bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
P
iercy,
M
arge
Authors: Shands Kerstin W.
Published: August 2017

Marge Piercy, whose oeuvre includes novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and drama, is increasingly recognized as a prominent writer in the United States. Born on March 31, 1936 in Detroit, Michigan, Piercy comes from a working‐class background. Piercy's poetic roots can be traced back to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Allen Ginsberg had an impact on her writing in the 1950s, and in the 1960s Piercy was influenced by black poets. Marge Piercy's work is worth exploring both for its challenging political perspectives and for its formal and structural aspects. Sometimes compared to the work of Doris Lessing, Piercy's writings are often feminist, and her poetry often deals with political issues (such as the American occupation of Iraq). Jewish thought is increasingly important in her work. Brimming with a varied and subtly delineated gallery of characters, Piercy's work has been part of a
rite de passage
for many readers in their personal and spiritual development. Moving along Dionysian rather than Apollonian lines, Marge Piercy's work is passionate, witty, and vitally alive.
P
urdy,
J
ames
Authors: Skerrett Joseph T.
Published: August 2017

James Purdy has been touted as “awriter's writer” – that is, someone more respected and admired by his peers than by the common reader and the marketplace. His early stories were praised by British writers like Dame Edith Sitwell, to whom Purdy had sent a copy of a privately printed volume in 1956, as well as George Steiner, Angus Wilson, and John Cowper Powys. His American admirers included Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Jerome Charyn, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, and, most recently, Gore Vidal and Jonathan Lethem. He experienced a brief period in the 1970s when his books made it into inexpensive paperback editions fairly regularly, but as time passed these editions vanished and were not followed by new editions of the early texts or any paperback editions of many of his later works. His plays – of which there are over a score – have never been collected, and few are published at all.
R
obinson,
M
arilynne
Authors: Tanner Laura E.
Published: August 2017

Born in Sandpoint, Idaho on November 26, 1943, Marilynne Robinson received her BA in American literature from Brown University in 1966 and her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977. In 1981, she published her first novel,
Housekeeping
, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. For more than two decades after the publication of her first novel, Robinson published primarily in the essay form. In 1997, Robinson received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1990, she received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Her second novel,
Gilead
, was published in 2004 to great acclaim; it received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and in 2005 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008, Robinson published
Home
, a companion novel to
Gilead
. She currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
S
cott,
J
oanna
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels and two short story collections that explore in rich detail the interiorities of characters who exist in complex natural and historical environments. A native of Darien, Connecticut, Scott received a BA from Hartford University and an MFA in creative writing at Brown University, where she studied with John Hawkes. She has taught at the University of Maryland and Princeton University, and is currently the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships; her fourth novel,
The Manikin
(1996), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
S
inclair,
U
pton
Authors: Coodley Lauren
Published: August 2017

Most Americans know Upton Sinclair simply as the author of
The Jungle
(1906), the astonishing novel that rocked the beginning of the twentieth century with its expose of poisoned meat. But in
Oil!
(1927), Sinclair also described the transformation of the California landscape following the building of automobile highways. His play
Singing Jailbirds
(1924b) drew attention to the plight of striking longshoremen in San Pedro, California. The
World's End
(1949) series gained him admirers from Britain to Japan to Germany, who found in it their first taste of what one called “story history.” With this series, Sinclair completed the circle he had begun when he went into the stockyards in 1905 to examine how cattle were slaughtered.
S
tone,
R
obert
Authors: Levene Mark
Published: August 2017

Despite a small body of work compared to that of Philip Roth and John Updike, Robert Stone remains one of the preeminent writers of post‐1960s American fiction. Regarded as a supreme prose stylist and celebrated for his courage in anatomizing loss and longing, violence and war, he is rare in submerging his personal ego and history in the demands of character and narrative and in the service of inhabiting the reader's consciousness for often lacerating shocks of moral recognition. Rarely do reviews avoid invocations of Melville and Conrad, although his preference for big themes and big books does not always travel well, particularly in England, the homeland of Graham Greene, who wrote big themes in smaller books. There Stone is perceived to be addicted to machismo and unsound religious hankerings, an epistemological imperialist; for the less intimidated of Stone's subjects and the stories in which they unfold are indicative of an incomparable intellectual and narrative strength and independence.
V
an
V
echten,
C
arl
Authors: Edwards Justin D.
Published: August 2017

The American novelist, photographer, journalist, and critic Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was an advocate of modernist music, dance, and literature in the early years of the twentieth century. His literary output included several clever and amusing novels about the wealthy and privileged urbanites of the 1920s for which he received critical acclaim. Van Vechten, however, is best known for his promotion and support of the visual artists, dramatic performers, and writers in the cultural movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. His financial assistance, critical endorsement, and general enthusiasm helped to publicize the creative production of African Americans throughout the 1920s.
V
idal,
G
ore
Authors: Endres Nikolai
Published: August 2017

The prolific Gore Vidal is one of America's most controversial writers: a political liberal who corresponded with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and was invited to his execution; a critic of “the hacks of academe” about whom he complains they have slighted him; a classicist who claims that the “scandalous” Roman satirists Petronius and Apuleius are his favorite models; and a gay rights pioneer who believes that “homosexual” should be an adjective, not a noun.
V
iramontes,
H
elena
M
aría
Authors: Jurado Kathy
Published: August 2017

Chicana writer, community organizer, and academic, Helena María Viramontes was born on February 26, 1954 in East Los Angeles, California to a working‐class family of Mexican descent. With a writing career that spans nearly three decades, Viramontes stands amongst the most celebrated contemporary Chicana/o authors. Her published works consist of a broad spectrum of writings that include coediting (with Maria Herrera‐Sobek) two prominent works of criticism that are Chicana centered:
Chicana Creativity and Criticism
(1988) and
Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film
(1995). In 1993 she also wrote a screenplay titled
Paris Rats in E.L.A
. that was produced by the American Film Institute. Viramontes, however, is most widely known for her works of fiction, which include the critically acclaimed collection of short stories,
The Moths and Other Stories
(1985), and her equally lauded first novel
Under the Feet of Jesus
(1994). She has recently published her long‐awaited second novel,
Their Dogs Came With Them
(2007), which has received positive praise by reviewers.
W
alker,
A
lice
Authors: McMahon Marci R.
Published: August 2017

Alice Walker is one of the foremost African American female authors of the post‐1970s. A prolific short story writer, poet, essayist, novelist, and children's book author, Walker has profoundly shaped the way audiences think about African American female subjectivity. Walker's comment that “black women are the most oppressed people in the world” underpins most of her work (quoted in Christian 1994).
W
harton,
E
dith
Authors: Campbell Donna M.
Published: August 2017

Edith Wharton was a twentieth‐century novelist and short story writer whose work ranges far beyond the genre of the novel of manners with which she is often associated. She is best known for her fiction of “Old New York,” which chronicles the clash between traditional upper‐class New York society and the brash, moneyed social climbers who invade and destroy it. Writing frequently about divorce and its complications at a time when divorce was socially taboo, Wharton delves beneath the mannerly facades of her well‐to‐do characters to explore the missed chances, thwarted love affairs, and instances of human cruelty imposed by a restrictive social system and the suffocating levels of hypocrisy needed to keep it in place.
W
olfe,
T
homas
Authors: Roberts Terry
Published: August 2017

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century, whose long‐term reputation rests largely on the impact of his first novel,
Look Homeward, Angel
(1929), and on the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life. Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900, and his promising writing career was cut off by his premature death from tubercular meningitis on September 15, 1938. Wolfe's biography is particularly significant because his own life was the source for much of his fiction, and he was haunted throughout his career by the charge that he could only write thinly disguised autobiography. This is unfortunate, because time has shown
Look Homeward, Angel
to be one of the finest American coming‐of‐age novels, and his widely celebrated short fiction ranges far beyond his personal experience. During the last 20 years, scholars have realized that Wolfe's lasting value has little to do with autobiography but rather with his lifelong experiments in form and style.
WPA
and Popular Front Fiction
Authors: Rabinowitz Paula
Published: August 2017

The 1937 novel
Murder in the WPA
by Alexander Williams combines the sensibilities of the hardboiled crime story‐ a desiccated newspaperman is embroiled in solving a series of murders for which he appears to be a potential suspect – with the political perspectives of Popular Front coalitions of communists, left‐wing unions, and New Deal government employees, all of whom work with a diligent urban police force to expose a protofascist group organized within the Works Projects Administration. Williams, scion of a Washington, DC family with longstanding ties to government employment, based his tale on the fractious New York WPA, especially its Arts Projects, riven with leftist sectarian politics, pressures from the Workers' Alliance and other unions, high‐profile publicity, and an ever‐changing local administration that faced ongoing assaults by the national press and Congress (Martin Dies's House Un‐American Activities Subcommittee). The novel probes the workings of city homicide squads and the internal office politics of the WPA, with a simultaneous nod to Dashiell Hammett and John Dos Passos. As a literary investigation of the WPA Arts Projects, it cannot compare to insider novels, such as Jack Balch's
Lamps at High Noon
(1941), Vardis Fisher's
Orphans in Gethsemane
(1960), or Norman Macleod's
You Get What You Ask For
(1939); but, deploying a popular form (detective fiction), it was the first to explore the politics of the WPA, outlining its deep association with Popular Front aesthetics.
Y
oung,
M
arguerite
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

Though she has a strong “cult” following, Marguerite Young (1908–95), novelist, poet, and essayist, has been regrettably overlooked as a significant modernist writer. Her neglected masterpiece,
Miss Maclntosh, My Darling
(1965), was the work of two decades, and stands in company with James Joyce's
Ulysses
(1922), Herman Broch's
The Death of Virgil
(1945), or William Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936) as an encyclopedic novel that explores myriad relations between complex psychological interiorities and the labyrinths of modern culture. Equally, Young stands alongside Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, and Djuna Barnes as a major woman writer who charted the modernist terrain of
écriture feminine
and expanded the reach of the novel in her experiments with language and form. It is difficult to say why Young has been so ignored: in 1993, Dalkey Archives reissued
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
in two volumes of over 600 pages each – perhaps it is the prolixity of her work or the demands it makes upon the reader that have led to her non‐recognition. The Dalkey reissue has led to a moderate outburst of new interest in her work, that ironic form of belated visibility as a writer before her time.
A
idoo,
A
ma
A
ta
Authors: Kortenaar Neil Ten
Published: August 2017

Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian dramatist and fiction writer whose voice is distinguished by its concern for women's issues and African nationalism, but equally by its awareness of intellectual conundrums and its openness to dialogue and multiple perspectives.
A
nand,
M
ulk
R
aj
Authors: Dhawan R. K.
Published: August 2017

Mulk Raj Anand is a pioneer of Indian English fiction. As a novelist and short story writer, Anand stands out prominently among his contemporaries through the vast range of his work, his wealth of living characters, his ruthless realism, and his fervent championing of the underprivileged.
A
woonor,
K
ofi
Authors: Maduakor Obi
Published: August 2017

Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor, formerly George Awoonor‐Williams, is a well‐known Ghanaian novelist, poet, professor, and diplomat. He began his career as a lecturer at the University of Ghana (1960–4), was assistant professor of English at the State University of New York (1968–75), and was imprisoned in Ghana as a political detainee (1975–6). Awoonor later became Ghana's ambassador to several South American countries (1983–8), to Cuba (1988–90), and finally to the United Nations (1990–4). He remains active as an elder statesman within government circles at Accra.
B
issoondath,
N
eil
Authors: Ramraj Ruby S.
Published: August 2017

Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidad‐born Canadian fiction writer and essayist, is concerned primarily with how immigrants adjust to adopted homelands – particularly Canada. Characteristically he approaches immigrants less as representatives of ethnic groups than as individuals; though he does not ignore cultural particularities, he addresses human commonalities rather than differences. Writing about diverse immigrant populations, he has (controversially) criticized Canada's policy of multiculturalism as divisive. Moreover, although he portrays – invariably sympathetically – immigrants' lives as harsh, he questions whether their plights are of their own making, often suggesting that those who fled corruption and violence are better off (if only marginally) in Canada.
BlackBritish Fiction
Authors: Ward Abigail
Published: August 2017

Black British fiction is an expanding area of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century literature. The term “black British literature” has been used since the 1980s, but it has been controversial because both “black” and “British” are deceptively complex terms that cause problems of categorization for writers and critics. Novelist and poet Fred D'Aguiar raised his objections in his essay “Against Black British Literature,” arguing that the term marginalizes black creativity and fails to recognize it as part of, rather than distinct from, Britishness (106). There is, equally, a danger of homogenization – of failing to recognize the diversity of peoples within this grouping. Moreover, as many “black British” authors now reside outside the UK – Caryl Phillips and George Lamming, among others – the label seems particularly inappropriate for them. As literary critic John McLeod has argued, the transnational elements of much black writing in Britain may be compromised by viewing the work as solely British (2002, 59). “Black writing in Britain,” an alternative phrase deployed by some critics, is an attempt to avoid the closed‐off nature of “black British,” suggesting instead the potential for movement, heterogeneity, and migration, recalling cultural theorist Stuart Hall's emphasis on diasporic identities “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew” (402).
B
oyd,
M
artin
Authors: Dolin Kieran
Published: August 2017

An upper‐class Australian expatriate who spent most of his adult life in England, Martin à Beckett Boyd explored the complexities of Anglo‐Australian identity and chronicled the decline of aristocratic power and culture in the twentieth century. Having witnessed the end of an old order in World War I, he eventually wrote with great discernment and conviction about the psychological and social costs of modern warfare.
Children's and Young Adult Fiction
Authors: Bradford Clare
Published: August 2017

Fiction for children and young adults necessarily reflects the social, cultural, and political contexts in which it is produced and received. This field of literature is deeply implicated within processes and practices of socialization, since throughout the world children's books are used extensively in family and school settings to introduce children to cultural values. While some children's texts explicitly advocate ideological positions (such as literature dealing with the environmental effects of global warming), others implicitly propose what is desirable and undesirable in human behavior. The language and visual images of novels and picture books are imbued with values. In some nations, such as China, state systems of censorship control what books are imported and published; Chinese writers for children have long been regarded as “engineers of children's souls.” It should not be imagined, however, that censorship does not exist in Western countries. Very often authors engage in processes of self‐censorship, avoiding or moderating themes and language that may decrease the appeal of their books to mainstream audiences. Much children's fiction seeks to align readers with protagonists, either through first‐person narration (particularly common in young adult fiction) or by way of focalization through the perspective of a character. This is a powerful way of inducting readers into the world of the text.
D
angarembga,
T
sitsi
Authors: Hai Ambreen
Published: August 2017

Tsitsi Dangarembga was the first black woman writer from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) to publish fiction in English. After several rejections from publishers in Zimbabwe, her novel
Nervous Conditions
was published by the Women's Press in London in 1988. It won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989, and has since become an internationally acclaimed work, frequently taught in university courses in various disciplines. It is also the subject of numerous scholarly articles as well as a scholarly collection (Willey & Treiber 2002). Set in colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s, the novel focuses on the lives of five women in a Shona family, and explores tricky questions such as how issues of gender intersect with those of race, class, and colonization, how a colonized subjectivity is formed, and how a colonial education can both liberate and entrap. Its long‐awaited sequel,
The Book of Not
, appeared in 2006. Dangarembga has also written short stories and three plays, and produced and directed films.
D
avies,
R
obertson
Authors: Sugars Cynthia
Published: August 2017

Robertson Davies stands apart from many other Canadian writers for setting the world of smalltown central Canada alongside the realm of myth and magic. Committed to countering strictly rationalist interpretations of human experience, Davies explored the links between psychology, religion, art, and science in a remarkable oeuvre that spanned more than six decades. As a result, his works are difficult to categorize, for they are neither realist nor fabulist. While they contain withering critiques of social and cultural posturing, they indulge in esoteric, sometimes Gothic, subject matter and elevated themes. This interest in the arcane, combined with Davies's eccentric and witty public persona, earned him a reputation as a formidable Renaissance man and polymath.
English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction
Authors: Rampure Archana
Published: August 2017

English Studies is the broad disciplinary grouping that encompasses all literary and cultural production in the English language – all forms of literature, certainly, but also literary theory and often even non‐literary forms of cultural production such as film and television. The discipline is staffed by members of the professoriate who make up “the Academy,” a self‐regulating group which also includes noted writers, literary publishers, and other literary opinion makers such as reviewers. While there is nothing official about it (unlike L'Académie française, responsible for ruling on the French language), the uncompromising singularity of the term “Academy” acknowledges its power in adjudicating the canon. The canon of texts that comprise the objects of study in English Studies – what is most often read and taught and studied and written about – is (more or less) selected by the Academy. The Academy does evolve, if slowly: people retire, once junior graduate students become faculty members, and the institutional interests of departments of English Studies shift (often, at the behest of academic administrators). Over the twentieth century, the English canon has changed dramatically in an attempt to take into account questions of politics as well as aesthetics. In the context of World Literature and its subfield World Fiction, it could be said that the main project of the introduction of this subject into the bastion of English Studies has been to remake the discipline in the light of critical theory – especially of postcolonialism. Where postcolonial theory provides a framework for what Robert Young calls a “more engaged politics with objectives of social justice and equality … inspired by memories of resistance,” World Literature often provides the literary (and cultural) texts for this study (166). As grand as postcolonialism's purpose is and infinite as this literature appears, there are some limiting parameters. Although fiction is the most widely read and studied postcolonial genre, World Fictionwritten in Englishis nonetheless an altogether smaller sampling thanallWorld Literature, which at its broadest includes other languages and genres. Fiction identified as British, Irish, or American (and thus more likely to be part of the traditional canon) may also be exempt – because the word “World” when used to delimit English‐language literature or fiction connotes texts that do not originate in the United Kingdom or the United States. In general, then, and not excluding many exceptions, since the “origin” of writing is often the subject of debate, English‐language fiction produced in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean (mostly but not exclusively in nations once colonized by Britain) and in the former settler colonies of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand may be termed “World Fiction in English.”
G
hosh,
A
mitav
Authors: Luo Shao‐Pin
Published: August 2017

Amitav Ghosh occupies a unique place in international literature: his work spans continents and historical times as well as genres – fiction, travel writing, and journalism. What Ghosh accomplishes most significantly, whether in his fiction or non‐fiction, are the twin tasks of “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 3) and “imagining pluralized Asias” (Spivak 2). Ghosh's work shifts the focus on Europe, or even Europe and its others, to the equal, parallel, and other narratives of human connections, such as those between India and Egypt and Mauritius, and between India and Burma, Malaya, and China. In examining the travel, trade, and coexistence among different peoples and the interconnectedness of different traditions in historical, “non‐European life‐worlds” (Chakrabarty 20) before and after the advent of colonialism and imperialism, Ghosh demonstrates an interest in the complex entanglements of peoples, cultures, and histories rather than the construction of a monolingual, monolithic account of world history.
G
oonewardene,
J
ames
Authors: Goonetilleke D. C. R. A.
Published: August 2017

James Goonewardene is a pioneer writer of Sri Lanka's post‐independence era who made a notable contribution through his fiction as a both a social critic and an idealist. Born in Pannala, Sri Lanka, on May 15, 1921, he was a schoolteacher before he made a notable contribution to broadcasting in English, livening up the fare in the 1960s when English broadcasting was under threat from the ascendant vernacular languages. He began writing full‐time in 1978 and, having married an Australian, could have emigrated, but as a staunch patriot he chose to remain.
G
race,
P
atricia
Authors: Keown Michelle
Published: August 2017

Patricia Grace (of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, and Te Ati Awa tribal descent) is one of Aotearoa/New Zealand's best‐known and most prolific Maori writers. Born in Wellington on August 17, 1937 to a Pākehā (European) mother and a Maori father, Grace was at the forefront of a new tradition of Maori creative writing in English that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when large numbers of Maori were migrating from rural settlements to the Pākehā‐dominated urban centers in search of employment and education opportunities. Grace began to write for publication in her mid‐twenties and, along with several other emerging Maori writers (such as Witi Ihimaera), she began publishing individual pieces of short fiction in periodicals such as the
New Zealand Listener
and
Te Ao Hou
. Her debut short story collection
Waiariki
(the first book‐length work of fiction by a Maori woman) was published in 1975, and since then she has produced six novels:
Mutuwhenua
(1978b),
Potiki
(1986),
Cousins
(1992),
Baby No‐Eyes
(1998),
Dogside Story
(2001), and
Tu
(2004); six short story collections:
The Dream Sleepers
(1980),
Electric City and Other Stories
(1987),
Selected Stories
(1991),
The Sky People
(1994b),
Collected Stories
(1994a), and
Small Holes in the Silence
(2006); several children's books; and nonfiction publications on Maori mythology and oratory.
H
ulme,
K
eri
Authors: Rauwerda Antje M.
Published: August 2017

Novelist, poet, and short story writer Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize in 1985 for
The Bone People
, a novel that had already won the 1984 Mobil Pegasus Award (allocated to Maori fiction that year) and the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. The novel proved to be significant in opening international eyes to Maori writing, but it also became a locus for critical consideration of what constitutes Maoriness (of Hulme's eight great‐grandparents only one is Maori), as well as of the possibilities for integrating Maori and Pākehā (white) histories in the culture of contemporary New Zealand.
Humor and Satire
Authors: Toron Alison
Published: August 2017

Humor and satire are highly subjective and culturally contingent modes of discourse; they depend largely on context and reception in specific discursive communities for their effect. Although satire and humor are not inherently subversive or inherently liberating, and indeed may be used to reinforce the established order (as in the case of a racist or sexist joke), twentieth‐century authors have often relied on their radical possibilities. Their ability to challenge the status quo and dismantle hierarchies while avoiding a direct, full‐frontal attack has made satire and humor appropriate venues for such oppositional literary and political movements as postcolonialism, feminism, anti‐racism, socialism, and queer activism. Much twentieth‐century fiction that has at its core a critique of the ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality uses humor as a kind of double‐edged discourse whereby seemingly light exchanges paradoxically allow more serious subjects to be discussed.
J
in,
H
a
Authors: Davis Rocío G.
Published: August 2017

The lucid, elegant fiction of Ha Jin, most of which is set in the People's Republic of China, explores the complex moral choices faced by ordinary people grappling with conflicts between traditional values, simple human desires, and party politics. Jin critiques the absurdity of political ideology and the viciousness of hate and revenge, showing how the collision of love and strict state‐legislated morality can often have tragic results.
J
ohnston,
W
ayne
Authors: Butler Heidi
Published: August 2017

Wayne Johnston's novels, memoir, and short fiction have received international attention and generated controversy in his native Canada. From the humorous adventures of Bobby O'Malley to the desperate ambitions of Joe Smallwood, Johnston's books are mainly set on the island of Newfoundland and focus on Newfoundlanders' struggles with political, financial, and cultural hardships; generational division between male relatives is among his foremost themes. His books highlight the often difficult emotions that arise between fathers who struggle to define their familial and national roles, and sons who attempt to retain Newfoundland identities in unsettled times.
J
olley,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Milech Barbara , Dibble Brian
Published: August 2017

Elizabeth Jolley, as Laurie Clancy has written, “had perhaps the most meteoric rise of any Australian writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century.” An unpublished writer in the UK, she published with increasing frequency after arriving in Australia in 1959, producing 15 novels and nine books of essays, stories, radio plays, and poems between 1976 and 2006, winning every major Australian prize for fiction, including the Miles Franklin Award. Her civic honors included the Order of Australia and being declared an Australian National Living Treasure in 1997; her academic recognition included four honorary doctorates and a professorship in creative writing. Well before she died on February 13, 2007, she was regarded as one of Australia's finest novelists – indeed, was often compared to Patrick White – and to many she was also Australia's best‐loved writer.
K
eneally,
T
homas
Authors: Ware Tracy
Published: August 2017

Thomas Keneally is a prolific and popular author of fiction and history, much of it about his native Australia. Convinced that history “is a parable for the present” (1975a, 29), he is best known for his historical novels. Two of his earliest novels,
Bring Larks and Heroes
and
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
, received the Miles Franklin Award for the best Australian fiction of the year, while three subsequent and very diverse novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize:
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
(1972; filmed by Fred Schepisi in 1978), about the persecution and murderous rampage of the son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father;
Gossip from the Forest
(1975b), about the signing of the armistice at the end of World War I; and
Confederates
, about the American Civil War. In 1982 he won the Booker for his meticulously researched
Schindler's Ark
(filmed as the Academy Award‐winning
Schindler's List
by Steven Spielberg in 1993), about an epicurean German businessman who saved the lives of more than 1,000 of his Jewish workers during the Holocaust. Keneally has spent time in England and the United States, but he lives in and writes mostly about Australia, and he is a strong republican. He received a New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 2008.
Kincaid,Jamaica
Authors: Ferguson Moira
Published: August 2017

Jamaica Kincaid writes about the formation of a pre‐ and postcolonial female subjectivity, and about the quest for personal and political identity. These issues intertwine in her writing with the influence of colonization on the psychic and material life of people in her native Antigua, with motherhood and colonialism as a twinned negotiation. Her pithy, resonant, original, often lyrical voice evokes a world of natural beauty irreversibly contaminated by colonialism. She says, “I never give up thinking about the way I came into the world, how my ancestors came from Africa to the West Indies as slaves. I just never forget it. It's like a big wave that's still pulsing” (Garis 42).
L
ovelace,
E
arl
Authors: Nair Supriya M.
Published: August 2017

Despite his impressive versatility and success, Earl Lovelace remains a surprisingly underrated writer, and only recently has sustained scholarship on his entire oeuvre been added to the previously scattered essays and articles on individual works. Some years younger than more internationally celebrated Caribbean authors such as George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul, Lovelace shares their major preoccupations. But Lovelace was one of the few of his generation who did not migrate northward to metropolitan countries; instead, he has lived in Trinidad for most of his life. This was most likely not a desirable choice at the time, but Lovelace would use it to pose a powerful counterpoint to the master narratives of exile and migration in anglophone Caribbean literature, even though his connection to the metropolis was sustained through publishing in London and academic activities in the United States.
M
arlatt,
D
aphne
Authors: Curran Beverley
Published: August 2017

In a long and still important interview with George Bowering from the 1970s, the Canadian poet and fiction writer Daphne Marlatt explains, “All my poetics are, is connections” (Bowering 32). This description continues to apply to her writing project and how she lets meaning drift, merges genres, and seeks out readers in her efforts to weave her way into the world. Marlatt, a self‐described local, west coast writer, has an abiding interest in place; her sense of what it means to be present and at home is crucially linked to an “immigrant imagination.”
Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction
Authors: Härting Heike
Published: August 2017

The terms “migration,” “diaspora,” and “exile” operate variously as thematic, theoretical, historical, social, and critical categories for reading twentieth‐century world fiction in English. Their meanings overlap to a degree, since all three terms are concerned with the cultural and political representation of individuals or groups that, by force, necessity, or volition, move across given national, geographical, and psychological borders. On many occasions, narratives of diaspora, exile, and migration rethink and reimagine the foundational character and legitimacy of such concepts as identity, history, memory, and place.
Munro,Alice
Authors: Besner Neil Kalman
Published: August 2017

During the four decades since her first collection,Dance of the Happy Shades(1968), won Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, Alice Munro's stories have been widely acclaimed as among the finest being written in the English‐speaking world. To date, Munro has published 12 books of stories; like Mavis Gallant and Katherine Mansfield, she has concentrated her fictional powers on the short story, although she has also written story sequences, novellas, and books of linked stories. Many of her fictions draw on her family and her home territory of Huron County in southwestern Ontario, but Munro always reshapes this material to form stories populated by characters that both invoke and transform their autobiographical and geographical settings. Munro's stories often engage readers first at an everyday surface level that then becomes a membrane: as Del Jordan, the narrator ofLives of Girls and Women(1971) puts it in a famous phrase, “People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum” (249). This apparent paradox of contradictions converging to reveal the depths of her characters’ lives is emblematic of Munro's fictional signature.
NewZealand Fiction
Authors: Jones Lawrence
Published: August 2017

In 1900 New Zealand fiction was still a colonial transplant from Great Britain, adapting to a South Pacific environment. Throughout the “late colonial” phase (c.1890–1935) the New Zealand novel was a minor adjunct of the English novel, mostly published in London and written for a primarily British audience. The New Zealand short story also used conventional English forms to present local materials, but was aimed at a more local reading public in New Zealand newspapers and New Zealand and Australian magazines. The novels and stories typically celebrated the colonizing endeavor to build what was often called “a better Britain of the Southern Seas.” Viewing that endeavor through a social Darwinist lens, the fiction also dealt with what was viewed as the necessary costs of “progress” – the destruction of much of the native forest to clear land for pasture and crops, the decimation or absorption of the Maori people and their culture, and the hardships and suffering of the early European (Pakeha) settlers.
P
aton,
A
lan
Authors: Vanzanten Susan
Published: August 2017

Alan Paton was the first South African writer to achieve international recognition.
Cry, the Beloved Country
(1948), his moving first novel, was published as the Afrikaner National Party came to power, and it provided English, American, and European readers with an eloquent introduction to apartheid's horrors and signaled the beginning of a new era in South African literature.
Richler,Mordecai
Authors: Ravvin Norman
Published: August 2017

Mordecai Richler's death on July 3, 2001 marked the end of an era in Canadian Jewish literary life. The major figures of the postwar era were by this point largely silent or gone, with the exception of Leonard Cohen, whose international renown as a singer and songwriter far outweighs his reputation as a novelist and poet. In his final years Richler attained major successes, including Canada's Giller Prize for fiction forBarney's Versionin 1997, and the remarkable popularity of that novel in Italy, where the wordRichleriano –denoting a certain knowing disregard for political correctness – entered the Italian vocabulary. Richler and his work became iconic, an ascendancy to national acclaim and popularity that represented a transformation of his reputation in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, when he published such major novels asSt. Urbain's Horseman(1971),Joshua Then and Now(1980), andSolomon Gursky Was Here(1989), alongside the provocative polemicOh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country(1992). Despite winning three Governor General's Awards – forSt. Urbain'sin 1971, and for bothCocksureandHunting Tigers under Glassin 1968 – Richler's reception in Canada throughout this period was colored by responses to his early writings, whose particular brand of satiric humor alienated sections of his audience. Following the appearance of Richler's autobiographical 1955 novelSon of a Smaller Hero, this alienation was most commonly expressed by his Jewish Montreal‐based detractors, who felt exposed and ridiculed by Richler's portrayal of them. And though critics and reviewers largely embraced his return to these themes inThe Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz(1959), this breakthrough book cemented the rift between writer and readers that would account for a longstanding love‐hate relationship.
R
oy,
A
rundhati
Authors: Tickell Alex
Published: August 2017

Arundhati Roy is best known for
The God of Small Things
(1997), her first and only novel to date. Drawing on Roy's childhood in the southern Indian state of Kerala, and combining aspects of the fairy tale, pastoral lyric, tragedy, and political fable, the novel represents a milestone in the stylistic development of South Asian literature in English. Roy's highly poetic language and the originality of her child‐centered narrative perspective are memorable features of the work. Coinciding fortuitously with India's fiftieth anniversary celebrations the year it was published,
The God of Small Things
won the Booker Prize, became an international bestseller, and has been translated into 18 languages.
R
ushdie,
S
alman
Authors: Teverson Andrew
Published: August 2017

Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most conceptually and artistically ambitious writers of literary fiction. He is also a controversialist whose provocative forays into sensitive ideological battlegrounds have resulted in a contentious, and in the case of one novel incendiary, body of fiction. Politics, however, while it is crucial to Rushdie's artistry, is ultimately a secondary concern in his work, for though he has consistently used his fictions to interrogate political and cultural developments, Rushdie is first and foremost a storyteller whose fictions seek to entertain readers with their lush extravagances, their Rabelaisian comedy, their witty denunciations, their gothic depravities, their clever (sometimes overly clever) game playing, their grotesque caricatures, their hyperbolic narrative experiments, and their unfettered sense of the pleasures to be found in language and narration. To read Rushdie is, sometimes, to be overwhelmed – as many of his less sympathetic reviewers have noted with disapproval. Being overwhelmed is, however, a central part of the aesthetic experience that Rushdie seeks to create, for it is Rushdie's view that the world he represents is one that is frequently overwhelming, one that doesn't conform to conventional notions of what is “real,” “normative,” “natural,” or “known,” and one that, as a result, requires an extraordinary aesthetic to do justice to it. “The world,” as Rushdie explained in 1993, “is operatic and surreal and grotesque” – and so the novels he writes are “operatic and surreal and grotesque” too (Chauhan 131).
Shields,Carol
Authors: Stovel Nora Foster
Published: August 2017

Carol Shields was one of the most popular and beloved Canadian writers of the later twentieth century. Poet, playwright, and biographer, she is best known as a novelist. She wrote primarily about ordinary people, domestic life, and the quotidian, revealing, as in her much anthologized story “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” (1985), the extraordinariness of the ordinary. Focusing particularly on women, although two of her novels feature male protagonists, her fiction became increasingly feminist.
T
lali,
M
iriam
Authors: Hlongwane Gugu
Published: August 2017

The accomplishments of Miriam Masoli Tlali are remarkable given the repressive conditions under which she wrote. Tlali was the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa during the period of racial segregation enforced by the National Party beginning in 1948. Her postcolonial writings, translated into several languages, include novels, short stories, journalistic writings, interviews, and one play. It is largely through the literary efforts of writers such as Tlali, Bessie Head, Noni Jabavu, Ellen Kuzwayo, Sindiwe Magona, and Lauretta Ngcobo that the particular challenges of black women under apartheid became known to local and international audiences. Despite writing during a state of emergency and being constantly harassed by apartheid's spies, Tlali bravely put pen to paper for the greater good of her society. She co‐founded an African press, Skotaville, as well as the radical anti‐apartheid literary magazine,
Staffrider
, for which she wrote a column titled “Soweto Speaking.”
T
utuola,
A
mos
Authors: Kortenaar Neil Ten
Published: August 2017

Amos Tutuola's controversial literary career is an object lesson in the production and reception of African literature. He published his first novel before Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka started writing, and his novels have inspired successors, most notably Ben Okri, yet Tutuola has not been accepted as a father of Nigerian literature. His career received its stamp from his first published book,
The Palm‐Wine Drinkard
(1952), often his only work discussed by critics, who treat his subsequent output as mere restatements. His reputation resembles that of another canonical anomaly, the Guyanese Wilson Harris who, critics assume, said everything he wanted to say in
Palace of the Peacock
, the first of his 24 novels.
W
iebe,
R
udy
Authors: Tiessen Hildi Froese
Published: August 2017

Rudy Wiebe's fiction is rooted in the experiences of the communities he lived among in his childhood and youth: Mennonite immigrants to the Canadian prairies, and native peoples who occupied the lands the Mennonites came to settle. In his award‐winning historical fiction, he has imaginatively documented significant alternative histories of the Indigenous peoples of Canada's west and far north, countering the notion that these territories were “empty” before the Europeans arrived.
W
iseman,
A
dele
Authors: Panofsky Ruth
Published: August 2017

Adele Wiseman (1928–92) was an iconoclastic Canadian writer whose work brings together her private and public interests in the moral imperative of art and Jewish experience. An accomplished novelist, she was also a playwright, essayist, children's author, short story writer, poet, and literary reviewer. A friend and mentor to other writers, she sustained an impressive number of correspondences with peers and colleagues throughout her life.
Manipulable and Hybridized, Ultralow‐Threshold Lasing in a Plasmonic Laser Using Elliptical InGaN/GaN Nanorods
Authors: Tao Tao , Zhi Ting , Liu Bin , Dai Jiangping , Zhuang Zhe , Xie Zili , Chen Peng , Ren Fangfang , Chen Dunjun , Zheng Youdou , Zhang Rong
Published: August 2017

Manipulating stimulated‐emission light in nanophotonic devices on scales smaller than their emission wavelengths to meet the requirements for optoelectronic integrations is a challenging but important step. Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are one of the most promising candidates for sub‐wavelength optical confinement. In this study, based on the principle of surface plasmon amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation (SPASER), III‐Nitride‐based plasmonic nanolaser with hybrid metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) structures is designed. Using geometrically elliptical nanostructures fabricated by nanoimprint lithography, elliptical nanolasers able to demonstrate single‐mode and multimode lasing with an optical pumping power density as low as 0.3 kW cm−2 at room temperature and a quality Q factor of up to 123 at a wavelength of ≈490 nm are achieved. The ultralow lasing threshold is attributed to the SPP‐coupling‐induced strong electric‐field‐confinement in the elliptical MOS structures. In accordance with the theoretical and experimental results, the size and shape of the nanorod are the keys for manipulating hybridization of the plasmonic and photonic lasing modes in the SPASER. This finding provides innovative insight that will contribute to realizing a new generation of optoelectronic and information devices.
Divergent Synthesis of 1H‐Indazoles and 1H‐Pyrazoles from Hydrazones via Iodine‐Mediated Intramolecular Aryl and sp3 C–H Amination
Authors: Wei Wei , Wang Zhen , Yang Xikang , Yu Wenquan , Chang Junbiao
Published: August 2017

A divergent intramolecular C–H amination of hydrazones has been developed employing molecular iodine (I2) as the sole oxidant. The required hydrazone substrates were readily obtained by condensation of hydrazines with the corresponding ketones. In the presence of potassium iodide, I2‐mediated oxidative cyclization of diaryl and tert‐butyl aryl ketone hydrazones produced 1H‐indazoles via direct aryl C–H amination. Under similar reaction conditions, primary and secondary alkyl ketone hydrazones were transformed into 1H‐pyrazole products in a reaction involving sp3 C–H amination. This synthetic methodology does not involve transition metals, and is operationally simple, providing a facile access to indazole and pyrazole derivatives in an efficient and scalable fashion.

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