The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing literary works across histories, cultures and languages; and understanding how literary production is affected by forces such as imperialism and globalization. The essays demonstrate how detailed critical engagements with particular literary texts call forth differing conceptions of world literature, and, conversely, how theories of world literature shape our practices of readings. Subjects covered include cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, internationalism, scale and systems, sociological criticism, translation, scripts, and orality. This book also includes original analyses of genres and forms, ranging from tragedy to the novel and graphic fiction, lyric poetry to the short story and world
Thanks to its tightly paced, intricately plotted narrative and its astute psychological characterisation, Emma is commonly thought to be Jane Austen's finest novel. In the twelve chapters of this volume, leading Austen scholars illuminate some of its richest themes and topics, including money and rank, setting and community, music and riddles, as well as its style and structure. The context of Emma is also thoroughly explored, from its historical and literary roots through its publication and contemporary reception to its ever-growing international popularity in the form of translations and adaptations. Equally useful as an introduction for new students and as a research aid for mature scholars, this Companion reveals why Emma is a novel that only improves on re-reading, and gives the lie to Austen's famous speculation that in Emma Woodhouse she had created 'a heroine whom no one but myself will much like'.
The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry is the first collection of essays to explore postcolonial poetry through regional, historical, political, formal, textual, gender, and comparative approaches. The essays encompass a broad range of English-speakers from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands; the former settler colonies, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, especially non-Europeans; Ireland, Britain's oldest colony; and postcolonial Britain itself, particularly black and Asian immigrants and their descendants. The comparative essays analyze poetry from across the postcolonial anglophone world in relation to postcolonialism and modernism, fixed and free forms, experimentation, oral performance and creole languages, protest poetry, the poetic mapping of urban and rural spaces, poetic embodiments of sexuality and gender, poetry and publishing history, and poetry's response to, and reimagining of, globalization. Strengthening the place of poetry in
This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.
