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      • Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2020

        Harry Potter and Beyond

        On J. K. Rowling's Fantasies and Other Fictions

        by Tison Pugh

        Harry Potter and Beyond explores J. K. Rowling’s beloved best-selling series and its virtuoso reimagining of British literary traditions. Weaving together elements of fantasy, the school-story novel, detective fiction, allegory, and bildungsroman, the Harry Potter novels evade simplistic categorization as children’s or fantasy literature. Along with the seven foundational novels of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and Beyond assesses the extraordinary range of supplementary material concerning the young wizard and his allies and a range of other Potter-inspired narratives. Pugh also surveys Rowling’s literary fiction The Casual Vacancy and her detective series written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Through this comprehensive overview of Rowling’s body of work, Pugh reveals the vast web of connections between yesteryear’s stories and Rowling’s vivid creations.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2019

        Understanding Bharati Mukherjee

        by Ruth Maxey

        Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author’s complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee’s first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee’s writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee’s work.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2021

        Understanding Colson Whitehead

        Revised and Expanded Edition

        by Derek C. Maus

        In this revised and updated edition of Understanding Colson Whitehead, Derek C. Maus unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead’s books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019’s The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead’s attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2014

        Understanding Truman Capote

        by Thomas Fahy

        Truman Capote continues to have a powerful hold over the popular imagination. His glamorous lifestyle, which included hobnobbing with the rich and famous and frequenting the most elite nightclubs in Manhattan, makes him the subject of ongoing interest for public and academic audiences alike. In Understanding Truman Capote, Fahy provides a new direction for Capote studies that offers a way to reconsider the author’s work. By reading Capote’s work in its historical context, Fahy reveals the politics shaping his writing and positions him as a writer deeply engaged with the social anxieties of the 1940s and 1950s. Understanding Truman Capote also applies a highly interdisciplinary framework to the author’s writing that includes discussions of  McCarthyism, the Lavender Scare, automobile culture, juvenile delinquency, suburbia, Beat culture, the early civil rights movement, female sexuality as embodied by celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, and atomic age anxieties.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2018

        Understanding John Updike

        by Frederic Svoboda

        The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932–2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author’s deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended, close readings of Updike’s most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood.  Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike’s professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation—not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2019

        Understanding James Baldwin

        by Marc Dudley

        James Baldwin died almost 30 years ago, but his eloquent and powerful novels, short stories, essays, and poems that explore the pernicious effects of racial, sexual, and class discrimination find new resonance today. Marc K. Dudley examines Baldwin’s career and traces the shift in Baldwin’s aspirations from occupying the pulpit to becoming a writer amid the turmoil of sexual self-discovery and the harsh realities of racism and homophobia. Dudley’s analyses of key works in Baldwin’s canon—including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Devil Finds Work—demonstrate the consistency of Baldwin’s vision and thematic concerns.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2020

        Understanding Joseph Roth

        by Sidney Rosenfeld

        A writer described as a “Jew in search of a fatherland” and a “wanderer in flight toward a tragic end,” the Austrian writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939) spent his life in pursuit of a national and cultural identity and his final years writing in fervent opposition to the Third Reich. In this introduction to Roth’s novels, which include Job and The Radetzky March, Sidney Rosenfeld demonstrates how the experience of homelessness not only shaped Roth’s life but also decisively defined his body of work. Rosenfeld suggests that more than any other component of Roth’s varied fiction, his skillful portrayals of uprootedness and the search for home explain his international appeal.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2018

        Understanding Irène Némirovsky

        by Margaret Scanlan

        Understanding Irène Némirovsky offers a sympathetic, nuanced reading of Némirovsky’s fiction. Scanlan begins with an overview of the writer’s life—her upper-class Russian childhood, her family’s immigration to France, her troubled relationship with her neglectful mother—and then traces how such experiences informed her novels and stories, including works set in revolutionary Russia, among the nouveau riche on the Riviera, and in struggling French families and failing businesses during the Depression. Scanlan examines the Suite Française and other works that address the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Viewing Némirovsky as a major talent with a distinctive style and voice, Scanlan argues for Némirovsky’s keen awareness of the unsettled times in which she lived and examines the ways in which even her novels of manners analyze larger social issues.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        February 2017

        Understanding Franz Kafka

        by Allen Thiher

        In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle.  Thiher shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity.     Also avaiable: Understanding Marcel Proust & Understanding Robert Musil

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2016

        Understanding Roberto Bolaño

        by Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat

        Understanding Roberto Bolaño offers a comprehensive analysis of this critically acclaimed Chilean poet and novelist whose work brought global attention to Latin American literature. Gutiérrez-Mouat chronologically contextualizes literary interpretations of Bolaño’s work in terms of his life, cultural background, and political ideals. Gutiérrez-Mouat explains Bolaño’s work to an English-speaking audience—including his relatively neglected poetry—and conveys a sense of where Bolaño fits in the Latin American tradition. Since his death, eleven of his novels, four short story collections, and three poetry collections have been translated into English.

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