Literature: history and criticism Books

'Adrian Noble vigorously highlights the extraordinary rhythmic, linguistic patterns Shakespeare gives the speaker. Any actor will find this book invaluable. For any student of Shakespeare it should be essential.' (From the Foreword by Ralph Fiennes)'How...

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film...

Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expression do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in significant ways. Memoirs of illness and...

The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of the sense that while the theory of biophilia has productively addressed ideal human affinities with nature, the capacity of "the biophilia hypothesis" as an explanatory model of human/ environment relations is...

What do we mean when we talk about disability in the Middle Ages? This volume brings together dynamic scholars working on the subject in medieval literature and history, who use the latest approaches from the field to address this central question...

This book attempts to reveal how the fantastic operates and how it produces its effects, and analyses the devices and techniques used by the fantastic in order to produce hesitation in the mind of the reader. It proceeds through an analysis of one French...

This book is about the power of narrative realism as a critique of the ideology of inwardness in the German-speaking world. It answers the question: What kind of truth about reality does German literary realism enable us to see, and what kind of...

Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot After Brecht

The book is based on the papers presented at the Mendel Friedman Yiddish conference held at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, in August 2012, revisits the rich and diverse legacy of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, known by his penname Der...

This book investigates the clash between social uniformity and personal anomalies as a key to understanding the functions of laughter in four major Italian authors from the early twentieth century, highlighting some essential differences between...

In the years since the death of Mao Zedong, interest in Chinese writers and Chinese literature has risen significantly in the West. In 2000, Gao Xingjian became the first Chinese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature followed by Mo Yan in...

This volume explores the role of music as a source of inspiration and provocation for modernist writers. In its consideration of modernist literature within a broad political, postcolonial, and internationalist context, this book is an important...

Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present examines the most important authors of Western literature: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marlowe, Goethe, Joyce, Eliot, Mann, Bulgakov and Pasternak, who based their...

The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our...

Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights...

Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and...

In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal-engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less-then what are the limits of life writing? Where does it begin and end?...

The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or...

Euhemerism and Its Uses offers the first interdisciplinary, focussed, and all-round view of the long history of an important but understudied phenomenon in European intellectual and cultural history. Euhemerism - the claim that the Greek gods were...

Hebrew and Hellene explores the intellectual and personal relations among John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater, three figures important in the development of nineteenth-century English thought and culture. Fundamentally concerned with the...

Kim Thúy is a literary phenomenon, rising in her first decade of writing to a level of international recognition that few Québécois writers ever attain. The Vietnamese-born author's novels have garnered literary prize recognition and have been translated...

From his debut as a novelist, Mordecai Richler challenged, provoked, enraged, entertained, and surprised readers. Criticizing him for his portrayals of Canada and accusing him of being anti-Jewish, many found his mix of progressive sympathies and...

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish writers played a key role in transatlantic cultural conversations - among Canada, Britain, France, America, and Indigenous nations - that shaped Canadian nationalism. Nationalism in Ireland was likewise...

The short story and the short story cycle have long been considered a marginal genre, free to make room for fresh or risk-taking voices. But in thematizing masculinity in crisis, the genre uses the premise of the marginal to elevate recuperative...

In the decade before and after independence, Nigerians not only adopted the novel but reinvented the genre. Nigerian novels imagined the new state, with its ideals of the rule of law, state sovereignty, and a centralized administration.Debt, Law, Realism...

The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) is a literary think tank that brings together writers and mathematicians. Since 1960, its worldwide influence has refreshed ways of making and thinking about literature...

The celebrated author of Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon receives much-deserved additional consideration in L.M. Montgomery and Gender. Nineteen contributors take a variety of critical and theoretical positions, from historical analyses of the...

Though we all face a tug of war between dependency and autonomy while growing up, British author D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) experienced the struggle with particular intensity. Later in life, his acute observational skills, high emotional intelligence, and...

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, gender scholars and activists have asked whether a reconcilliation between Zionism and feminism is possible in the current political landscape. Fictions of Gender explores the contemporary controversies surrounding...

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of...

This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and...

The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic shakeups of the nineteenth century that left masculinity a site of contestation, racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire...

Over the past few decades, a group of writers we might call the Thinking and Singing poets have stood at the forefront of poetry in Canada. These five poets - Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn - are major voices in an...

Efforts to fight back against silencing are central to social justice movements and scholarly fields such as feminist and postcolonial studies. But claiming to give voice to people who have been silenced always risks appropriating those people's stories...

If feminism has always been characterized by its divisions, it is metafeminism, a term coined by Lori Saint-Martin, that defines and embraces that disorder. As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist...

Margaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors. She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known...

From the 1960s until his death in 2000, Al Purdy was one of the most prominent writers in Canada, famous for his frank language and his boisterous personality. He travelled the country and wrote about its people and places from Newfoundland to Vancouver...

From history and politics to fantasy and farce, the first flourish of women's theatre in Canada questioned the discourses that formed and informed ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality. This book revives ten theatrical comedies that staged the promise of...

Literature emerging from nineteenth-century Upper Canada, born of dramatic cultural and political collisions, reveals much about the colony's history through its contrasting understandings of nature, ecology, deforestation, agricultural development, and...

In Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than...

The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower reviews the most current scholarship on the late medieval poet and opens doors purposefully to research areas of the future. It is an essential resource for scholars and students of Gower and of Middle...

Putting embodied experience at the heart or the stomach of our understanding of literary artistry, linguistic innovation and book history, this landmark collection explores the edible materiality of reading and writing in the period.

Wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived, this Research Companion investigates Shakespeare's relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare's specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism's likeness and...

An Index To The Old English Glosses Of The Durham Hymnarium (1905) is a reference book written by Harvey W. Chapman. This book is a comprehensive index of the Old English glosses found in the Durham Hymnarium, a manuscript containing a collection of...

An Index to Herodotus (1829) by Henry H. Davis is a comprehensive guide to the works of the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus. This book serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of ancient history who wish to delve deeper...