Literary studies: general Books

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates...

The Structural Study of Medieval Narrative Introduction: Absent Narratives and the Textual Culture of the Late Middle Ages The Wanting Words of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Remembering Canacee: Chaucer, Incest, and the Structure of Narrative Chaucer's...

Ethics for Apocalyptic Times is about the role literature can play in helping readers cope with our present-day crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and the shift toward fascism in global politics. Using the lens of Mennonite...

Romance, Family, and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature explores how Japanese writers in Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan used narratives of romantic and familial love in order to traverse the dangerous currents of empire. Focusing on the period between...

Lively and deeply productive discussions have focused on the topics of "magnificence" and "the sublime" in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following. They have engaged major figures from Ernst Gombrich to Theodore...

Introduction: The Province of Public Intellectualism: Emerson, Du Bois, Emotion, and Reform Writing Race: You'll Know It When You Feel It Double Consciousness: It's More Than What You Think Losing Your Head: Why Du Bois and Emerson (Mostly) Like John...

When has using the term "lesbian" not been considered an anachronistic gesture? This question lies at the heart of this important new collection of essays. The Lesbian Premodern engages key scholars in lesbian studies and queer theory in an innovative...

Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, this book shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.

Heir to an earldom, and wife and widow of William de Valence (half-brother of King Henry III), Joan de Valence was an important actor in the volatile political world of thirteenth-century England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Yet, astonishingly, her...

This dynamic volume explores the differences that separate man from other forms of life. Building on the increased attention paid in recent criticism to both plant and animal life in the Renaissance, as well as the instability of categories such as...

Skin is a multifarious image in medieval culture: the material basis for forming a sense of self and relation to the world, as well as a powerful literary and visual image. Treating key medieval English texts and traditions, from romance and exemplum to...

Collectively undertaking the first sustained examination of Chaucer's representation of non-human creatures since Beryl Rowland's Blind Beasts in 1971, this book connects work in critical animal studies and close-readings of Chaucer's texts. Grouped under

Acknowledgements Introduction: Individuals-in-Relation The Ironies of Western Individualism New Women, Female Aesthetes and Socialist Individualists: The Literature of Separateness and Solubility Decadent Interiority and the Will The Unclassed and the...

This volume focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500. It brings to the fore a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman alongside that of the English vernacular, demanding a rethinking...

This book demonstrates that, rather than being an exceptional or unusual phenomenon, multilingualism is fundamental to modernist fiction. Focusing on the use of different languages by key modernist writers including D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson,...

This rich and varied collection of essays makes a timely contribution to critical debates about the Female Gothic, a popular but contested area of literary studies. The contributors revisit key Gothic themes - gender, race, the body, monstrosity,...

Acknowledgements Author Biographies Writing Madness, Analysing Madness Mental States Power and Institutions in Fiction Diversity, Ethnicity, Madness and Fiction Creativity, Madness and Fiction Postmodern Madness Literature and Clinical Education...

This is the first extended text-based analysis of the social and political implications of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Arguments are primarily based on close readings of the first four Harry Potter books and the first two films - in other words, a...

Studies in the Medieval Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that answers the question: what did the Atlantic Ocean mean to medieval north Europeans? Contributors analyze the Atlantic Ocean of the seventh to sixteenth centuries through...

Old Norse texts offer many different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women who occupy diverse social and economic positions or who have varying racial origins. Covering a much wider range of texts than have previous studies, this book...

Medieval drama based on the Bible commonly directs its audiences toward a Christian interpretation, but equally interesting, and less frequently investigated by scholars, are the plays' modes of resistance to Christian authority. Through a reading...

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts,...

Marriage, Property, and Women's Narratives addresses Virginia Woolf's question, 'Why are women poor?' Drawing from three different time periods and three distinct legal models of female property ownership, this study investigates how women writers frame...

Medieval women's history is entering a new stage. In the last thirty years medievalists have recovered the sources about women, and have moved women to the foreground of narratives to view society from their vantage point. The historians in this...

These essays trace the Western poem as it confronts indigenous alterity in Latin America. Andrés Ajens approaches literature as a Western invention and seeks connections between the two traditions. This book discusses a wide range of indigenous American,...

Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer's Talking Birds analyzes the interaction between gender and species in Chaucer's poetry and interprets his adaptation of medieval genres through an ecofeminist lens. His self-conscious experimentation with talking...

Approaching the subject from a dramaturgical point of view, this investigation differs from anything that has been written about the relationship between Thomas More and William Shakespeare. Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett define, in specific...

No one working today in Middle English studies or in period-related film and/or documentary can proceed untouched by Terry Jones' thought-provoking views. Through films such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, educational television series for BBC and...

Davis challenges the dominant accounts of the Elizabethan literary system, revealing the competing commercial, intellectual, political, and personal interests that swirled around the printing of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Astrophel and Stella,...

To what extent did Charles Dickens see himself as a medium of forces beyond his conscious control? What did he think such subconscious mechanisms might be, and how did his thoughts on the subject play out in his writings? Sensation and Sublimation in...

Little attention has been focused on the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study analyzes the role of Muslims in several core texts representing...

The Anglo-Scottish border in the late medieval and early modern period was a highly contested region; both a militarized zone and a place of cultural contact and exchange. The contributors to this volume explore the role of this borderland in the...

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture examines an important moment in the long history of the medical use and abuse of the human body. In early modern Protestant England, the fragmented corpse was processed, circulated, and...

This volume broadens the perspective of recent work on the discourse of the Muslim Other in medieval Christendom by investigating pertinent texts, art, and artifacts in Armenian, Old Irish and Breton, Old Norse, Serbo-Croatian, Middle English, Old...

This book posits that coins and their (especially literary) representations were inextricably bound with several key factors for English state formation within the period. After surveying various definitions and histories of the "state" within the first...

For many medieval authors, sexuality was the ultimate expression of embodiment. Sexuality could be a medium for human communication with the divine, but it could also be a barrier when not conceptualized or practiced correctly. Broad in scope, this...

Ekphrasis, a genre of poetry describing a work of art, has traditionally existed on the ideological battleground between the verbal and visual arts. Medieval ekphrases, however, reveal ekphrasis as a process rather than a genre and show how it works with...

Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Exploring a cross-section of 9th through 12th centuries, non-religious Arabic prose and poetic...

Although praised by reviewers, Robert Duncan's last two books of poetry have yet to receive the critical attention they merit. This collection fills that gap and addresses such topics as the evolution of Ground Work, the relation of Duncan's later poetry...

Shattering terrain and lives, the First World War challenged the representative power of words, maps, and visual art. This book tells the untold story of literary responses, showing how modernist fictional topographies by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West,...

Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature studies medieval attitudes towards the human mediation of God's and Christ's voices and thus attends to how medieval people resignified a pagan practice. As Mary Hayes demonstrates, the ventriloquized...

In the first major study of the twentieth-century American protest novel, Kimberly S. Drake examines a group of authors who self-consciously exploited the revolutionary potential of the novel. These works transformed literary conventions concerning art...

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages...

This exciting collection brings together work from several disciplines that addresses the politics of queer representation in global contexts. Articles cover many aspects of contemporary culture, including the queer cowboy, the emergence of lesbian chic,...