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The Edinburgh companion to twentieth-century British and American War literature
The first reference book to deal so fully and incisively with the cultural representations of war in 20th-century English and US literature and film. The volume covers the two World Wars as well as specific conflicts that generated literary and imaginative responses from English and US writers.
eBook
The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English
Opening up the field of diasporic Anglo-Arab literature to critical debate, this companion spans from the first Arab novel in 1911 to the resurgence of the Anglo-Arabic novel in the last 20 years. There are chapters on authors such as Ameen Rihani, Ahdaf Soueif and Waguih Ghali, and interviews with Laila Lalami, Hisham Matar and Fadia Faqir.
eBook
A Shrinking Island
This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, \"Civilisation has shrunk.\" Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England,A Shrinking Islandtracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s.
Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.
eBook
Postwar british literature and postcolonial studies
This book offers a reassessment of current approaches to postwar writing in Britain in light of ongoing debates about the legacy of imperialism and decolonization, the cultural implications of globalization, and the strengthening of alternative conceptions of national identity across the UK. Graham MacPhee discusses a wide range of writers from W.H. Auden to Linto Kwsi Johnson and from Sam Selvon to Ian McEwan.
eBook
Cricket, Literature and Culture
In his important contribution to the growing field of sports literature, Anthony Bateman traces the relationship between literary representations of cricket and Anglo-British national identity from 1850 to the mid 1980s. Examining newspaper accounts, instructional books, fiction, poetry, and the work of editors, anthologists, and historians, Bateman elaborates the ways in which a long tradition of literary discourse produced cricket's cultural status and meaning. His critique of writing about cricket leads to the rediscovery of little-known texts and the reinterpretation of well-known works by authors as diverse as Neville Cardus, James Joyce, the Great War poets, and C.L.R. James. Beginning with mid-eighteenth century accounts of cricket that provide essential background, Bateman examines the literary evolution of cricket writing against the backdrop of key historical moments such as the Great War, the 1926 General Strike, and the rise of Communism. Several case studies show that cricket simultaneously asserted English ideals and created anxiety about imperialism, while cricket's distinctively colonial aesthetic is highlighted through Bateman's examination of the discourse surrounding colonial cricket tours and cricketers like Prince Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of India and Sir Learie Constantine of Trinidad. Featuring an extensive bibliography, Bateman's book shows that, while the discourse surrounding cricket was key to its status as a symbol of nation and empire, the embodied practice of the sport served to destabilise its established cultural meaning in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.
eBook