Böcker i Literature in Context-serien

Bertolt Brecht in Context examines Brecht's significance and contributions as a writer and the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, along with his continued impact on theater around the world. It also examines Brecht's contributions to revolutionary thought and to poetry and his response to twentieth-century German history.

This volume is for undergraduate and graduate students as well as academic scholars. The short, focused chapters offer students clear and concise overviews of contexts that shape Mailer's work, without assuming in-depth knowledge of his oeuvre. Simultaneously, the chapters also offer seasoned scholars jumping off points for further research.

Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. This book gathers thirty-three new essays by an international group of scholars relating Wright's multi-faceted writings to contexts essential to understanding them: biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual.

This book provides fresh perspectives on some of the most important people and places in Ellison's life, and explores where his work and biography cross paths with some of the major topics of his time. It will be a key resource to scholars, students and teachers interested in Ralph Ellison.

This book guides the reader through the intersecting fields of biography, literary culture and reception, and the intellectual and cultural movements informing the history and politics of the Romantic period and in turn the life and works of Lord Byron (1788-1824).

Don DeLillo In Context benefits scholars and students interested in intersections between his literature and its contexts. Essays examine how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding his body of work.

This book is for an academic readership in Latin American and world literatures. It offers unprecedented coverage of the principal contexts in which leading Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) read and wrote, including family and Argentine history, the Western cultural tradition, both learned and popular, and the Middle East.

This book provides a comprehensive, indispensable map for readers at all levels to explore the pivotal contexts, shaping events, and enduring concerns informing the diverse body of work of one of the most consequential writers of the late 20th century and the turn of the millennium.

Provides crucial biographical, critical, historical, and cultural context for the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Britain's first feminist and political theorist. Leading scholars provide students and scholars of eighteenth-century feminism, literature, social, and political theory with essential background to understand Wollstonecraft's diverse writing.

Thirty-eight authoritative and lively essays by an international team of scholars examine a full range of Blake's works from lyrical songs to later myth, from writing to artworks, situating them in historical and cultural contexts. Research driven yet accessibly written, the essays will appeal to students, teachers, and academic experts alike.

Elizabeth Bishop is increasingly recognised as one of the twentieth century's most original writers. Consisting of thirty-five ground-breaking essays by an international team of authors, including biographers, literary critics, poets and translators, this volume addresses the biographical and literary inception of Bishop's originality, from her formative upbringing in New England and Nova Scotia to long residences in New York, France, Florida and Brazil. Her poetry, prose, letters, translations and visual art are analysed in turn, followed by detailed studies of literary movements such as surrealism and modernism that influenced her artistic development. Bishop's encounters with nature, music, psychoanalysis and religion receive extended treatment, likewise her interest in dreams and humour. Essays also investigate the impact of twentieth-century history and politics on Bishop's life writing, and what it means to read Bishop via eco-criticism, postcolonial theory and queer studies.

"Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation"--

"Premier playwright of modern theater and trailblazer of the short story, Anton Chekhov was also a practising doctor, journalist, writer of comic sketches, philanthropist and activist. This volume provides an accessible guide to Chekhov's multifarious interests and influences, with over 30 succinct chapters covering his rich intellectual milieu and his tumultuous socio-political environment, as well as the legacy of his work in over two centuries of interdisciplinary cultures and media around the world. With a Preface by Cornel West, a chronology and Further Reading list, this collection is the essential guide to Chekhov's writing and the manifold worlds he inhabited"--

"Salman Rushdie in Context discusses Rushdie's life and work in the context of the multiple geographies he has inhabited and the wider socio-cultural contexts in which his writing is emerging, published and read. This book reveals the evolving political trajectory around transnationalism, multiculturalism and its discontents, so prominently engaged with by Salman Rushdie in relation to South Asia, its diasporas, Britain, and the USA in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Focused on the aesthetic, biographical, cultural, creative, historical and literary contexts of his works, the book reveals his deep engagement with processes of decolonization, emergent nationalisms in South Asia, Europe and the USA, and diasporic identity constructions and how they have been affected by globalisation. The book traces how, through his fiction and non-fiction, Rushdie has profoundly shaped the discussion of important questions of global citizenship and migration that continue to resonate today"--

Tolstoy's life and thought engaged a vast array of national and international contexts: historical, religious, scientific, philosophical, socio-political, and artistic. This volume introduces those contexts and situates Tolstoy-the man and the writer-in the rich and tumultuous period in which his thought and creative output came to fruition.

The definitive guide to Moliere's world and his afterlife, this is an accessible contextual guide for academics, undergraduates and theatre professionals alike. Interdisciplinary and diverse in scope, each chapter offers a different perspective on the social, cultural, intellectual, and theatrical environment within which Moliere operated, as well as demonstrating his subsequent impact both within France and across the world. Offering fresh insight for those working in the fields of French Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies and French History, Moliere in Context is an exceptional tribute to the premier French dramatist on the 400th anniversary of his birth.

"Daniel Defoe established the genre of the novel with Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. He also wrote pioneering works of non-fiction and verse. This collection of short, accessible essays by leading scholars helps students and general readers understand Defoe's writing and the vibrant culture in which he lived"--

The German academic and writer W. G. Sebald made an astounding ascent into the canon of world literature. In this volume, leading experts from both the English- and the German-speaking worlds explore his celebrated prose works published in the short span from 1996 to his premature death in 2001. Special attention is paid to Sebald's unpublished texts and books awaiting translation into English. The volume - illustrated with many unpublished archive images - scrutinizes the dual nature of Sebald's life and work, located between Germany and England, academic and literary writing, vilification and idolization. Through nearly forty essays on a broad range of topics, W. G. Sebald in Context achieves a revision of our understanding of Sebald, defying many clichés about him. Particular attention is paid to the manifold ways in which Sebald's writings exerted a legacy far beyond literature, especially in the areas of art, cinema, and popular music.

"Providing a multi-faceted survey of Luigi Pirandello's life and works, this volume explores his sensitivity to place alongside the intellectuals and dramatists who shaped his perspective. It reveals how profound shifts in science, philosophy, culture, and politics at the fin-de-siâecle fashioned him into a revolutionary playwright of his century"--