Literature: history and criticism Books

In this book, Octavio R. González revisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth-century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit...

From early prostheses to present-day transhumanism, this graphic novel addresses one of the most remarkable challenges in the history of medicine: how we repair and even enhance the body.A young man wakes up in the hospital to discover that one of his...

What is sex? Has it always existed? What purpose does it serve? Why are there penises and vaginas? These questions are at the very core of Dirty Biology, an erudite (and hilarious) graphic novel that aims to teach you everything you wanted to know about...

The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope towards the spiritual...

Central to rhetorical theory, the enthymeme is most often defined as a truncated syllogism. Suppressing a premise that the audience already knows, this rhetorical device relies on the audience to fill in the missing information, thereby making the...

Jacques Lacan's commentaries on Freud had revolutionary implications not only for the analytic movement but also for contemporary philosophy and literary criticism. Lacan held that if the unconscious, as Freud described it, exists, it functions...

In Enlightenment and Pathology Anne Vila surveys the various understandings of sensibility that passed back and forth between different professional modes of discourse in eighteenth-century France. The thrills of the nervous system, the delectations of...

Tourniers novel is a love story that uses the theme of twinship to explore a near infinity of dualities. Jean and Paul are identical twins. Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean-Paul. The mysterious bond between them...

In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a...

In this book, Emily Griffiths Jones examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688 to show how writers during this politically turbulent time used the genre of romance to construct diverse ideological...

This work is both an introduction to and a critical appraisal of the work of Rainer Forst, one of the most important political theorists in Germany today. Structured for classroom use, this collection of original essays engages with Forst's extant corpus...

Superhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and...

Superhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and...

First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences–especially Shakespearean ones–on Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the...

Love in a Time of Slaughters examines a diverse array of creative narratives in which genocide and extinction blur species lines in order to show how such stories can promote the preservation of biological and cultural diversity in a time of man-made...

The 1993 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Toni Morrison is well established as one of the leading voices in American letters. Even so, her novels are often read narrowly rather than expansively, read as literary artifacts rather than as dynamic cultural...

Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed...

Borges Beyond the Visible presents radically new readings of some of Jorge Luis Borges’s most celebrated stories. Focusing on the tensions between fiction and intimacy, Max Ubelaker Andrade shows how Borges employed his famous intertextual puzzles...

For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in...

A transdisciplinary collection of essays focusing on David Hume as historian, and arguing that his "historical" and "philosophical" works are more intimately connected than scholars have often assumed.

A transdisciplinary collection of essays focusing on David Hume as historian, and arguing that his "historical" and "philosophical" works are more intimately connected than scholars have often assumed.

Explores the uses of Shakespeare in Manhattan’s Lower East Side from the 1890s to 1920s, as part of a cultural exchange among non-Anglo and Anglo-identified groups, intermingling different communities’ ideas about what Shakespeare, race, and...

Explores the uses of Shakespeare in Manhattan’s Lower East Side from the 1890s to 1920s, as part of a cultural exchange among non-Anglo and Anglo-identified groups, intermingling different communities’ ideas about what Shakespeare, race, and...

A household icon of the environmental movement, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) may be the most quoted conservationist in history. A Sand County Almanac has sold millions of copies and Leopold's writings are venerated for their perceptions about land and how...

Explores representations of Joan of Arc in English culture from 1429 until the early nineteenth century, examining the factors that shaped retellings of her military successes and execution.

Explores representations of Joan of Arc in English culture from 1429 until the early nineteenth century, examining the factors that shaped retellings of her military successes and execution.

Explores the metaphorical power of time and space in Jewish modernist poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish as a response to the experience of exile and landlessness, and as a means of furthering modernism's exploration of the self and its relation to community,...

An exploration of the literary and cinematic representations of the kibbutz movement in Israel. Authors discussed include Amos Oz, Savyon Liebrecht, Nathan Shaham, Avraham Balaban, Atallah Mansour, Eli Amir, and Batya Gur. Directors discussed include...

An exploration of the literary and cinematic representations of the kibbutz movement in Israel. Authors discussed include Amos Oz, Savyon Liebrecht, Nathan Shaham, Avraham Balaban, Atallah Mansour, Eli Amir, and Batya Gur. Directors discussed include...

Originally published in 1912. A collection of stories focusing on Pennsylvania's folklore, history, and wildlife, set in the Bald Eagle Mountains of Centre, Clinton, Lycoming, Juniata, and Union counties.

Explores the challenges and rewards faced by literary biographers. Details the author's experiences writing the lives of writers including Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, and Archibald MacLeish.

Speak Like Singing honors talk-song visions for all relatives and seeks to plumb, if not to reconcile, Native and American poetics, tribal chorus, and solitary vision.

Speak Like Singing focuses on select Native American writers showcasing the distinct voices and tribal diversities of living Indians. Through the pan-tribal medium of English, a second language for some and now a mother tongue for most, many of these...

Hector A. Torres conducted these interviews with today's popular Chicano/a writers, asking each about language and life between languages, about the creative drive that has guided them in their craft and commits them to their art. In sharing their...

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: "I just want you to be happy"; "I'm happy if...

A major literary event, the publication of this masterful translation makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is...

Melodrama is often seen as a blunt aesthetic tool tainted by its reliance on improbable situations, moral binaries, and overwhelming emotion, features that made it a likely ingredient of British imperial propaganda during the late nineteenth century...

25th Annniversary Edition, with a new preface by the author Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by...

The Brontes and the Fairy Tale is the first comprehensive study devoted to the role of fairy tales and folklore in the work of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Bronte. It intervenes in debates on genre, literary realism, the history of the fairy...

Shakespeare and baseball are monuments of high and popular culture: Shakespeare is the most widely read and staged playwright in the world, and baseball is America's game. Professor Samuel Crowl, a prize-winning teacher and international scholar of...

Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. This new study rethinks several assumptions in...

In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on "drawing-room books" as both...

Charity and Condescension explores how condescension, a traditional English virtue, went sour in the nineteenth century, and considers how the failure of condescension influenced Victorian efforts to reform philanthropy and to construct new narrative...

Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 1059-1133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text...

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European society struggled to adapt to numerous challenges to traditional knowledge systems. In response to an increasing confusion of standard forms, Victorian thinkers and writers developed and amplified the...

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Tóibín's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Tóibín brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view.Known for his acuity...

This book collects, for the first time, Colm T¾ibÝn's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, T¾ibÝn brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view.Known for his acuity...