Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining literary standards.
This book draws on the tools of literary analysis and cultural geography to investigate Ernest Hemingway's sophisticated construction of physical environments. In doing so, Laura Gruber Godfrey revises conventional approaches to Hemingway’s literary landscapes and provides insight about his fictional characters and his readers alike.
Collected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo's best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic, the perverse, and the strange, in a marvelous homage to Rampo's literary 'mentor', Edgar Allan Poe.
The seventy-eight letters in this Anthology are selected both for their intrinsic interest and to illustrate the range of functions letters performed in the ancient world. Dating from between c.500 BC and c.400 AD, they include naive and high-style, "real" and "fictitious", and classical and patristic items. Numerous letters survive from the ancient world. Their range is similarly wide: official and private, literary and non-literary, philosophical and mundane. Some were written by well-known literary figures, such as Ovid and Pliny, others were written by kings and emperors, while many survive from the pens of otherwise anonymous figures from the provinces.
Examining how ideas about species, sexuality, and gender link to 20th- and 21st-century literary texts, this wide-ranging collection of essays explores the complicated yet evocative relationship between animals and humans within a literary context. Contributors discuss writers like Franz Kafka, J. R. Ackerley, and Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi .