Literary studies: general Books

This essay collection addresses the paradox that something may at once "be" and "not be" Shakespeare. This phenomenon can be a matter of perception rather than authorial intention: audiences may detect Shakespeare where the author disclaims him or have...

This volume considers Joseph Conrad's use of multiple genres, including allusions to sensation fiction, pornography, anthropology, and Darwinian science, to respond to Victorian representations of gender in layered and contradictory representations of...

This volume uncovers the ideas concerning everyday life circulating in the burgeoning feminist periodical culture of Britain in the early twentieth century. Barbara Green explores the ways in which the feminist press used its correspondence columns,...

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary...

This book offers an original and interdisciplinary interpretation of the relation between aesthetics and modern liberal democracy, uniting the fields of art theory with the democratic political philosophy and modern liberal economic theory. The central...

This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Stein's work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Stein's radical approach to meaning and knowledge. Inspired by the immanence of landscape, both of Provence where...

This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material...

Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed...

This book explores the relationship between Thomas Hardy's works and Victorian media and technologies of communication - especially the penny post and the telegraph. Through its close analysis of letters, telegrams, and hand-delivered notes in Hardy's...

This book uncovers a new genre of 'post-Agreement literature', consisting of a body of texts - fiction, poetry and drama - by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles but published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement...

Cocteau had an ambition many a poet has: to become immortal. But he, perhaps more than most, addressed this ambition directly in a great many of his plays, poems, and films. This book puts the work of this elusive and compelling poet under the...

While British drama of the long eighteenth century remains largely unexamined as registering ecological fears, its visual spectacle and settings allow the audience to grasp threats to environments across the globe. In plays from 1682-1799, The Theatres...

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture engages with migration to, within, and from Europe, foregrounding migration through the lenses of historical migratory movement and flows associated with...

From Sherlock Holmes onwards, fictional detectives use lenses: Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction argues that these visual aids are metaphors for ways of seeing, and that they help us to understand not only individual...

Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction draws on three related bodies of knowledge: crime fiction criticism, masculinity studies, and the cultural analysis of food and consumption practices from a critical eating studies...

Drawing both on historical accounts of the emotions and on contemporary affect theory, this book explores the intersection of social constructions of sex and gender with the development of norms for emotive speech in literary texts from the classical to...

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio's material history and offers a major revision to a century's old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for...

This book examines the idea of the self in Anglophone literatures from British colonies in Africa and the subcontinent, and in the context of intercultural encounter, literary hybridity and globalization. The project examines texts by eight authors...

Shakespeare was not only aware of the socio-cultural fears and anxieties generated by the older woman's body but with the characterization of his tragic ageing females, Shakespeare becomes the first literary giant to explore the physiological and...

This book proposes a model of reading called hyperobject reading that bridges the Anthropocene scale variance between humans and humanity by focusing on the large-scale problems and phenomena themselves. Hyperobject reading draws on narratology and...

This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author's previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory...

Women, Science and Fiction Revisited is an analysis of selected science fiction novels and short stories written by women over the past hundred years from the point of view of their engagement with how science writes the world. Beginning with Charlotte...

The New Woman sought vast improvements in Victorian culture that would enlarge educational, professional, and domestic opportunities.  Although New Women resist ready classification or appraisal as a monolithic body, they tended to share many...

This book explores the significance of flight to Romantic literature. Although the Romantic movement and the age of ballooning coincided, there has been a curious and long-time tendency to forget that flight was not impossible during this period. This...

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Critical Confessions Now. These chapters on confessions exhibit great diversity and take up different disciplinary approaches by scholars who stand at various stages of their careers. They...

This book explores Darwinism in modern Italian literature. In the years between Italy's unification (1861) and the rise of fascism, many writers gave voice to anxieties connected with the ideas of evolution and progress. This study shows how Italian...

This book analyses how the three books of visions by Hildegard of Bingen use the allegorical vision as a form of knowledge. It describes how the visionary's use of allegory and allegorical exegesis is linked to theories of cognition, interpretation, and...

Navigating Urban Soundscapes: Dublin and Los Angeles in Fiction offers an innovative analytical framework to explore sound in different media and across two distinct urban soundscapes. Studying a wide range of novels, films, and radio dramas, using...

This book sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of...

Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie's female poisoners in the context of Christie's own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver...

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British...

This book is the first collection of essays dedicated to the work of C. H. Sisson (1915-2003), a major English poet, critic and translator. The collection aims to offer an overall guide to his work for new readers, while also encouraging established...

This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf's modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf's writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on the possibilities...

This book is a study of how transfictional and transmedia storytelling emerges in the nineteenth century and how the period's receptive practices anticipate the receptive practices of fandom and transmedia storytelling franchises in the twentieth and...

The Multiverse of Office Fiction liberates Herman Melville's 1853 classic, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," from a microcosm of Melville studies, namely the so-called Bartleby Industry. This book aims to illuminate office fiction-fiction featuring office...

This book about receptions of Simon Magus uncovers further facets of one who was held to be the evil archetype of heretics. Ephraim Nissan and Alberto Ferreiro explore how Simon Magus has been represented in text, visual art, and music. Special attention...

This book analyses the gender roles and political contexts of spy fiction narratives published during the years of the Cold War. It offers an introduction to the development of spy fiction both in England and in the United States and explores the ways in...

This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This...

The Stuttering Son: A Literary Study of Boys and Their Fathers examines stuttering, a condition which overwhelmingly affects boys, in terms of the complex relationships a number of male authors have had with their fathers. Most of these writers,...

Postmodernism has had its day. Are we now in the era of epimodernism? Reinterpreting the six "memos" that Italo Calvino suggested more than thirty years ago for "the new Millennium", in this acclaimed book Emmanuel Bouju identifies six new...

Wallace Stevens's musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various...

This book proposes a comparative approach to the supernatural short stories of Machado de Assis, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant. It offers an alternative to predominantly novel-centric and Anglo-centric perspectives on literary pre-modernism by...

Samuel Beckett's work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett's own preoccupation with and resistance to...

This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental...

Beowulf, composed around 700 A.D., is the first great epic poem in the English language. It tells the timeless story of a hero's fight against monsters and sets it against a complex background of political intrigue and tribal warfare. Situated in...

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for George Orwell's Animal Farm, one of the most famous political satires to this day. As a book of the twentieth-century prior to the Cold War, it remains among the most...

In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries...

How has the work of C. S. Lewis transformed the American religious landscape? With fresh research and analysis, this volume by noted historian Mark A. Noll considers the surprising reception of Lewis among Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and...