Literary fiction is of crucial importance in human life. It is a source of understanding and insight into the nature of the human condition. Yet ever since Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible explanation of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary text means that fiction presents not the real world, but emother/em worlds - what are commonly called emfictional/em worlds.
This text argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the 1800s, the author looks at Balzac and Henry James, to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using rhetoric and excess of melodrama.
Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (Contemporary Studies in Children's Literature)
This is a critical study of Ursula le Guin, Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett. It overviews the "alworlds" genre and studies the "Earthsea" quartet, the "Discworld" series and the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.
British Children's Fiction in the Second World War
This is a broad-ranging discussion of wartime children's literature and its effects. What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. In a unique time for British children, parental controls were often relaxed if not absent. Radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future.
