San Antonio College Library

"Wales, though a small country, has a literature among the oldest in Europe. The New Companion is an essential reference guide to its literature, whether in Welsh or in English, and to Wale's history and culture. It spans the period from the sixth century to the present, from early heroic poetry and the medieval Arthurian tales to the flowering of Welsh national consciousness in the late twentieth century. The individual entries contain a wealth of...

The contributors argue from a variety of perspectives for the expansion and redefinition of "American" literature to include a more representative selection of works. The book is organized in three major sections on redefining the American literary canon, oral dimensions of American literature, and critical and historical perspectives. Topics range from detailed analysis of oral traditions in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) to historical...

Canadian literature in English presents a wealth of imaginative experience that belies the colonial status sometimes accorded the world's second-largest country. This revised and expanded edition of Major Canadian Authors provides an entrance into that realm. Stouck's carefully integrated essays introduce the life and writings of eighteen foremost Canadian authors, including Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Sinclair Ross, and Alice Munro. The...

Between 1881 and 1897, Benito Perez Galdos, generally acknowledged as Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist, composed some twenty "contemporary" novels, which Geoffrey Ribbans characterizes as the peak of his achievement. This monumental study traces the evolution of the many strands that make up one of them: the long and complex novel Fortunata y Jacinta. Ribbans examines the various stages of composition, not only the earlier, reconstructed...

"John Muthyala's Reworlding America moves beyond the U.S.-centered approach of traditional American literary criticism. In this book, Muthyala argues for a transgeographical perspective from which to study the literary and cultural histories of the Americas." "Muthyala questions the nationalistic, religious, and ethnocentric frameworks used to conceptualize American literary history and proposes alternative critical models to engage with the dissonant...

"This new history of American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present is written in an informed and accessible style by one of the leading authorities in the field. While paying attention to the full range of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction that has been incorporated into the mainstream literary canon, it also looks at other forms, including oral literature, folktales, spirituals, the blues, the western, the defective story, the...

Covers the whole field of literature written in the languages of Spain from Roman times to the present, including the literatures of Latin America alongside those of peninsular Spain (Basque, Catalan, and Galician as well as Castilian). A comprehensive, cross-referenced guide to the literature written in the languages of Spain and Central and South America, with entries on works and authors comprising the bulk of the book.

"Ralph Ellison has long been admired as the author of one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man. Yet he has also been dismissed by some critics as a writer who only published one major work of fiction and a black intellectual out of touch with his times. In this book, Timothy Parrish offers a fundamentally different assessment of Ellison's legacy, describing him as the most important American writer since William...

The confrontation between European and native peoples in the Americas is often portrayed as a conflict between literate civilization and illiterate savages. That perception ignores the many indigenous forms of writing that were not alphabet-based, like Mayan pictoglyphs, Iroquois wampum, Ojibwe birchbark scrolls, and Incan quipus. Queequeg's Coffin offers a new definition of writing that comprehends the dazzling diversity of literature in the Americas...

"Joining the current debates in American literary history, José David Saldívar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies. Saldívar pursues...