Literary studies: general Books

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...

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...

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...

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...

Despite the general scholarly consensus about Lucretius' debt to Empedocles as the father of the genre of cosmological didactic epic, there is a major disagreement regarding Lucretius' applause for his Presocratic predecessor's praeclara reperta (DRN 1...

Though popular opinion would have us see Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There as whimsical, nonsensical, and thoroughly enjoyable stories told mostly for children; contemporary research has shown us...

Food is a defining feature in every culture. Despite its very basic purpose of sustaining life, it directly impacts the community, culture and heritage in every region around the globe in countless seen and unseen ways, including the literature...

Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult...

Scott's Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott's intertextual sources, it offers a fresh approach to the existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon,...

Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and...

Research into the emotions is beginning to gain momentum in Anglo-Saxon studies. In order to integrate early medieval Britain into the wider scholarly research into the history of emotions (a major theme in other fields and a key field in...

This book tells, for the first time, the story of the Situationist International's influence and afterlives in Britain, where its radical ideas have been rapturously welcomed and fiercely resisted. The Situationist International presented itself as the...

This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality-with their...

This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact...

This is the first book on the fiction of Zoë Wicomb, a writer long at the forefront of the South African canon and whose international stature was firmly secured with the award of an inaugural Windham Campbell prize at Yale in 2013. It brings together...

This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer,...

A study of ancient Rome as a prominent topic in the works of Middle English poets. Discusses how each these poets conceives of ancient Rome and Romans, both pagan and Christian, and why it matters to their work. Includes the works of Gower, Chaucer,...

Examines the ways queer theory and Mennonite literature have intersected over the past decade and how these two traditions hold fundamental commitments to social justice in common.

The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation in the literary uses of dialect, with dialect becoming a key feature in the development of the realist novel, dialect songs being printed by the hundreds in urban centres and dialect poetry becoming a...

Sir John Denham (1614/15-1669) Reassessed shines new light on a singular, colourful yet elusive figure of seventeenth-century English letters. Despite his influence as a poet, wit, courtier, exile, politician and surveyor of the king's works, Denham,...

With its many rites of initiation (religious, educational, professional or sexual), Elizabethan and Jacobean education emphasized both imitation and discovery in a struggle to bring population to a minimal literacy, while more demanding techniques were...

This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the...

Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature exam>ines Woolf's life and oeuvre from the perspective of recycling and pro>vides answers to essential questions such as: Why do artists and writers recycle Woolf's texts and introduce...

A multidisciplinary collection of essays exploring current scholarship on the history of human identification. Examines how techniques of identification are entangled within a wider sphere of cultural identity formation.

Taking an original approach, Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities: Literary and Artistic Voices that undo the Lusophone Atlantic explores a selected body of cultural works from Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa. Contributors from...

This authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost transcribes the original 10-book poem, records its textual problems and numerous differences from the second edition, and discusses in critical commentary the importance of...

Examines the ghost stories of writer and academic Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936). Focuses on the intersection between his scholarly work and his fiction, arguing that his two careers are intriguingly intertwined.

Randall Jarrell was only fifty-one at the time of his death, in 1965, yet he created a body of work that secured his position as one of the century's leading American men of letters. Although he saw himself chiefly as a poet, publishing a number of books...

Illustrates how Oxford scholar Robert Burton used the resources available to a seventeenth century academic: genres and languages, as well as academic disciplines such as medicine and rhetoric. Demonstrates how early modern practices of knowledge and...

In The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena, Konrad Eisenbichler analyzes the work of Sienese women poets, in particular, Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Salvi, during the first half of the...

A leading authority in the field, Phillip Harding here presents the very first English translations of the six Athenian writers known as the Atthitographers.

Steven Rozenski reopens old discussions and addresses new ones concerning late medieval devotional texts, particularly those showing continental and German influences.For many, Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German has come to define the...

From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book...

This book explores the ways in which discourses of religious, racial, and national identity blur and engage each other in the medieval West. Specifically, the book studies depictions of Muslims in England during the 1330s and argues that these...

This book provides a study of Walter Benjamin's first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of...

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in...

Write My Name: Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore is the first monograph devoted to Moore's poetry, and argues for the value of attending to neglected aspects of Moore's poetic work through analysis of his shifting modes of authorship and...

Hellenic Common argues that theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy exemplify the functioning of a cosmopolitan cultural commonwealth.

This volume explores the reception of the classical past in the works of 20th century American dramatist Robert E. Sherwood and his use of the ancient world to critique key events and trends in American history.