Litteraturstudier: skønlitteratur og forfattere

Daniel Clowes (b. 1961) emerged from the "alternative comics" boom of the 1980s as one of the most significant cartoonists and most distinctive voices in the development of the graphic novel. His serialized Eightball comics, collected in such books as David Boring, Ice Haven, and Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, helped to set the standards of sophistication and complexity for the medium. The screenplay for Ghost World, which Clowes co-adapted (with Terry Zwigoff) from his graphic novel of the same name, was nominated for an Academy Award.Since his early, edgy Lloyd Llewellyn and Eightball comics, Clowes has developed along with the medium, from a satirical and sometimes vituperative surrealist to an unmatched observer of psychological and social subtleties. In this collection of interviews reaching from 1988 to 2009, the cartoonist discusses his earliest experiences reading superhero comics, his time at the Pratt Institute, his groundbreaking comics career, and his screenplays for Ghost World and Art School Confidential. Several of these pieces are drawn from rare small-press or self-published zines, including Clowes's first published interview. He talks at length about the creative process, from the earliest traces of a story, to his technical approaches to layout, drawing, inking, lettering, and coloring. These interviews reveal a thoughtful artist, deeply interested in the history of comics and the potential of the medium.An assistant professor of English at East Carolina University, Ken Parille is the author of Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and 'The Boy-Problem' in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. A lecturer in English at the University of Vermont, Isaac Cates has published in Indy Magazine, International Journal of Comic Art, ImageText, and many other periodicals.

From the underbelly of the nuts behind hit websites failblog.org and icanhascheezburger.com comes FAIL Nation, your silent guide and handler to the not-even-close-to-perfect nation of FAIL, chock-full of irrelevant tips and useless suggestions about why to shop, who to eat, and when to see. So fasten your exit and check for the nearest seatbelt?your FAIL plane departs now.

Two London Fairies is a novel written by George Robert Sims and published in 1906. The book tells the story of two young women, Dolly and Mabel, who come from humble backgrounds and dream of a better life in London. They are both determined to succeed and make something of themselves, but they face many obstacles along the way.The novel is set in the early 1900s and provides a vivid portrait of life in London during that time. The city is bustling with activity, and Dolly and Mabel are drawn into its vibrant and sometimes seedy underworld. They encounter a cast of colorful characters, including street performers, artists, and criminals, as they try to make their way in the world.Despite the challenges they face, Dolly and Mabel remain determined to achieve their goals. They work hard and make sacrifices, but they also find joy and love along the way. The novel is a celebration of the human spirit and the power of perseverance in the face of adversity.Two London Fairies is a classic work of fiction that offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of early 20th-century London. It is a compelling and entertaining read that will appeal to anyone interested in history, social issues, or simply a good story.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

The Queen of the Fairies, A Village Story: And Other Poems is a collection of poems written by Violet Fane and published in 1876. The book features a variety of poems, including the titular poem about a queen of the fairies who falls in love with a mortal man, as well as other poems that explore themes of love, nature, and human emotion. The poems are written in a lyrical and romantic style, with vivid imagery and a focus on the beauty of the natural world. The collection also includes a number of shorter poems and sonnets, as well as longer narrative poems that tell stories of love and loss. Overall, The Queen of the Fairies, A Village Story: And Other Poems is a charming and evocative collection of poetry that captures the spirit of the Victorian era.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

The New York Times bestseller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five-a "gripping" posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut's previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace. A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve previously unpublished writings. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor and outraged moral sense, the pieces range from a letter written by Vonnegut to his family in 1945, informing them that he'd been taken prisoner by the Germans, to his last speech, delivered after his death by his son Mark, who provides a warmly personal introduction to the collection. Taken together, these pieces provide fresh insight into Vonnegut's enduring literary genius and reinforce his ongoing moral relevance in today's world.Includes an Introduction by Mark Vonnegut

Speculating about the cultural metaphors in Janet Evanovich's wildly popular mystery series (which includes 11 books, from "One for the Money" to "Eleven on Top"), this anthology takes a look at lingerie-buyer-turned-bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum and catalogs her bad luck with cars (she's blown up quite a few), her good luck with men, her unorthodox approach to weapon storage, and the rich tapestry of her milieu: Trenton, New Jersey, also known as The Burg. The contributors praise the way the series smartly spoofs that familiar chick-lit epiphany--I have a bad job and what I really want is a good man!--in "Bounty Hunting as a Metaphor for Dating, Why Stephanie Should Quit Her Job ... but Never Will, " and "Nothing Better than a Bad Boy Gone Good." Several essays veer from the chick-lit perspective and focus instead on the comic theme of luck and chance that ties Stephanie to the barroom gamblers and gangster meanies of her home town in "Luck of the Italian?: Skill versus Chance."

No place celebrates Christmas like Dixie, and with this charming, humorous guide, anyone can learn how to deck the halls, Southern styleIt's the one time of the year when both the divine and debutantes take center stage in a perfect storm of hot glue and cheese grits: Christmas. But successfully navigating through the holiday season can be more complex than Santa's midnight journey. There are pitfalls hotter than any chimney -- and social situations more slippery than any roof! But now The Official Guide to Christmas in the South has arrived to reveal the finer and sometimes unspoken details of Dixie etiquette.Perfect for a true Southerner's coffee table or an imposter's survival guide, The Official Guide to Christmas in the South is the gift that will keep on regifting season after season.

For his many devoted readers, Philip K. Dick is not only one of the "one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) but a source of divine revelation. In the riveting style that won accolades for The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead, follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink light, three-eyed invaders, and messages from the Roman Empire. Drawing on interviews as well as unpublished sources, he vividly conjures the spirit of this restless observer of American postwar malaise who subverted the materials of science fiction--parallel universes, intricate time loops, collective delusions--to create classic works of contemporary anxiety.

Step into the WardrobeThis peerless companion has served as an adventurer's passport to the land of Narnia for twenty-five years and was used by the cast and crew of the major motion picture The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. From Aslan, the Great Lion, to Zardeenah, the mysterious lady of the night, this comprehensive, accessible book contains hundreds of alphabetically arranged and indexed entries covering all the characters, events, places, and themes that Lewis brilliantly wove into his timeless and magical world.For readers of all ages, this is the perfect guide for the enchanted world of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

"Kreeft shows how Tolkien gives a very convincing myth or vision which makes sense of reality and gives arguments for them. This is an exciting and insightful book."

In this enlightening look at J.K. Rowling's phenomenal bestsellers, a Christian minister illuminates the powerful, positive message Harry Potter and his magical world bring to readers of all ages.Potter fever has swept the world and shows no signs of abating. The books and the recent movie have attracted millions of followers and fans, all of them eagerly awaiting the next installments. Along with the widespread enjoyment and appreciation of Harry Potter and his friendships, however, criticism of the series has also emerged. The opposition has focused on two issues; the darkness of the novels and their apparent endorsement of witchcraft and the occult. In A Charmed Life, Francis Bridger, a theologian and pastor, argues that far from promoting the dark arts, the Potter books are firmly based in Christian values, and offer valuable insights into our characters, our relationships, our priorities, and our spirituality.Taking readers on an entertaining tour of Potterworld, Bridger shows that each adventure presents new ways of expressing and exploring key spiritual issues, from the meaning of justice, to the need to confront fears, to the debilitating effects of evil. As Harry and his friends deal with one another, face their enemies, cope with their variously dysfunctional families, and experience the common problems of growing up, Bridger demonstrates, it is their intrinsic human goodness, love, and friendship--not wizardry or magic--that allows them to triumph over evil.

Examines the psychological, cultural, and political implications of Gothic fiction, and helps to explain why horror writers and filmmakers have found such large and receptive audiences eager for the experience of being scared out of their wits.

The sweep of Japanese literature in all its great variety was made available to Western readers for the first time in this anthology. Every genre and style, from the celebrated No plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, find a place in this book. An introduction by Donald Keene places the selections in their proper historical context, allowing the readers to enjoy the book both as literature and as a guide to the cultural history of Japan. Selections include "Man'yoshu" or "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves" from the ancient period; "Kokinshu" or "Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry," "The Tosa Diary" of Ki No Tsurayuki, "Yugao" from "Tales of Genji" of Murasaki Shikibu, and "The Pillow Book" of Sei Shonagon from the Heian Period; "The Tale of the Heike" from the Kamakura Period; Plan of the No Stage, "Birds of Sorrow" of Seami Motokiyo, and "Three Poets at Minase" from the Muromachi Period; and Sections from Basho, including "The Narrow Road of Oku," "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki" by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Waka and haiku of the Tokugawa Period.

In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned book, Ayn Rand throws a new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again Miss Rand eloquently demonstrates her refusal to let popular catchwords and conventional ideas stand between her and the truth as she has discovered it. The Romantic Manifesto takes its place beside The Fountainhead as one of the most important achievements of our time.

The more radical poetries today are known by their admirers and detractors alike for their extreme difficulty, a difficulty, Marjorie Perloff argues, dependent less on the recondite imagery and obscure allusion one associates with early modernism than on a large-scale deconstruction of syntax and emphasis on morphology and pun, paragram and paratext. She suggests this new "non-sensical" poetry cannot be explained away as some sort of pernicious fad, designed to fool the gullible and flatter the pretentious; it is, on the contrary, an inevitable--and important--response to the wholesale mediaization of postmodern culture in the United States. But the conventional alienation model, the still-dominant myth of the sensitive and isolated poet, confronted by the hostile mass media, is no longer adequate. On the contrary, Perloff argues, we must recognize that poetry today, like the visual arts and theater, is always contaminated by media discourse; there is no escape into some bucolic, purer realm. What this means is that poetry actively engages the communication models of everyday discourse, producing language constructions that foreground the artifice of the writing process, the materiality of writing itself. How the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the great modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the Donahue "talk show", or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the discourse of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, GeorgeOppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, a polymath, one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, no musical note, no painted surface, no theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. That poet is John Cage and it is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.

Faszination, Inspiration und sexuelle Freiheit - ein neuer Blick auf englische Autor*innenund ihr Berlin der Goldenen Zwanziger.John Chancellor stellte 1929 in seinem Reiseführer »How to Be Happy in Berlin« eine Frage, die englische Autor*innen insgesamt seit mehr als hundert Jahren beschäftigt - mit unterschiedlichsten Antworten und weitreichender kultureller Wirkung. Neben W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood und Stephen Spender, dem berühmten Dreigestirn, das mit seinen Texten und deren Verfilmungen den Grundstein für den Mythos Berlins legte, spielten dabei auch unbekanntere Stimmen eine Rolle: Die Übersetzerin Freuds, Alix Strachey, die aus Berlin eine Fülle lebendiger Briefen an ihren Ehemann James in London schrieb. Die Botschaftergattin Helen D`Abernon, die in ihren Memoiren das soziale Elend Berlins nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg ebenso beschreibt wie die rauschenden Feste in der britischen Botschaft. Oder der pro-faschistische Avantgard-Autor Wyndham Lewis, der in Berlin zunächst der Faszination für Hitler erlag und gegen die sexuelle Freizügigkeit Berlins in der Weimarer Republik wetterte.Der zweisprachige und reich bebilderte Begleitband zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung geht den vielfältigen Spuren dieser und vieler weiterer Autor*innen nach. Zugleich erklärt er, wie vor allem die männlichen Autoren den Mythos Berlins aktiv herbeischrieben und an welchen Orten sich das abspielte, was in englischen Briefen, Romanen, Memoiren, Reiseführern und Tagebüchern zu höchst ambivalenten Berlinbildern verarbeitet wurde. Dieser Mythos wirkt bis heute nach und findet etwa sein Echo in den Werken gegenwärtiger englischsprachiger Autor*innen, die sich Berlin als Zufluchtsort nach dem Brexit gesucht haben.

Siri Hustvedt is one of the few contemporary US-American authors who consistently engages with the questions of seeing and perceiving in her work. However, despite the growing academic interest in her narratives, many aspects related to the depiction of these fundamental practices have been left unaddressed in the criticism. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the concepts of seeing and perceiving as represented in both her fictional and nonfictional writings published to date and argues that Hustvedt's texts reveal the deep entanglement of the senses that inform a meaningful human experience. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist epistemology, this study highlights Hustvedt's interest in embodied cultural habits and implicit forms of knowledge that play a crucial role in the ways people perceive the world and each other. Through the motif of gender masquerade, her narratives explore how the ideas about femininity and masculinity shape people's perceptions and interactions.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Wuppertal, language: English, abstract: This paper compares Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and Anna Todd's "The Spring Girls" paying special attention to gender roles in the two novels. It aims to look at Anna Todd¿s retelling by portraying the change and development of the role of women and feminism in a period of 150 years. So, the main question will be: What changes and new issues in the role of women in America can be found in the retelling, "The Spring Girls", which was published 150 years after "Little Women" and how does the author, Anna Todd, deal with Louisa May Alcott¿s legacy?In order to answer the question above, the paper will start off by building a theoretical frame on the history of feminism and adaptation theory. Latter will firstly, define the term adaptation and then, focus on the general changes and their effects in "The Spring Girls". Next, the paper will continue with the main part which will depict more specific changes in the new novel, changes in the role of women and the perception of feminism. In doing so, it will focus on four different topics, namely, the home sphere, class and social acceptance, relationships and sexuality, and last but not least the new woman. This is aimed to be achieved by analyzing and comparing Louisa May Alcott¿s Little Women and Anna Todd¿s retelling The Spring Girls. The analysis of the stories of all of the four sisters instead of only one, as found in most research papers, aims to offer a new feminist reading of the novel.