The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature

Author: Edward James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107493730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Fantasy is a creation of the Enlightenment, and the recognition that excitement and wonder can be found in imagining impossible things. From the ghost stories of the Gothic to the zombies and vampires of twenty-first-century popular literature, from Mrs Radcliffe to Ms Rowling, the fantastic has been popular with readers. Since Tolkien and his many imitators, however, it has become a major publishing phenomenon. In this volume, critics and authors of fantasy look at its history since the Enlightenment, introduce readers to some of the different codes for the reading and understanding of fantasy, and examine some of the many varieties and subgenres of fantasy; from magical realism at the more literary end of the genre, to paranormal romance at the more popular end. The book is edited by the same pair who produced The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (winner of a Hugo Award in 2005).

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature

Author: Edward James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521429595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
This is the first introduction to the whole field of modern fantasy literature in the English-speaking world.

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

Author: Edward James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521016575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Table of contents

The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen

Author: Deborah Cartmell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827553
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
This Companion offers a multi-disciplinary approach to literature on film and television. Writers are drawn from different backgrounds to consider broad topics, such as the issue of adaptation from novels and plays to the screen, canonical and popular literature, fantasy, genre and adaptations for children. There are also case studies, such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the nineteenth-century novel and modernism, which allow the reader to place adaptations of the work of writers within a wider context. An interview with Andrew Davies, whose work includes Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Bleak House (2005), reveals the practical choices and challenges that face the professional writer and adaptor. The Companion as a whole provides an extensive survey of an increasingly popular field of study.

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body

Author: Travis M. Foster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110889609X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
The human body has been depicted in a variety of ways across a range of cultural and historical locations. It has been described, variously, as a biological entity, clothing for the soul, a site of cultural production, a psychosexual construct, and a material encumbrance. Each of these different approaches brings with it a range of anthropological, political, theological, and psychological discourses that explore and construct identities and subject positions. This Companion examines connections between American literature and bodies from the eighteenth century through the present. It reveals the singular way that literature can help us understand the body's entanglement within social and biological influences, and it traces the body's existence within histories of race, gender, and ability. This volume details the genres, critical fields, and interpretive practices that best facilitate the analysis of bodies in the full span of American literary imaginings.

The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing

Author: David Morley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
Creative writing has become a highly professionalised academic discipline, with popular courses and prestigious degree programmes worldwide. This book is a must for all students and teachers of creative writing, indeed for anyone who aspires to be a published writer. It engages with a complex art in an accessible manner, addressing concepts important to the rapidly growing field of creative writing, while maintaining a strong craft emphasis, analysing exemplary models of writing and providing related writing exercises. Written by professional writers and teachers of writing, the chapters deal with specific genres or forms - ranging from the novel to new media - or with significant topics that explore the cutting edge state of creative writing internationally (including creative writing and science, contemporary publishing and new workshop approaches).

Rhetorics of Fantasy

Author: Farah Mendlesohn
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819573914
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
This sweeping study of fantasy literature offers “new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts). Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Drawing on nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn identifies four categories—portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal—that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to some of the best works in the contemporary field. Mendlesohn discusses works by more than one hundred authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams, and many others.

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric

Author: Erik Gunderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827804
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
Rhetoric thoroughly infused the world and literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity. This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of rhetorical theory and practice in that world, from Homer to early Christianity, accessible to students and non-specialists, whether within classics or from other periods and disciplines. Its basic premise is that rhetoric is less a discrete object to be grasped and mastered than a hotly contested set of practices that include disputes over the very definition of rhetoric itself. Standard treatments of ancient oratory tend to take it too much in its own terms and to isolate it unduly from other social and cultural concerns. This volume provides an overview of the shape and scope of the problems while also identifying core themes and propositions: for example, persuasion, virtue, and public life are virtual constants. But they mix and mingle differently, and the contents designated by each of these terms can also shift.

Terry Pratchett

Author: Andrew M. Butler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781882968312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
Terry Pratchett has long been on Britain's most popular and successful authors, and has already won many fans in North America as well. He is best known for the bestselling Discworld series. This is a new edition of of the first full-length study of Pratchett. The first edition was shortlisted for the Hugo Award in 2001 and the 2001 Locus Award for Non-fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel

Author: Robert L. Caserio
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139828339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
The twentieth-century English novel encompasses a vast body of work, and one of the most important and most widely read genres of literature. Balancing close readings of particular novels with a comprehensive survey of the last century of published fiction, this Companion introduces readers to more than a hundred major and minor novelists. It demonstrates continuities in novel-writing that bridge the century's pre- and post-War halves and presents leading critical ideas about English fiction's themes and forms. The essays examine the endurance of modernist style throughout the century, the role of nationality and the contested role of the English language in all its forms, and the relationships between realism and other fictional modes: fantasy, romance, science fiction. Students, scholars and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to the history of the English novel.