Literary studies: general Books

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...

This book illuminates the connections and interaction among women and between women and men during the medieval period. To do this, Kathryn L. Reyerson focuses specifically on the experiences of Agnes de Bossones, widow of a changer of the mercantile...

This book shows how bubonic plague and smallpox helpedend the Hittite Empire, the Bronze Age in the Near East and later theCarthaginian Empire. The book will examine all the possible infectious diseasespresent in ancient times and show that life was a...

This volume presents 50 contributions on the themes of reasonableness and effectiveness and their connections, which are central issues in argumentation theory. It discusses van Eemeren's views on the study of argumentation; the approach to argumentation...

Vikram Seth is a critical enigma. He is recognized as one of the most important Indian Anglophone authors of his generation; his individual works have been widely reviewed, yet his work has rarely been approached as a whole and remains surprisingly...

This book makes newly visible the sustained engagement of the English and the Dutch throughout a critical century in their cultural and national development. It reads a broad selection of early modern literary texts, some never before treated in...

This book is the first extended critical study of the early modern poet Edmund Spenser from the perspective of animal studies. With an introduction situating Spenser in current discussions of animal life and literary form, and early modern animal...

"You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." These are some of the most quoted lines written by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical...

This book considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with 'Whig poetry': a tradition of verse from the eighteenth century which celebrated the political and constitutional arrangements of Britain as guaranteeing liberty. It argues that, during the...

Animals and Science Fiction is the first edited collection to be published focusing on the intersection of animal studies and science fiction studies. It offers a broad range of theoretical approaches and primary source texts-including novels, short...

Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space examines the relationship between poetics and architecture in the work of the first generation New York School poets, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James...

This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture - canonical literature, children's fiction, scientific texts, and writing by children - to argue that precocity challenges the idea of progress. It considers how practitioners...

This book analyses the evolution of literary and artistic representations of the soul, exploring its development through different time periods. The volume combines literary, aesthetic, ethical, and political considerations of the soul in texts and works...

The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women's Writing considers the works of eleven North American female authors who wrote for or descended from the Irish Famine generation: Anna Dorsey, Christine Faber, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Kate...

Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory argues that the train is a loaded trope for reconfiguring narrative theories past their "spatial turn." Atsuko Sakaki's method exploits intensive and rigorous close reading of literary...

This book focuses on Ireland's lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation's fiction; not surprisingly, the disease both manifests and conceals itself with devastating frequency in literature as it did in life. It seeks to place the...

This book explores the tension between the conservatism and the imaginative process across the entirety of Rudyard Kipling's fiction. It shows how Kipling the conservative thinker explores problematic aspects of Empire and the English class-system, both...

This book examines the literature of African-American author Richard Wright and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, arguing that Wright was not only the foremost proponent of minoritarian protest literature, but also a groundbreaking minoritarian exponent...

This book analyzes Shakespeare's use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and...

Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin's paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political...

The Testing of Barbara Pym, a companion volume to The Making of Barbara Pym (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), completes a comprehensive analysis of Pym's novels and her life, focusing on her complex view of the necessity of change at both the...

The long nineteenth century (1789-1914) has been described as an axial age in the history of both bees and literature. It was the period in which the ecological and agronomic values that are still attributed to bees by modern industrial society were...

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the work of prolific writer, activist and publisher, Jack Lindsay (1900-1990). It maps the development of his ideas across the twentieth century by reference to the five British writers about whom he published...

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of...

Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about  medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul...

Vegetarianism and Science Fiction: A History of Utopian Animal Ethics examines how vegetarian ideals promoted within science fiction and utopian literature have had a real-world impact on the awareness and spread of vegetarianism and animal advocacy, as...

Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views...

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the engagement with and representation of the face across literature, photography, and theatre. It looks at how the face is an active agent, closely connected with the history of the media and the social...

This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining...

Defining class broadly as an identity categorization based on status, wealth, family, bloodlines, and occupation, Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama e xplores class as a complicated, contingent phenomenon modified by a wider range...

This book reinterprets C. P. Cavafy's historical and archaeological poetics by correlating his work to major cultural, political and sexualized receptions of antiquity that marked the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on selected poems which stage...

This book addresses a little-considered aspect of the study of the history of emotions in medieval literature: the depiction of perplexing emotional reactions. Medieval literature often confronts audiences with displays of emotion that are improbable,...

Two of the most notable figures from the Middle Ages-the volatile, brilliant Abelard and the equally brilliant Heloise-became the parents of their son Astralabe before Abelard's infamous, brutal castration. The couple spent the rest of their lives as...

This edited volume explores the historical, cultural and literary legacies of Polish Britain, and their significance for both the British and Polish nations. The focus of the book is twofold. First, it investigates the history of Polish immigration and...

Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England offers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiety about hybridity surfaces in characters of mixed ethnic identity in the romances. But anxiety is found also in the...

Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts analyzes the impact migrations, both internal and external, have on Europe's literary and visual representations in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The volume aims to subvert a...

This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the "limit cases" regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries...

This book examines trauma in late twentieth- and twenty-first century American popular culture. Trauma has become a central paradigm for reading contemporary American culture. Since the early 1980s, an extensive range of genres increasingly feature...

This book depicts the Early Modern book markets in Europe and colonial Latin America. The nature of book production and distribution in this period resulted in the development of a truly international market. The integration of the book market was...