New essays providing critical views of Coetzee's major works for the scholar and the general reader.

Breaks new ground by both analyzing the literary qualities of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth and contextualizing their concern with climate change within the wider crises of the Anthropocene.

Details Lawrence's reception of Melville and reveals his underacknowledged role in the Melville Revival, while contributing to the history of the book and the study of the creative process.

New essays examining the intellectual allegiances of Coetzee, arguably the most decorated and critically acclaimed writer of fiction in English today and a deeply intellectual and philosophical writer.

New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles.

Employing close reading of a kind usually associated with the study of lyric poetry, this book offers a general framework for reading African-American (and American) literature.

An investigation of the phenomenon of the framed formal center in literature of the last 180 years, illuminating both the works and correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations.

Liz Jensen, a British author of eight novels, is among today's most innovative writers. Her literary thrillers occupy the terrain between realism and science fiction. This first study of Jensen centers on the very diverse "otherworlds" she creates in each of her novels, which can consist of an indeterminate space of ontological instability, a zone in which real and unreal converge to destabilize the realist text, as in Egg Dancing (1995) and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004). In other novels the otherworld relies on defamiliarization: thus in War Crimes for the Home (2002) the experience of war is transformed by being seen from a woman's perspective. In still other cases, the otherworld spans the novel's entire topos, as in The Paper Eater (2000), the full-blown utopia at the center of Jensen's oeuvre.
Jensen's work approaches contemporary social issues such as religious fundamentalism, ecological disaster, and assisted procreation. Simultaneously, itdisplays a number of characteristics of erudite fiction, including self-reflexivity, inter- and intratextual reference, parody, pastiche, and burlesque. Notwithstanding the "popular" elements of Jensen's work, Helen E. Mundler's study adopts a rigorously academic approach to it, referencing canonical works but also more innovative texts, particularly by contemporary women writers, as points of comparison.

Helen E. Mundler is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at UPEC (Université Paris-Est Créteil) with a research affiliation at the Université Paris-X Nanterre-La Défense.