134 books match the query 'English-speaking countries' and 6 start with w

cover of What Became of Wystan?: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry

What Became of Wystan?

Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry

Alan Jacobs

University of Arkansas Press, 1998

In this lucid and balanced treatise Alan Jacobs reveals the true parameters of Auden's change after the poet's move to America in 1939. By carefully examining poems that represent transitional moments in Auden's thinking, Jacobs identifies the points at which the tectonic plates of the poet's intellect clashed and the buckles and rifts these pressures caused in Auden's body of work.
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cover of Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes?: Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society

Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes?

Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society

Robert S. Paul

Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Robert S. Paul suggests that the reason detective fiction has won legions of readers may be that "the writer of detective fiction, without conscious intent, appeals directly to those moral and spiritual roots of society unconsciously affirmed and endorsed by the readers."

Because detective stories deal with crime and punishment they cannot help dealing implicitly with theological issues, such as the reality of good and evil, the recognition that humankind has the potential for both, the nature of evidence (truth and error), the significance of our existence in a rational order and hence the reality of truth, and the value of the individual in a civilized society.

Paul argues that the genre traces its true beginning to the Enlightenment and documents two related but different reactions to the theological issues involved: first, a line of writers who are generally positive in relation to their cultural setting, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle; and second, a reactionary strain, critical of the prevailing culture, that begins in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and continues through the anti-heroic writers like Arsène Lupin to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and John MacDonald.

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cover of Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers

Women Times Three

Writers, Detectives, Readers

Kathleen Gregory Klein

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

This volume explores the range of relationships among women writers, women detectives and women-centered mystery fiction, and women readers. Focusing on writers as diverse as Sara Paretsky, Joan Hess, Sarah Caudwell, P. D. James, Katherine V. Forrest, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Sue Grafton, D. R. Meredith, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Barbara Wilson, the authors analyze the development of detective fiction with a different agenda: the woman-authored woman detective.
       The eleven essays concentrate new attention on the trio of reader, writer, and text when all three are modified by the terms “woman” and “mystery.”
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cover of Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

Women Writing Plays

Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

Edited by Alexis Greene

University of Texas Press, 2006

Women's playwriting burgeoned in the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Ever since, playwriting women have been embracing new subjects, experimenting with form, and devising new ways of looking at the world. To honor their achievements and inspire future endeavors, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize was established in memory of an American actor, journalist, and feminist who died of breast cancer. In the nearly three decades of the award's existence, more than three hundred English-speaking women playwrights have been finalists for the Blackburn Prize in recognition of their work, including such prominent writers as Marsha Norman, Cheryl L. West, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of women's playwriting, as well as a celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It combines critical essays, playwrights' memoirs, and conversations and interviews with playwrights to explore how women's playwriting evolved in relation to the women's movement and how it continues to map new territory and find fresh modes of expression. The majority of contributors to this volume—playwrights, arts journalists, and theater critics—have had some connection to the Blackburn Prize, either as award recipients, play readers, or judges. The memoirs, conversations, and interviews come from some of the finest women playwrights of the last three decades. These dramatists offer fascinating insight into the playwriting art, theatrical careers, and women's goals in writing for the theater.

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cover of Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940

Women of the Left Bank

Paris, 1900-1940

By Shari Benstock

University of Texas Press, 1986

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years.

This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."

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cover of Women's Life-Writing: Finding Voice, Building Community

Women's Life-Writing

Finding Voice, Building Community

Linda S. Coleman

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

These essays offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little known, British and American, black and white, young and old, the essayists explore how women used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined.
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