'Pilgermann here. I call myself Pilgermann, it's a convenience. I don't know what I am now .'

In A Wayward Mood gathers together the most important work of this visionary teacher and cultural observer. It is the essential Daniel C. Noel. For more than forty years, Daniel C. Noel wrote and taught at the nexus of religion, literature, and cultural studies, working in the tradition of C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman. His books include Seeing Castaneda; Approaching Earth--A Search for the Mythic Significance of the Space Age; Paths to the Power of Myth;and The Soul of Shamanism. Noel passed away in August, 2002.

The essays in this collection survey the work of some of the most important British and Irish novelists of today. They not only consider afresh the work of novelists who established their reputations before 1960, such as Doris Lessing and William Golding; they also discuss the work of more recent novelists, among them Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter and Graham Swift. The contributors are drawn from various parts of the English-speaking world, and provide a variety of original perspectives on the novelists concerned.

Author Robert A. Parker has compiled here his critique of hundreds of novels he has read. This is the third of six volumes that cover authors alphabetically, in this case from George Gissing to Milan Kundera. More than 85 authors are represented, including Greene, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Hersey, Horgan, James, Joyce, Kazantzakis Kafka, Kennedy, and King. They reflect a broad range of writing styles, cultural influences, and moral philosophies. All works are rated on their literary achievement, the effectiveness of plot, character, and setting, plus their recognition of the moral, ethical and spiritual values of mankind. Here is a unique critical perspective that measures the meaning of literature against the meaning of life.

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.

Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextuality and hybrid forms to create textual realities that either run in opposition to or in parallel with an external reality; fabulations that develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to reality; works that use the aspects already noted to more fully engage with political or cultural realities; texts that deal with history as a fiction; and texts that elude categorization even within the variety already explored. For example, in fiction, a postmodernist novel might tell a story about a writer struggling with writing (only, perhaps, to find that he is a character in a book by another writer struggling to write a book). The A to Z of Postmodernist Literature and Theater examines the different areas of postmodernist literature and the variety of forms that have been produced. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on individual postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. By placing these concerns within the historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts of postmodernism, this reference explores the frameworks within which postmodernist literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century operates.