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"The funniest man i ever saw, and the saddest man i ever knew". This is how W. C. Fields described Bert Williams, the highest-paid entertainer in America in his heyday and someone who counted the King of England and Buster Keaton among his fans. Born in the Bahamas, he moved to California with his family. Too poor to attend Stanford University, he took to life on the stage with his friend George Walker. Together they played lumber camps and mining towns until they eventually made the agonising decision to "play the coon". Offstage, Williams was a tall, light-skinned man with marked poise and dignity ; on-stage he now became a shuffling, inept "nigger" who wore blackface make-up. As the new century dawned they were headlining on Broadway. But the mask was beginning to overwhelm Williams and he sank into bouts of melancholia and heavy drinking, unable to escape the blackface his public demanded.

English fiction

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Public debates on the benefits and dangers of mass literacy prompted nineteenth-century British authors to write about illiteracy. Since the early twentieth century writers outside Europe have paid increasing attention to the subject as a measure both of cultural dependence and independence. So far literary studies has taken little notice of this. The Non-Literate Other: Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English offers explanations for this lack of interest in illiteracy amongst scholars of literature, and attempts to remedy this neglect by posing the question of how writers use their literacy to write about a condition radically unlike their own. Answers to this question are given in the analysis of nineteen works featuring illiterates yet never before studied for doing so. The book explores the scriptlessness of Neanderthals in William Golding, of barbarians in Angela Carter, David Malouf, and J.M. Coetzee, of African natives in Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, of Maoris in Patricia Grace and Chippewas in Louise Erdrich, of fugitive or former slaves and their descendants in Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Gaines, of Untouchables in Mulk Raj Anand and Salman Rushdie, and of migrants in Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, and Amy Tan. In so doing it conveys a clear sense of the complexity and variability of the phenomenon of non-literacy as well as its fictional resourcefulness.

English fiction --- Literacy. --- English fiction. --- Illiteracy --- Education --- General education --- English literature --- History and criticism. --- 1900-1999

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Focusing on major works by Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Forster, Valerie Wainwright draws upon new research to trace the ways in which the ethical interests and ideas of philosophers and intellectuals, both famous and obscure, were taken up and reappraised as authors tackled the implications of an expansive ethics of well-being and self-fulfillment.

Ethics in literature. --- English fiction --- History and criticism.

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English fiction --- Closure (Rhetoric) --- Sex role in literature --- Feminism and literature --- History and criticism --- History --- English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism --- Feminism and literature - History - 20th century

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This book identifies and interprets the longstanding transatlantic dialogue between the literary imaginations of Anglo-Ireland and the Anglo-American South.

English fiction --- American fiction --- Dandies in literature. --- Irish authors --- History and criticism.