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Twentieth-century Polish literature is often said to be a “witness to history,” a narrative of the historical and political disasters that visited the nation. This book examines Poland's modern poetry and fiction and explains that the best Polish writing of the period 1918–89 was much more than testimony. Rather, it constantly transformed historical experience into metaphysical reflection, a philosophical or religious exploration of human existence. The book analyzes and contextualizes the work of nine modern Polish writers. These include the “three madmen” of the interwar period—Schulz, Gombrowicz, and Witkiewicz, whom he calls the fathers of Polish modernist prose; the great poets of the war generation—Milosz, Herbert, and Szymborska; Herling-Grudzinski and Konwicki, with their dark philosophical subtexts; and the mystical-ecstatic poet Zagajewski.

This book throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonization, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, it culminates in fresh engagements with contemporary Jewish, post-ethnic, and postcolonial writers. The author regards many of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century luminaries he examines—among them Hannah Arendt, Anita Desai, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, Caryl Phillips, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Zadie Smith, and Muriel Spark—as critical exemplars of the diasporic imagination. Against the discrete disciplinary thinking of the academy, he elaborates and argues for a new comparative approach across Jewish and postcolonial histories and literatures. And in so doing, the author illuminates the ways in which histories and cultures can be imagined across national and communal boundaries.

Vladimir Nabokov's “Western choice”—his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. This book offers the hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. The author of this book—a Russian living in America—finds in Nabokov's novels a useful guide for Russia's integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov's “Western” characters herself, the author discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that were foreseen half a century earlier. In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Pnin; and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one's own “happy” destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, and Nabokov's work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders.

Why do spies have such cachet in the twentieth century? Why do they keep reinventing themselves? What do they mean in a political process? This book examines the tradition of the spy narrative from its inception in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Ranging from John le Carré's bestsellers to Elizabeth Bowen's novels, from James Bond to John Banville's contemporary narratives, this book sets the historical contexts of these fictions: the Cambridge spy ring; the Profumo Affair; the witch-hunts against gay men in the civil service and diplomatic corps in the 1950s. Instead of focusing on the formulaic nature of the genre, the book emphasizes the responsiveness of spy stories to particular historical contingencies. The book begins by offering a systematic theory of the conventions and attractions of espionage fiction and then examines the British and Irish tradition of spy novels. A final section considers the particular form that American spy narratives have taken as they have cross-fertilized with the tradition of American romance in works such as Joan Didion's Democracy and John Barth's Sabbatical.

Waiting for Godot has been acclaimed as the greatest play of the twentieth century. It is also the most elusive: two lifelong friends sing, dance, laugh, weep, and question their fate on a road that descends from and goes nowhere. Throughout, they repeat their intention “Let's go,” but this is inevitably followed by the direction “(They do not move.).” This is Beckett's poetic construct of the human condition. This book is an introduction to Samuel Beckett's great work for general readers, students, and specialists. It approaches the play scene by scene, exploring the text linguistically, philosophically, critically, and biographically. The book argues that the play portrays more than the rational mind's search for self and worldly definition. It also dramatizes Beckett's insights into human nature, into the emotional life that frequently invades rationality and liberates, victimizes, or paralyzes the individual. The book shows that Beckett portrays humanity in conflict with mysterious forces both within and outside the self, that he is an artist of the psychic distress born of relativism.

In the aftermath of debate about the death of literary theory, this book asks whether theory has failed us or we have failed literary theory. Theory can thrive, the book argues, only if we understand how it can be strategically deployed to reveal what it does not presuppose. This involves the repositioning of theoretical inquiry relative to historical and critical inquiry and the repositioning of theories relative to each other. What follows is a reexamination of the controversial claims of pluralism in literary studies. The book explores the related roles of literary history, criticism, and theory by tracing the fascinating history of linguistics as an intellectual problem in the twentieth century. This approach clarifies the pluralistic nature of literary inquiry, the viability and life cycles of theories, the controversial status of canonicity, and the polemical nature of the culture wars by positioning them all in the context of recurring debates about language that have their earliest exemplifications in classical times.

What is the relationship between poetry and fame? What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity? Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype? One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity. Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, the book provides a history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States. It sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself.

This book examines literature in its connection to virtue and moral excellence. The author is concerned with literature as the teacher of virtue. The current crisis in the humanities may be traced back to the separation of art and morality. The arts and humanities concern themselves with the fate and prospects of humankind. Today that fate and those prospects are under the increasing influence of technology. In a technological age, literature gains in importance precisely to the extent that our sense of intrinsic value is lost. In its elevation of play and inexhaustible meaning, literature offers a counterbalance to reason and efficiency. It helps us grasp the ways in which diverse parts form a comprehensive and complex whole, and it connects us with other ages and cultures. Not least, great literature grapples with the ethical challenges of the day.