Literary studies: general Books

This book is about the presence of utopian and dystopian elements in the Italian literary landscape. It focuses on four authors that are representatives of the various positions in the Italian cultural debate: Pasolini, Calvino, Sanguineti, and Volponi...

This book brings a renewed critical focus to the history of novel writing, publishing, selling and reading, expanding its viewing beyond national territories. Relying on primary sources (such as advertisements, censorship reviews, publisher and bookstore...

This book examines the literary impact of famed British poet, Barry MacSweeney, who worked at the forefront of poetic discovery in post-war Britain.  Agitated equally by politics and the possibilities of artistic experimentation, Barry MacSweeney...

This book is a critical experiment that tracks the literary and poetic uses of musical notation and notational methods in North American long poems from the middle of last century to the contemporary moment. Poets have readily referred to their poems as...

This is the first exploration of the performative and theatrical force of Austen's work and its afterlife, from the nineteenth century to the present. It unearths new and little-known Austen materials: from suffragette novels and pageants to school and...

Applying critical race theory to contemporary African American children's and young adult literature, this book explores one key racial issue that has been overlooked both in race studies and literary scholarship-internalised racism. By systematically...

Winner of the Montserrat Ordóñez Prize 2018This book provides an original and exciting analysis of Colombian women's writing and its relationship to feminist history from the 1970s to the present. In a period in which questions surrounding...

This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as "tropical weather." Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic...

This book reevaluates fiction devoted to the postwar American suburb, examining the way these works imagine suburbia as a communal structure designed to advance a particular American identity. Postmodern Suburban Spaces surveys works by both canonical...

This book proposes feminist empathy as a model of interpretation in the works of contemporary Anglophone African women writers. The African woman's body is often portrayed as having been disabled by the patriarchal and sexist structures of...

The essays in this volume provide an overview and critical account of prevalent trends and theoretical arguments informing current investigations into literary treatments of motherhood and aging. They explore how two key stages in women's lives-maternity...

Reading literary and cinematic events between and beyond American and Persian literatures, this book questions the dominant geography of the East-West divide, which charts the global circulation of texts as World Literature. Beyond the limits of national...

This book is about the historical moment when writers and critics first used the term "realism" to describe representation in literature and painting. While scholarship on realism tends to proceed from an assumption that the term has a long-established...

Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human...

This collection establishes the term 'medical paratexts' as a useful addition to medical humanities, book history, and literary studies research. As a relatively new field of study, little critical attention has been paid to medical paratexts. We...

This book presents a fundamental shift in the way we approach, discuss, and evaluate Joyce's non-fictional writings. Rather than simply proposing or applying new methodologies, it historicises and reconceives the critical assumptions that have shaped...

This book explores how writers responded to the rise of the newspaper over the course of the nineteenth century. Taking as its subject the ceaseless intertwining of fiction and journalism at this time, it tracks the representation of newspapers and...

Joe Bray's careful analysis of Jane Austen's stylistic techniques reveals that the genius of her writing is far from effortless; rather he makes the case for her as a meticulous craftswoman and a radical stylistic pioneer. Countering those who have...

This book follows the figure of 'the clever girl' from the post-war to the present and focuses on the fiction, plays and memoirs of contemporary British women writers. Spurred on by an ethic of meritocracy, the clever girl is now facing austerity and...

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant 'native' literary culture until the postcolonial period. Indeed, most literary histories of the Caribbean begin with the texts associated with the independence...

Until the nineteenth century, consumptives were depicted as sensitive, angelic beings whose purpose was to die beautifully and set an example of pious suffering - while, in reality, many people with tuberculosis faced unemployment, destitution, and an...

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John...

This book argues that there are deep connections between 'poetic' thinking and the sensitive recognition of creaturely others. It explores this proposition in relation to four poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Les Murray. Through a...

The 1820s and 1830s, the gap between Romanticism and Victorianism, continues to prove a difficulty for scholars. This book explores and recovers a neglected culture of poetry in those years, and it demonstrates that culture was a crucial turning point in...

This book is a study of children, their books and their reading experiences in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.  It argues for the importance of reading to early modern childhood and of childhood to early modern reading cultures by...

This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically neglected pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the white writing of South Africa, from the aesthetics of...

This book examines women's domestic occupations in the Romantic-period novel at the most intimately human level. By examining the momentary thought and feeling processes that informed the playing of a harp, the stitching of a dress, or the reading of a...

This book represents the first serious consideration of the 'domestic noir' phenomenon and, by extension, the psychological thriller. The only such landmark collection since Lee Horsley's The Noir Thriller, it extends the argument for serious, academic...

This book explores multilingualism as an imaginative articulation of the experience of modernity in twentieth-century Spanish and American literature. It argues that while individual multilingual practices are highly singular, literary multilingualism...

This book is a historically informed and textually grounded study of the connections between Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, and Nietzsche, who thought of himself as an "attempter." In conversation with the Essais, Nietzsche developed key themes...

This book is about the modernist narrative voice and its correlation to medical, mythological, and psychoanalytic images of emasculation between 1919 and 1945. It shows how special-effects of rhetoric and form inspired by outré modernist developments in...

This book is about haunting in modernist literature. Offering an extended and textually-sensitive reading of modernist spectrality that has yet to be undertaken by scholars of either haunting or modernism, it provides a fresh reconceptualization of...

This book explores the tangled relationship between literary production and epistemological foundation as exemplified in one of the masterpieces of Italian literature. Filippo Andrei argues that Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron has a significant though...

This collection represents a new range of critical awareness and marks the burgeoning of what is a twenty-first-century Marianne Moore renaissance. The essays explore Moore's participation in modernist movements and communities, her impact on subsequent...

This book views Romantic literature's discourses of childhood, education, and reproduction through the eyes of four early nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge, children of Samuel...

This collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays by international scholars takes a fresh look at the profound impact of the Peninsular War on Romantic British literature and culture. The expertly authored chapters explore the valorization of...

This book is a major study of the presentation of work and workers in contemporary novels from India, North America and the UK. Drawing on lively recent theories about work, it shows how the novel is a crucial form for helping us to understand what work...

This volume examines the teaching of Jewishness within the context of medieval England. It covers a wide array of academic disciplines and addresses a multitude of primary sources, including medieval English manuscripts, law codes, philosophy, art, and...

This book frames the undeniably copious 21st-century performances of stupidity that occur within social media as echoes of rhetorical experiments conducted by humanist writers of the Renaissance. Any historical overview of humanism will associate it with...