Explore the shock of the new—and the familiar—experienced by well-known expatriate writers when they returned to the United States. The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad. Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein. Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the “returning absentee” by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture.

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language. This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.

The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad. Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein. Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the "returning absentee" by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture. -- Joseph A. Boone, University of Southern California

Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics explores the relationship between Plath's writing and Cold War discourses and argues that the time (1960-1963), the place (England), and the global politics are important factors for us to consider when we consider the rhetoric of Plath's later poetry and fiction. Based on fresh readings arising from new research, this study argues that Plath should not be depoliticized, and examines her writing alongside the discourses of the period as expressed in newspaper reporting, magazines, and BBC radio. In contrasting her relationship with institutions in America in the 1950s with her responses in England to church, the American arms industry, the National Health Service, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament it becomes clear that the process of cultural defamiliarization causes Plath to question the model of the individual artist divorced from society, a model of the writer that had previously seemed so attractive.

Author and former literary agent Nathan Bransford shares his secrets for creating killer plots, fleshing out your first ideas, crafting compelling characters, and staying sane in the process. Read the guide that New York Times bestselling author Ransom Riggs called "The best how-to-write-a-novel book I've read."

For the first time in the literary tradition, the contemporary woman's historical novel (post-1970) is surveyed from a transnational feminist perspective. Analyzing the maternal (the genre's central theme) reveals that historical fiction is a transnational feminist means for challenging historical erasures, silences, normative sexuality, political exclusion, and divisions of labor. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 5)

Here for the first time is a full-length study of the 'critical modernisms' of the three leading art writers of the second half of the twentieth century, which helps us build a better understanding of the development of modern art writing and its relation to the 'post-modern' in art and society since the 1970s. Focusing on canonical modern artists such as Manet, Cezanne, Picasso and Pollock, this book provides an important understanding of writing and criticism in modern art for all students and scholars of art theory and art history. Mainstay issues discussed include aesthetic evaluation, subjectivity and meaning in art and art writing. Jonathan Harris examines key discourses and identifies points of significant overlap as well as sharp disjunction between the critics. Developing the notions of 'good' and 'bad' complexity in modernist criticism, Writing Back to Modern Art creates ways for us to think outside of these discourses of value and meaning and helps us to look at the place that art writing holds in the latter twentieth century and beyond.