The Cambridge Companion To Twentieth Century Literature And Politics

Many twentieth-century literary writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This book explores literature's direct relationship to politics, offering new ways of thinking about the troubled relationship between literature and politics.

In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.

This volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel.

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.

This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.

For a long time, people had been schooled to think of modern literature's relationship to politics as indirect or obscure, and often to find the politics of literature deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. But twentieth-century writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This Companion tell a story of the rich and diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped – and also clashed. Covering some of the century's most influential political ideas, moments, and movements, nineteen academic experts uncover new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. Liberalism, communism, fascism, suffragism, pacifism, federalism, different nationalisms, civil rights, women's rights, sexual rights, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, neoliberalism: twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, events, and campaigns.

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.

This Companion provides new ways of reading a wide range of influential women's poetry. Leading international scholars offer insights on a century of writers, drawing out the special function of poetry and the poets' use of language, whether it is concerned with the relationship between verbal and visual art, experimental poetics, war, landscape, history, cultural identity or 'confessional' lyrics. Collectively, the chapters cover well established and less familiar poets, from Edith Sitwell and Mina Loy, through Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Jennings to Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland and Jo Shapcott. They also include poets at the forefront of poetry trends, such as Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Patience Agbabi, Caroline Bergvall, Medbh McGuckian and Carol Ann Duffy. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is aimed at students and poetry enthusiasts wanting to deepen their knowledge of some of the finest modern poets.