The collection brings together experts in the field of twentieth-century writing to provide a volume that is both comprehensive and innovative in its discussion of a set of newly canonical texts. The book includes new applications of philosophical and critical thinking to established texts.

The collection brings together experts in the field of twentieth-century writing to provide a volume that is both comprehensive and innovative in its discussion of a set of newly canonical texts. The book includes new applications of philosophical and critical thinking to established texts.

Essay themes include the politics of gender and canon-formation, canonical appropriation, ethnicity and the ltierary canon, and canon formation as a social process.

Since his astonishing Academy Award-nominated film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Hanif Kureishi has been recognized as a major writer who has both documented and profoundly influenced contemporary British culture. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), remains a key work in redefining our sense of what it means to be English in the postcolonial era. Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary British fiction and culture to reassess the full range of the author's writings, from novels such as The Black Album, My Son the Fanatic and Something to Tell You to films such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, My Son the Fanatic and Venus. As well as exploring Kureishi's handling of such themes as Thatcherism, terrorism, race, class and sexuality, the book move moves beyond sociological and psychoanalytical approaches, examining the stylistic features of his most recent novel, The Last Word. The volume includes interviews with Stephen Frears, the director of My Beautiful Launderette, and with Hanif Kureishi himself, as well as a foreword by Roger Michell, who has directed several of the author's screenplays, most recently Le Week-End.

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison—fiction, non-fiction, and other—drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts, Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, second edition provides an overview of Morrison’s intellectual growth as an artist. Linda Wagner-Martin aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty plus years. The revised edition includes new discussion of God Help the Child, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard. These additions present and intensify scholarship on Morrison’s major literary contributions, but also trace her significant role as a public intellectual, bringing to light the consistency of Morrison’s aesthetic and political visions.

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.