This book traces the presence of the theater, both as an abstract concept and a literal space, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens as it attempts to explain the parallel depictions of consciousness that are found in both authors' work.Literary modernists inherited a self that was fallible, a self that was seen as an ultimately failed gesture of expression, and throughout much modern literature is a sense of disillusionment with more traditional notions of s...

With an Introduction and Notes by Sara Haslam, Department of English, The Open University.The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Set before the First World War, it tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe.They are 'playing the game...

Race remains a potent and divisive force in our society. Whether it is the shooting of minority people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, or the recent KKK rallies that have been in the news, it is clear that the scars from the United States’ histories of slavery and racial discrimination run too deep to simply be ignored. But what are the most productive ways to deal with the toxic and torturous legacies of American racism?Slavery’s Descendants brin...

A Rebels' War assembles forty-seven personal accounts of the Confederacy, placing battlefield recollection beside diary, memoir, political testimony, naval narrative, and reflections on civilian life. Its varied prose ranges from formal military reportage to intimate domestic observation, revealing how war was experienced, remembered, and subsequently narrated by Confederate participants. Campaign accounts, prison and espionage episodes, and striking records of the home front together illu...

God Save the South: 40+ Memoirs of Defiance gathers a capacious, contentious body of Confederate-era recollection: military narratives, political testimony, diaries, domestic observations, and retrospective defenses of secession. Its varied styles range from battlefield chronicle and naval report to intimate journal writing and polemical memoir. Accounts of campaigns, imprisonment, supply, civilian hardship, and the collapsing home front make the volume valuable not as a unified history, b...

This volume includes Ford Madox Ford's The Soul of London, The Heart of the Country, and The Spirit of the People. Published between 1905 and 1907, this trilogy investigates the changing culture of the English with originality and in ways that provide an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal modernist writer. Though a work of nonfiction, the trilogy eschews superficially factual history.

The third volume of Parade's End—one of the outstanding works about World War I and British society before, during, and after that cataclysm—this novel focuses on Valentine Wannop in London and Christopher Tietjens away at war, with the narrative concluding on Armistice Day. Making a dramatic comment on prewar life and morality, this is a perceptive exploration of time, history, and sexuality. This first-ever critical edition is fully annotated and includes a new introduction by a...

No man had taken a woman as his and his alone for centuries—and he hadn't even asked.He'd just told her she was to be his bride, watched her blush at the shameful term, then fisted her hair and pulled her in for a brutal, possessive kiss the moment she opened her mouth to protest.A kiss that made clear this wasn't up to her, and even if it were they both knew she would choose to wear his ring, share his bed, and one day bear his children. A kiss that said s...

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINALVirginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm “the prince” of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his “whim of iron” and “cleverness amounting to genius,” while Beerbohm himself noted that “only the insane take themselves quite seriously.” From his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until he put his pen aside in the aftermath of World War II, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own....

In "Autobiography," G.K. Chesterton offers an introspective journey that weaves together elements of wit, philosophical inquiry, and rich narrative. Written with Chesterton's signature paradoxes and humor, the text provides an elegant tapestry of memories, revealing his thoughts on faith, art, and the complexities of modern life. This autobiographical work stands out in the literary canon for its deeply personal yet universally resonant themes, reflecting a time marked by rapid change and ...

Ford masterfully combines his trademark subtlety and complexity in this masterful tetralogy that follows Christopher Tietjens, an officer and a gentleman, as he traverses the tumultuous path leading from Edwardian England to World War I. Against the chaotic backdrop of a world at war, the complicated sexual warfare between Tietjens and his sadistic wife, Sylvia, comes to a head while Tietjens is faced with a deteriorating sense of self and an increasingly ruinous life.

Set in Oxford in the 1660s - a time and place of great intellectual, religious, scientific and political ferment - this remarkable novel centres around a young woman, Sarah Blundy, who stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion;Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause, determined t...