Literary studies: general Books

This volume explores film and television sources in problematic conversation with classical antiquity, to better understand the nature of artistic reception and classical reception in particular. Drawing inspiration from well-theorized fields like...

This book updates our understanding of working-class fiction by focusing on its continued relevance to the social and intellectual contexts of the age of Trump and Brexit. The volume draws together new and established scholars in the field, whose...

This book shows that Shakespeare continues to influence contemporary Irish literature, through postcolonial, dramaturgical, epistemological and narratological means. International critics examine a range of contemporary writers including Eavan Boland,...

This collection of essays examines the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft's most important critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Each chapter illuminates a crucial aspect of Lovecraft's criticism, from its aesthetic, philosophical and literary sources,...

The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced...

This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the...

This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white,...

This study explores the work of Western avant-garde writers who traveled to and wrote about Asia and North Africa. Though exoticist in outlook, many of these writers were also anti-colonialist and thus avoided some of the pitfalls of academic orientalism...

Jane Austen's minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions...

This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider...

This edited collection examines concepts and realities of motherhood in the ancient world. The collection uses essays on the Roman Empire, Mesoamerica, the Philippines, Egypt, and India to emphasize the concept of motherhood as a worldwide phenomenon and...

This book tackles the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries and sensibilities focusing on the ways they are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema.  After the defeat of the Socialist modernity the...

This book is about literary representations of the both left- and right-wing Italian terrorism of the 1970s by contemporary Italian authors. In offering detailed analyses of the many contemporary novels that have terrorism in either their foreground or...

This book is about the relationship of food and food practices to discourses and depictions of domestic and political governance in early modern women's writing. It examines the texts of four elite women spanning approximately forty years: the Psalmes of...

This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international 'English' in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices...

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as...

Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance applies literary ecocriticism to the imaginative fiction of the Greek world from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Through analyses of hunting, gardening, bride-stealing,...

This book highlights the multi-dimensionality of the work of British fantasy writer and Discworld creator Terry Pratchett. Taking into account content, political commentary, and literary technique, it explores the impact of Pratchett's work on fantasy...

The book is the first full-length text on Anthony Burgess's fiction in a generation, and offers a radical and innovative way of understanding the extensive literary achievements of one of the twentieth century's most innovative authors. This book...

This book examines Toni Morrison's fiction as a sustained effort to challenge the dominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman...

This collection examines gender and Otherness as tools to understand medieval and early modern art as products of their social environments. The essays, uniting up-and-coming and established scholars, explore both iconographic and stylistic...

This book broadens the scope of inquiry of neo-Victorian studies by focusing primarily on screen adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture. More specifically, this monograph spotlights the overlapping yet often conflicting drives...

This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study-i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and...

This volume looks at the representation of 9/11 and the resulting wars in European literature. In the face of inner-European divisions the texts under consideration take the terror attacks as a starting point to negotiate European as well as national...

This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at...

This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture - migration and memory. From its starting point with the 'New Irish' generation of poets in the United States during the 1980s and concluding with the...

This book bridges medieval and contemporary philosophical thinkers, examining the relationship between fiction and philosophy for bringing about social change. Drawing on the philosophical reading and writing practices of medieval author Christine de...

This book attempts to understand what 'contemporary' has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best...

This book uses the figure of the Victorian heroine as a lens through which to examine Jane Austen's presence in Victorian critical and popular writings. Aimed at Victorianist readers and scholars, the book focuses on the ways in which Austen was...

This book brings together geographers and literary scholars in a series of engagements near the boundaries of their disciplines. In urban studies, disproportionate attention has been given to a small set of privileged 'first' cities. This volume...

This book provides a rich and cutting-edge analysis of one of the most prominent literary groups in Latin America: the Mexican Crack Writers. The first part explores the history of the group and its relation to the Latin American literary tradition,...

This book explores the humanities as an insightful platform for understanding and responding to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, other manifestations of "Guantánamo," and the contested place of freedom in American Empire. It presents the work...

This book shows how Shakespeare's excellence as storyteller, wit and poet reflects the creative process of conceptual blending. Cognitive theory provides a wealth of new ideas that illuminate Shakespeare, even as he illuminates them, and the theory of...

This book is about how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our postmodern globalized world. At what price? What ethical and political conundrums does the...

This volume explores the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. By focusing on contemporary narratives in English from 1990 to the present, the essays...

This book is the first book-length study to explore the sartorial politics of identity in the literature of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Using fashion and dress as the main focus of analysis, and linking them with a myriad of identity concerns,...

This innovative collection explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume...

This fascinating volume examines the enduring influence of courtly tradition and courtly love, particularly in contemporary popular culture. The ten chapters explore topics including the impact of the medieval troubadour in modern love songs, the legacy...

This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries.Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection...

This edited collection offers undergraduate Literature instructors a guide to the pedagogy and teaching of Victorian literature in liberal arts classrooms. With numerous essays focused on thematic course design, this volume reflects the increasingly...

This book explores the collaborative practices - both literary and material - that women undertook in the production of early modern texts. It confronts two ongoing methodological dilemmas. How does conceiving women's texts as collaborations between...

This collection chronicles the strategic uses of madness in works by black women fiction writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Moving from an over-reliance on the "madwoman" as a romanticized figure constructed in...

The essays in this volume broaden previous approaches to Atlantic literature and culture by comparatively studying the politics and textualities of Southern Europe, North America, and Latin America across languages, cultures, and periods. Historically...

This volume investigates the ways in which Italian women writers, filmmakers, and performers have represented female identity across genres from the immediate post-World War II period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Considering genres such as...

The contributors to this volume use diverse critical techniques to identify how Carson McCullers' writing engages with and critiques modern social structures and how her work resonates with a twenty-first century audience. The collection includes...

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change. Antonia Mehnert turns to a set of contemporary American works of fiction,...

This book is about the empiricist challenge to literature, and its influence on eighteenth-century theories of fiction. British empiricism from Bacon to Hume challenged the notion that imaginative literature can be a reliable source of knowledge. This...

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce's famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century...