Achebe or Soyinka?

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David Lodge

"Human Consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping - even rediscovery - by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. As the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of understanding that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in light of recent investigations in the sciences."--BOOK JACKET.

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Alexandra W. Schultheis

"In Regenerative Fiction, Alexandra W. Schultheis brings postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories together to explore this tumultuous zone, a place that is at once cutting edge, open wound, and sutured scar. This analysis of the authors' political and aesthetic strategies reveals fissures in the ruling ideology of subject and nation as well as immanent resistance to it."--Jacket.

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Nigel Harkness

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-76), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity." "Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sand's novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sand's fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of these performances of masculinity offers fresh insights into gendered processes of literary representation in the nineteenth-century French novel."--Jacket.

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Jonathan P. Davis

Few can argue with the unprecedented success author Stephen King has established in the two decades following the publication of his first novel, Carrie. He has built a reputation as the world's premier storyteller, and his name has become commonplace within the home. American publishers, producers, and fans have all capitalized on his unquestionable ability to entertain. But it is this same success that has often overshadowed the elements of his fiction that contribute to the canvas of literature established in the twentieth century by authors such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. All have lasting reputations as masters of the American literary tradition. Stephen King's America aims to heighten awareness of the numerous American issues that resonate throughout King's fiction, issues that bear universal application to the evolution of the human condition. Within his stories can be found a diverse study of all that makes life in America, land of the free, unique: the struggle for moral health; leaving the splendor of childhood at the corruption of innocence; an advanced technology that often exceeds its understood potentials; the rewards and sacrifices within a free-market society; the delicate balance between autonomy and collective social harmony; and the simple solution to survival in an adverse world. Take a closer look at these subtexts and discover a new dimension in the reading of Stephen King's fiction. By focusing on these issues, and by presenting four rich interviews with men close to the work of Stephen King, Stephen King's America lifts the veil that is the surface of his stories, shining a pleasantly distinct light on the sources that are both his subliminal and apparent strengths as a modern author.