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"Paul Kincaid’s engaging discussion of Robert Holdstock’s masterwork is a model of enlightening criticism, providing both historical and literary contexts without resorting to special pleading or academic jargon. Even readers who have long loved Mythago Wood are likely to be pleasantly surprised at how thoroughly Kincaid unravels the true depth and complexity of the novel." —Gary K. Wolfe, Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Roosevelt University, USA This book is a detailed examination of one of the most important works of fantasy literature from the twentieth century. It goes through Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock considering how it engages with war on a personal and family level, how it plays with ideas of time as something fluid and disturbing, and how it presents mythology as something crude and dangerous. The book places Mythago Wood in the context of Holdstock’s other works, noting in part how complex ideas of time have been a consistent element in his fiction. The book also briefly examines how the themes laid out in Mythago Wood are carried through into later books in the sequence as well as the Merlin Codex. Paul Kincaid is the author of books on Iain Banks, Christopher Priest, and Brian Aldiss, as well as two collections of essays. He has twice won the BSFA Non-Fiction Award and has also received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Thomas Clareson Award.

Sociology of culture --- Fiction --- Literature --- populaire cultuur --- literatuur --- literatuurgeschiedenis --- fantasie (verbeelding) --- anno 1900-1999 --- Fiction. --- Popular Culture. --- Literature, Modern --- Fiction Literature. --- Contemporary Literature. --- Literary Criticism. --- 20th century. --- 21st century. --- History and criticism. --- English Literature

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Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments. Nick Wolterman is an independent scholar based in York, UK. He received his PhD in English and Related Literature from the University of York. .

Theatrical science --- Fiction --- Literature --- History --- theater --- geschiedenis --- literatuur --- fantasie (verbeelding) --- anno 1900-1999 --- Literature, Modern—20th century. --- Fiction. --- Literature. --- Drama. --- Theater—History. --- Twentieth-Century Literature. --- Fiction Literature. --- Contemporary Theatre and Performance.

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This book undertakes the first large-scale analysis of women’s agency in Frank Herbert’s six-book science fiction Dune series. Kara Kennedy explores how female characters in the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood—from Jessica to Darwi Odrade—secure control and influence through five avenues of embodied agency: mind-body synergy, reproduction and motherhood, voices, education and memory, and sexuality. She also discusses constraints on their agency, tensions between individual and collective action, and comparisons with other characters including the Mentats, Bene Tleilaxu, and Honored Matres. The book engages with second-wave feminist theories and historical issues to highlight how the series anticipated and paralleled developments in the women’s liberation movement. In this context, it addresses issues regarding sexual difference and solidarity, as well as women’s demand to have control over their bodies. Kennedy concludes that the series should be acknowledged as a significant contribution to the genre as part of both New Wave and feminist science fiction. Kara Kennedy is a researcher, writer, and educator in the areas of science fiction, digital literacy, and writing. She is an avid scholar of Dune who has lectured and published on various topics including world-building. She posts literary analyses of Dune for a mainstream audience on her blog DuneScholar.com.

Philosophy --- Sociology of culture --- Sociology of the family. Sociology of sexuality --- Fiction --- American literature --- Literature --- populaire cultuur --- filosofie --- literatuur --- gender --- fantasie (verbeelding) --- America --- Fiction. --- Feminism and literature. --- Popular Culture. --- Women --- Sex. --- Fiction Literature. --- Feminist Literary Theory. --- North American Literature. --- Women's History / History of Gender. --- Gender Studies. --- Philosophy. --- Literatures. --- History.

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“This essay collection, written by a stellar group of Canadian literature specialists, is a love letter to the late Canadian writer Carol Shields, who died about twenty years ago. The essays revisit Shields’s prolific career—short story writer, novelist, book reviewer, teacher and biographer—through the lens of her posthumous collection, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing (2016), edited by her daughter Anne Giardini and grandson Nicholas Giardini. The chapters are eclectic, both intimate and academic in tone, as they reflect different relationships with this beloved writer within our Can Lit circle—and beyond.” —Laurie Kruk, Professor in English Studies, Nipissing University, Canada This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her novels and short stories. Shields’s essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and short stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields’s writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes, by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction, both novels and stories, helping readers to comprehend her art. These essays read Shields’s fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction. Nora Foster Stovel is a Professor Emerita of the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has published books and essays on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence, including Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her program of research on Carol Shields. .

Philosophy --- American literature --- Literature --- filosofie --- literatuur --- anno 1900-1999 --- America --- America—Literatures. --- Literature, Modern—20th century. --- Creative nonfiction. --- Literature—Philosophy. --- Feminism and literature. --- Prose literature. --- North American Literature. --- Twentieth-Century Literature. --- Non-Fiction Literature. --- Feminist Literary Theory. --- Narrative Text and Prose.

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This book looks at Margaret Atwood’s use of food motifs in speculative fiction. Focusing on six novels – The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, the Maddaddam trilogy, and The Heart Goes Last – Katarina Labudova explores the environmental, ecological, and cultural questions at play and the possible future scenarios which emerge for humanity’s survival in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic conditions. Labudova argues that food has special relevance in these novels and that characters’ hunger, limited food choices, culinary creativity and eating rituals are central to Atwood’s depictions of hostile environments. She also links food to hierarchy, dominance and oppression in Atwood’s novels, and foregrounds the problem of hunger, both psychological or physical, caused by pollution and loss of contact with the natural and authentic. The book shows how Atwood’s writing draws from a range of genres, including apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, and thriller – and how food is an important, highly versatile motif linking these intertextual threads. Katarina Labudova lectures on British and Canadian literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia. She co-edited Presences and Absences: Transdisciplinary Essays (2013). She has published numerous articles on Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, identity, monstrosity and the representations of the body and food in postmodern literatures.

Sociology of culture --- Didactics of the arts --- Fiction --- American literature --- Literature --- Amerindian literature --- cultuur --- literatuur --- Amerikaanse cultuur --- fantasie (verbeelding) --- United States of America --- Fiction. --- America --- Culture --- Fiction Literature. --- North American Literature. --- Literary Aesthetics. --- Cultural Studies. --- Literatures. --- Aesthetics. --- Study and teaching. --- English Literature