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Costa Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produced that stand in opposition to this normative image of who or what is tico and their creation as vehicles of soft power which aim to question social norms. This book explores protest literature from the 1970s by Quince Duncan, Carmen Naranjo, and Alfonso Chase who narrate their experiences from the margins of society by virtue of their identity as Afro-Costa Rican, feminist, and homosexual authors. Cinema from the twenty-first century is then analysed to demonstrate the nuanced and intersectional position chosen by national directors Esteban Ramírez, Paz Fábrega, Jurgen Ureña, and Patricia Velásquez to challenge the dominant nation-image as they reinscribe youth culture, Afro-Costa Rica, a female consciousness, and trans identity into the fabric of the nation.

The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomón de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated. De la Selva’s range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva’s own poetry – his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection – The Dinner at Gonfarone’s highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, all of whom were part of de la Selva’s extensive network.

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, “one of the most popular poets who ever lived”; on the other hand he has often been overlooked or marginalized by scholars and in literary histories. This book, the first full length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity. It approaches Lear’s work thematically, tracing some of its most fundamental subjects and situations. Grounded in attentive close readings, it connects Lear’s nonsense poetry with his various other creative endeavours: as a zoological illustrator and landscape painter, a travel writer, and a prolific diarist and correspondent.

This volume takes into account the variety of talents that inform not only Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six best-selling novels, but also her philosophical, theological and critical writing, which together express stringent views on art, politics and morality. It identifies Murdoch as a proudly Anglo-Irish writer whose work straddles the boundary between popular and intellectually serious novels which spanned the entire latter half of the twentieth century. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes and issues that characterise her fiction decade by decade; explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist; explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction by borrowing from the visual arts, drama, poetics and music. The importance of the settings of her homeland of Ireland and her beloved London concludes the study, and while Iris Murdoch is acknowledged throughout as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century she is also presented as one whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology speaks perhaps more urgently to twenty-first century readers than they did to those of the century in which she wrote.

John Dos Passos & Cinema, the first study to use the novelist’s little-known writing for the screen to assess the trajectory of his prolific career, explores both how film aesthetics shaped his revolutionary modernist narratives and how he later reshaped them directly into film form. The book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of his screen writing during the 1930s for Hollywood feature films and in an innovative independent treatment; it examines the complexities of his role in the 1937 political documentary The Spanish Earth; and it explores the unproduced screen treatment of his attempts from the 1940s on to adapt his epic trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism of that period. John Dos Passos & Cinema thus provides a new context for and reading of his modernist literary innovations and his conservative political reorientation in the 1930s that redefined his literary career.

The late-Victorian era has been extensively researched as a period of Gothic literature, and this study seeks to build upon this body of work by connecting the content of such studies to the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with the quintessentially urban Gothic space of fin de siècle London, as represented in classic texts such as Dracula and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the study proceeds to ask how the themes and energies which emerge in this moment evolve throughout the early twentieth century. In the ghost stories of authors like M.R. James, the Edwardian era witnesses an uncanny return to the rural English landscape, in which modernity encounters the re-emergence of suppressed fears and forces. After World War One, London again experiences a renewal of Gothic themes, with figures such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot representing the city as a stricken and desolate space, haunted by the trauma and ghosts of the recent conflict. That legacy of violence and loss is also evident in rural representations of place in the 1920s and 1930s, along with a renewed interest in supernaturalism and paganism found in authors like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Butts. Ultimately, this study argues, this period of dramatic social and cultural change is shadowed by a corresponding evolution in Gothic literary representation, whether that is expressed through modernist experimentation or more conventional narrative forms.

In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.

Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books examines Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press as a key intervention in modernist and women's writing and mark its importance to independent publishing, bookselling, and print culture at large. The research in this volume coincides with the centenary of the founding of Hogarth Press in 1917, thus making a timely addition to scholarship on the Woolfs and print culture.

In contrast to recent theories of the ‘global’ or ‘post-national’ Latin American novel, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela’s literary isolation. The latter results from factors including the legacy of the Boom and historically low levels of emigration from Venezuela. Grounded in theories of metafiction and intertextuality, the book provides a close reading of eight novels published between 2004 (the year in which the first Minister for Culture was appointed) and 2012 (the last full year of President Chávez’s life), relating these novels to the context of their production. Each chapter explores a way in which these novels reflect on writing, from the protagonists as readers and writers in different contexts, through appearances from real life writers, to experiments with style and popular culture, and finally questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. This literary analysis complements overarching studies of the Bolivarian Revolution by offering an insight into how Bolivarian policies and practices affect people on an individual, emotional and creative level. In this context, self-reflexive narratives afford their writers a form of political agency.