The creative vision of Bessie Head

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Onookome Okome

"This is a full-length study of Kenule Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni Minority and Human Rights activist who was judicially murdered on November 10, 1995. One remarkable feature of the essays selected for this volume is the intensity of each contributor's voice to the very controversial man whose judicial murder has come to signify the extent of misrule in Nigeria.". "Questions of nationhood, ethnic minority and power politics in Nigeria are discussed as each contributor examines the corpus of his literary and political ideas, pointing out the direction of his thought and the enduring contribution this writer and social critics have left behind on Nigeria's literary and political arenas."--BOOK JACKET.

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Janet Galligani Casey

"The Novel and the American Left focuses exclusively on left-leaning fiction of the Depression era, lending visibility and increased critical validity to these works and showing the various ways in which they contributed not only to theorizations of the Left but also to debates about the content and form of American fiction. In theoretical terms, the collection as a whole contributes to the larger reconceptualization of American modernity currently under way. More pragmatically, individual essays suggest specific authors, texts, and approaches to teachers and scholars seeking to broaden and/or complicate more traditional "'American modernism" syllabi and research agendas." "The selected essays take up, among others, such "hard-core" leftist writers as Mike Gold and Myra Page, who were associated with the Communist Party; the popular novels of James M. Cain and Kenneth Fearing, whose works were made into successful films; and critically acclaimed but nonetheless "lost" novelists such as Josephine Johnson, whose Now in November (Pulitzer Prize, 1936) anticipates and complicates the more popular agrarian mythos of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath." "This volume will be of interest not only to literary specialists but also to historians, social scientists, and students of American cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jesús M. Usunáriz, Edwin Williamson (eds

"Este libro examina las opiniones -críticas feroces y grotescas o alabanzas cortesanas- sobre la figura de los validos y favoritos; se analiza el profundo impacto que suscitaron las tesis de Maquiavelo en las obras de poetas y tratadistas. Calderón, Cervantes, Quevedo, Alemán, Lope de Vega, Guevara, Gracián, Ribadeneyra y un gran número de autores (teólogos, historiadores, arbitristas...) aparecen en estas páginas como hombres que conocían y participaban de los retos políticos y sociales de su época."--P. [4] of cover.

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Timothy Melley

"In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since--and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments--from The Manchurian Candidate through 24--as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others." -- Publisher's website.