Reading Oscar Wilde is a comprehensive interpretive guide designed for students and readers who come to Wilde’s writings for the first time, delivering a fuller understanding of the works and the background from which the canon has emerged. This ready-at-hand compendium details the scholarly perspectives of Wilde’s vast literary output. Meticulously arranged, this accessible volume includes freestanding discussions of individual works, including clarification of Wilde’s pioneering...

A survey of foundational theory on James Joyce’s UlyssesThis collection of essays reviews the state of theory on James Joyce’s Ulysses more than 100 years after the fictitious Leopold Bloom steps into the novel, a day Joyceans celebrate as Bloomsday. The contributors—well known for their work in James Joyce studies—each provide three assessments in their areas of specialization: a history of the best criticism to date, an updating of critical positions, an...

With her ex-husband imprisoned for embezzlement, the pampered Virginia Fleetman relocates to an inherited mountainside property expecting to live in a newly-finished vacation home. Instead she finds a half-finished foundation with the builder Drew Tippet and her twelve-year-old daughter Cody living inside. Drew has been planning a new life too, but after the checks stopped coming, she is forced to make the basement a refuge. When Virginia orders Drew and her daughter out, a cascade of life...

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce’s writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce’s works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce’s innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and...

Branding Oscar Wilde traces the development and perception of Wilde’s public persona and examines the impact of interpretations of his writing. Through calculated behavior, provocative language, and arresting dress, Wilde self-consciously created a brand initially recognized by family and friends, then by the British public, and ultimately by large audiences over the world. That brand changed over the course of his public career—both in the way Wilde projected it and in the way it was perc...

Agriculture is the product of a complex mixture of behavioural, biophysical and market drivers. Understanding how these factors interact to produce crops and livestock for food has been the focus of economic investigation for many years. The advent of optimisation algorithms and the exponential growth in computing technology has allowed significant growth in mathematical modelling of the dynamics of agricultural systems. The complexity of approaches has grown in parallel with the availabil...

Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. This Companion offers a state-of-the-subject survey of English-language children's literature from the seventeenth century to the present. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected w...

In the Victorian period, the British novel reached a wide readership and played a major role in the shaping of national and individual identity. As we come to understand the ways the novel contributed to public opinion on religion, gender, sexuality and race, we continue to be entertained and enlightened by the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and many others. This second edition of the Companion to the Victorian Novel has been updated fully, taking account of new resear...

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction covers British and American crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. As well as discussing the detective fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. It also includes chapters on the treatment of crime in eighteenth-century literature, French and Victorian fiction, women an...

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the critical debates around the heritage film, from its controversial status in British cinema of the 1980s to its expansion into a versatile international genre in the 1990s and 2000s. This study explores the heritage film in light of questions of national identity in film and television, industry and funding, and history, gender and representation. Using a wide range of examples and including an in-depth analysis of three case studies ...

The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde offers an essential introduction to one of the theatre's most important and enigmatic writers. Although a general overview, the volume also offers some of the latest thinking on the dramatist and his impact on the twentieth century. Part One places Wilde's work within the cultural and historical context of his time and includes an opening essay by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland. Further chapters also examine Wilde and the Victorians and his image as...

Oscar Wilde was a courageous individualist whose path-breaking life and work were shaped in the crucible of his time and place, deeply marked by the controversies of his era. This collection of concise and illuminating articles reveals the complex relationship between Wilde's work and ideas, and contemporary contexts including Victorian feminism, aestheticism and socialism. Chapters investigate how Wilde's writing was both a resistance to and quotation of Victorian master narratives and ge...