Literary studies: general Books

Sport as it is largely understood today was invented during the long eighteenth century when the modern rules of sport were codified; sport emerged as a business, a spectacle, and a performance; and gaming organized itself around sporting culture...

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary...

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary...

Contending that criticism of Marlowe's plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the...

Marcus Gheeraerts's portrait of a 'Persian lady' - probably in fact an English lady in masquing costume - exemplifies the hybridity of early modern English culture. Her surrounding landscape and the embroidery on her gown are typically English; but her...

Scholars have long been interested in the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon past can be understood using material written, and produced, in the twelfth century; and simultaneously in the continued importance (or otherwise) of the Anglo-Saxon past in the...

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland...

Examining the fairies of medieval romance as liminal beings, this book draws on anthropological and philosophical studies of liminality to combine folkloristic insights into the nature of fairies with close readings of selected romance texts. Tracing...

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So re-examines the prevailing critical consensus that Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist writer. While more difficult elements of his work have often been the subject of scholarly attention,...

Surrealism and the Gothic argues for the determinative influence of the gothic - of the gothic novel itself and of ideas strongly associated with the gothic (insanity, incarceration, the 'accursed outsider', magic, etc.) - upon both the formation and...

This study reads the Poet's reactions to the Terror in passages from The Prelude as explicitly about his twenty-three-year-old-self witnessing the gory deaths of Gorsas and others, which caused post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms, exacerbated...

This book explores the unedited material contained in the Hawthornden manuscripts of William Fowler, a Scottish poet attached to the court of Queen Anna of Denmark between 1590 and 1612. The material is representative of Fowler's ephemeral and occasional...

This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics; graphic narratives; animated documentaries and online, interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant. In doing so it explores,...

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from...

Migrant and Tourist Encounters: The Ethics of Im/mobility in 21st Century Dominican and Cuban Cultures analyzes the effects of clashing flows of voluntary and involuntary travelers to and from these countries due to an increase in migration and tourism...

Hundreds perished in Rome's Second Proscription, but one victim is remembered above all others. Cicero stands out, however, not only because of his fame, but also because his murder included a unique addition to the customary decapitation. For his corpse...

First published in 1990, Chaucer and the Social Contest takes a fresh view of The Canterby Tales, by placing the storytelling contest among the Canterbury pilgrims within the larger social contests in the changing England of the late fourteenth century...

Using an ecomaterialist conceptual framework, addresses interconnected stories from fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites in Italy and elsewhere.

Examines how French Renaissance travelers consumed and represented Italian space through writing and the imagination. Includes writings by Rabelais, Montaigne, and Du Bellay as well as lesser-known French travelers, illustrating how the material and...

As the story of the war between the sons of Oedipus and their cursed race, the Theban legend rivaled that of Troy in popularity and importance for medieval poets and audiences. Dominique Battles explores the vernacular Theban narratives of the Middle...

Much has been written about women of the English Renaissance, but few examples of women's writing from that era have been readily available until now. This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women...

This outstanding introductory survey collects, presents and examines, for the very first time, the portraits and representations of Alexander the Great on the ancient coins of the Greek and Roman period.From 320 BC to AD 400, Karsten Dahmen examines not...

This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and...

With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female...

This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period.Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and...

In Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance, Walter Wadiak traces the evolution of the medieval English romance from its thirteenth-century origins to 1500, and from a genre that affirmed aristocratic identity to one that appealed more...

While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee's remarkable new study reveals that Dante's engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid,...

In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period...

This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing...

Studies on the aesthetic representations of atrocity the world over have taken different discursive dimensions from history, sociology, political to human rights. These perspectives are usually geared towards understanding the manifestations, extent,...

Origin and Ellipsis in the Writing of Hilary Mantel provokes a re-engagement with Derrida's thinking in contemporary literature, with particular emphasis on the philosopher's preoccupation with the process of writing. This is the first book-length study...

Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance analyzes paradigmatic works of contemporary Native American/First Nations literary fiction using the tools of narrative theory. Each chapter is read through the lens of a narrative...

Analyzing Shakespeare's views on theatre and magic and John Dee's concerns with philosophy and magic in the light of the Italian version of philosophia perennis (mainly Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno), this book offers a new...

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out...

Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing - industrial novels, literature about...

Focusing on early Renaissance Franco-Ottoman relations, this book fills a gap in studies of Ottoman representations by early modern European powers by addressing the Franco-Ottoman bond. In French Encounters with the Ottomans, Pascale Barthe examines the...

What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights,...

Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton studies the relationship between English poetry and church discipline in four carefully chosen bodies of poetry written between the Reformation and the death of John Milton. Its primary goal is to...

Tracing the rise of conduct literature and the didactic novel over the course of the eighteenth century, this book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate during and immediately after the French Revolution...

This study explores the ways in which Dickens's published work and his thousands of letters intersect, to shape and promote particular myths of the reading experience, as well as redefining the status of the writer. It shows that the boundaries between...

Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the...

The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages-the female body-exists in special...

This book focuses on the complex network of relationships between the poet, Uri Zvi Grinberg, and the Labor Movement in Mandate Palestine from 1923-1937.