Literature: history and criticism Books

Jordan Carson's American Exceptionalism as Religion looks at how American nationalist ideologies intersect with religious ones in contemporary literature. Carson traces out how an exceptionalist belief system began to emerge historically with a...

In this survey of Central and South American literature, Earl E. Fitz provides the first book in English to analyze the Portuguese- and Spanish-language American canons in conjunction, uncovering valuable insights about both. Fitz works by comparisons...

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation focuses on nonprocreative and nonbiological kinship ties, revealing the importance of these relationships...

What meaning does the past hold for the present? History writing often prioritizes the ethos and actions of the "great men" of the past, those connected to formal expressions of power, as models worthy of imitation. The problem with such exemplars is...

When British and American leaders today talk of the nation--whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump--they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual...

A descendent of two U.S. presidents and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Henry Adams enjoyed a very particular place in American life, not least due to his ancestry. Yet despite his prolific writing in the years between 1877 and 1891, when he lived in...

In the past thirty years biodiversity has become one of the central organizing principles through which we understand the nonhuman environment. Its deceptively simple definition as the variation among living organisms masks its status as a hotly...

While early modern selfhood has been explored during the last two decades via a series of historical identity studies involving class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, until very recently there has been little engagement with disability and...

In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating "invisibly" in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a...

What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously? With Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women's Travel, Tisha Brooks addresses this question by focusing...

What is Melville beyond the whale? Long celebrated for his stories of the sea, Melville was also fascinated by the interrelations between living species and planetary systems, a perspective informing his work in ways we now term "ecological."...

In the seventeenth century, even as the Spanish Habsburg monarchy entered its irreversible decline, the capital of its most important overseas territory was flourishing. Nexus of both Atlantic and Pacific trade routes and home to an ethnically diverse...

During the Renaissance, horses--long considered the privileged, even sentient companions of knights-errant--gradually lost their special place on the field of battle and, with it, their distinctive status in the world of chivalric heroism. Parrots, once...

The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter LaSalle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel.A summer spent roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris...

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media-everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games-is key to...

A definitive introduction to New Testament textual criticism, this book includes a comparison of the major editions of the New Testament, detailed description and analysis of the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, and discussion on the value of the...

This book provides original essays that suggest ways to engage students in the classroom with the cultural factors of American literature. Some of the essays focus on individual authors' works, others view American literature more broadly, and still...

Paring a novel into a two-hour film is an arduous task for even the best screenwriters and directors. Often the resulting movies are far removed from the novel, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable. Stanley Kubrick's adaptations have...

Much has been written about America's troubled teens, particularly endangered teenage girls. Works like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and many others have contributed to the general perception that contemporary young women are in a state of crisis...

Today, debates about the cultural role of the humanities and the arts are roiling. Responding to renewed calls to reassess the prominence of canonical writers, Shakespeare On Stage and Off introduces new perspectives on why and how William Shakespeare...

For many Canadians, the small province of New Brunswick on Canada's scenic east coast is "a nice place to visit but no place to live," plagued for generations by outmigration and economic stagnation. In The Fiddlehead Moment Tony Tremblay challenges this...

Enlightenment - both the phenomenon specific to the eighteenth century and the continuing trend in Western thought - is an attempt to dispel ignorance, achieve mastery of a potentially hostile environment, and contain fear of the unknown by promoting...

The materials we turn to for the construction of our literary pasts - the texts, performances, and discussions selected for storage and cataloguing in archives - shape what we know and teach about literature today. The ways in which archival materials...

The study of Montreal as a specific location in French and English writings has long been subordinated to the demands of linguistically divided and politically contentious narratives about national development. In this cross-linguistic study, Patrick...

Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and "progress poems" that address America's destiny in...

In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of Canadian authors were revealed to have faked the identities that made them famous. What is extraordinary about these writers is that they actually "became," in everyday life, characters they had...

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) was a successful Soviet author and journalist, but he is more often recognized in the West as Russian literature's leading dissident. How do we account for this paradox? In the first collection of essays to explore the Russian...

L.M. Montgomery's writings are replete with enchanting yet subtle and fluid depictions of nature that convey her intense appreciation for the natural world. At a time of ecological crises, intensifying environmental anxiety, and burgeoning eco-critical...

Taking its title from a poem by Prince Edward Island poet Anne Compton, In the Interval of the Wave is a close study of diaries written by Prince Edward Island women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women from both rural and urban regions...

The Epicureans were notorious in antiquity for denigrating most forms of civic participation and for rejecting those cultural activities (such as poetry, music, and rhetoric) which are broadly labelled paideia. In this, as in all else, they ostensibly...

This study follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Exploring the continuities between the romantic and Victorian "periods" that have so often been rather...

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student...

Many studies of poetic modernism focus on the avatars of High Modernism, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, who created a critical coterie based on culture and class. A New Matrix for Modernism introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct...

This book seeks to include among accounts of modern lyric poetry a theory of the poem's relation to the unintelligible. DeSales Harrison draws a distinction between sites of unintelligibility and sights of difficulty; while much has been said about...

This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political...

Addressing for the first time Shakespeare's place in counter-cultural cinema, this book examines and theorizes counter-hegemonic, postmodern, and post-punk Shakespeare in late 20th and early 21st century film. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies,...

Ovid, Rome's most cynical and worldly love poet, has not until recently been highly regarded among Latin poets. Now, however, his reputation is growing, and this volume is an important contribution to the re-establishment of Ovid's claims to critical...

In the increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic American landscape of the present, understanding and bridging dynamic cross-cultural conversations about social and political concerns becomes a complicated humanistic project. How do everyday embodied...

First published in 1975, this title provides an introduction to the study of the novel. Marjorie Boulton deals systematically with the major elements of plot, character, authorial conventions, narrative structure, and dialogue and distinguishes different...

It is impossible to appreciate poetry fully without some knowledge of the various aspects of poetic technique. First published in 1953, with a second edition in 1982, this title explains all the usual technical terms in an accessible manner. Marjorie...

This book proposes a fundamental relationship between exile and mapping. It seeks to understand the cartographic imperative inherent in the exilic condition, the exilic impulses fundamental to mapping, and the varied forms of description proper to both...

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's...

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law -The Legacy of Modernism addresses the legacy of contemporary critiques of language for the concept of the rule of law. Between those who care about the rule of law and those who are interested in contemporary legal...