peter Cogman
The short fiction that flourished in nineteenth-century France has attracted relatively little critical attention compared with the novel. This study focuses on some key stories by major authors of contes and nouvelles from the late 1820s to the 1890s, taking as a starting-point, aspects of narrative technique as a way of exploring not just characteristic strategies of short fiction, but also the ends to which they were put: recurrent themes, and the vision of mankind. Each chapter looks in some detail at three or four stories, referring briefly to other tales for illustration. The underlying point that emerges from this study is that the interest of a tale lies in the telling, not the events. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2023The bad German and the good Italian
by Paul Barnaby, Filippo Focardi
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2022Kate Atkinson
by Armelle Parey
This timely in-depth study of award-winning Kate Atkinson's work provides a welcome comprehensive overview of the novels, play and short stories. It explores the major themes and aesthetic concerns in her fiction. Combining close analysis and literary contextualisation, it situates her multi-faceted work in terms of a hybridisation of genres and innovative narrative strategies to evoke contemporary issues and well as the past. Chapters offer insights into each major publication (from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war) in relation to the key concerns of Atkinson's fiction, including self-narrativisation, history, memory and women's lives.
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FictionOctober 2020Once upon a time in Italy
by Fulvio, Luca Di
Rome in 1860 - with the exciting age of the Risorgimento as an atmospheric backdropLuca Di Fulvio's new novel is a powerful emotional epic about solidarity, self-discovery, homeland, family, love, and life dreams. The story begins in 1860, with the plot set mainly in Rome during the last phase of the Italian unification movement, the Risorgimento. Luca Di Fulvio creates a highly emotional, mentally cinematic epic with strong, distinctive characters. An orphan boy who wants to use his camera to change the way people see the world. A circus girl with a burning interest in politics. A countess who gives the gift of freedom to others. Three people whom fate brings to Rome in 1870, the pulsating heart of Italy on its path to becoming a nation state. As their paths cross in the midst of this city of promise, their dreams seem to be interwoven with magical bands. But the dazzling city of Rome presents the three with unexpected challenges. One day, when a dramatic event shakes the Eternal City, they are threatened with losing everything they hold dear. A highly emotional epic about three unforgettable characters, and a visually stunning story about new beginnings, the power of love, and a great longing for security in a world where one person stands up for the other. Bursting with life, deeply moving, and full of hope - Luca Di Fulvio's stories are like journeys that you wish would never end Three people and their dream of a better world The new novel by SPIEGEL bestselling author Luca Di Fulvio Set in Rome in 1860 against the atmospheric backdrop of the Italian unification movement
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The ArtsJanuary 2019Cinema - Italy
by Stefania Parigi, Des O'Rawe
A journey to the Italian cinema that overturns established views and opens up new perspectives and interpretations. Its itinerary is organized in four stages. The first is an analysis of the theories of Cesare Zavattini on neorealism which overturns widely accepted positions both on Zavattini and on neorealism. The second confronts a key film of the post-war Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, by examining the nature of its realism. The third is dedicated to Luchino Visconti: to questions of the use of language exemplified in his La terra trema, the use of settings, costume and light as agents of meaning in his Il Gattopardo and Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa. The final voyage of the film is to the physical and symbolic construction of heaven and earth in the work of Pasolini. Particular attention is given to the representation of the body in his last four films: the grotesque and mythical bodies in popular tradition in his Trilogia di vita and the tortured bodies destroyed by the mass media in Salò.
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July 2021International Division of the Young Communist Party 2·Young Heros
by Zhou Fei,Song Chunhua
International Division of the Young Communist Party is a long novel about young people's growth created against the historical background of the establishment and development of the Young Communist International Division of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army during the Second Domestic Revolutionary War. The work is in four volumes, using a combination of reality and fiction, with the growth of fictional teenage heroes such as Yin Jie as the main line, interspersed with Chen Guang, Xiao Hua and other typical characters of the International Division of the Young Communist Party, to tell the glorious revolutionary history of this period. These teenage heroes were enthusiastic, resourceful, brave, decisive and righteous, and made outstanding contributions to the cause of national and ethnic liberation.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2023
The politics of male friendship in contemporary American fiction
by Michael Kalisch
How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2025Through the fiction of Phebe Gibbes (1764–90)
Women, alienation, and prodigality in the long eighteenth century
by Kathryn Freeman
Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.
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July 2021International Division of the Young Communist Party 1·Iron Fists
by Zhou Fei,Song Chunhua
International Division of the Young Communist Party is a long novel about young people's growth created against the historical background of the establishment and development of the Young Communist International Division of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army during the Second Domestic Revolutionary War. The work is in four volumes, using a combination of reality and fiction, with the growth of fictional teenage heroes such as Yin Jie as the main line, interspersed with Chen Guang, Xiao Hua and other typical characters of the International Division of the Young Communist Party, to tell the glorious revolutionary history of this period. These teenage heroes were enthusiastic, resourceful, brave, decisive and righteous, and made outstanding contributions to the cause of national and ethnic liberation.
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July 2021International Division of the Young Communist Party 4·The Road to Glory
by Zhou Fei,Song Chunhua
International Division of the Young Communist Party is a long novel about young people's growth created against the historical background of the establishment and development of the Young Communist International Division of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army during the Second Domestic Revolutionary War. The work is in four volumes, using a combination of reality and fiction, with the growth of fictional teenage heroes such as Yin Jie as the main line, interspersed with Chen Guang, Xiao Hua and other typical characters of the International Division of the Young Communist Party, to tell the glorious revolutionary history of this period. These teenage heroes were enthusiastic, resourceful, brave, decisive and righteous, and made outstanding contributions to the cause of national and ethnic liberation.
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July 2021International Division of the Young Communist Party 3·Turning Iron to Steel
by Zhou Fei,Song Chunhua
International Division of the Young Communist Party is a long novel about young people's growth created against the historical background of the establishment and development of the Young Communist International Division of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army during the Second Domestic Revolutionary War. The work is in four volumes, using a combination of reality and fiction, with the growth of fictional teenage heroes such as Yin Jie as the main line, interspersed with Chen Guang, Xiao Hua and other typical characters of the International Division of the Young Communist Party, to tell the glorious revolutionary history of this period. These teenage heroes were enthusiastic, resourceful, brave, decisive and righteous, and made outstanding contributions to the cause of national and ethnic liberation.
