Literary studies: general Books

This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. Shields's essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist...

This book rethinks the concept of community taking Jean-Luc Nancy's influential essay "La communauté désoeuvrée" as its starting point, tracing subsequent scholarship on community and adding new insights on avant-garde aesthetics and politics...

Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in...

Constance of France: Womanhood and Agency in Twelfth-Century Europe is a biography of Constance of France, sister of King Louis VII of France. Myra Bom recovers Constance's life story and puts it in its medieval context by...

This book argues for the importance of adopting a postcolonial perspective in analysing contemporary Italian culture and literature. Originally published in Italian in 2018 as Riscrivere la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, this new English...

This book analyzes a range of Edgar Allan Poe's writing, focusing on new readings that engage with classical and (post)modern studies of his work and the troubling literary relationship that he had with T.S. Eliot. Whilst the book examines Poe's...

This edited collection brings together scholars from across the world, including France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the USA and India, to offer a truly international perspective on the global reception of Shakespeare's Sonnets from the...

Drawing on the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman, this book examines women writers who struggled with conservative, patriarchal ideologies of motherhood in novels, periodicals and life writings of the long modernist period...

This book interrogates the repertoire of masculine performance in popular crime fiction and cinema from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. This critical survey of the back alleys of pulp culture reveals American masculinities to be unsettled, contentious,...

This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt's representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be...

Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels. The volume begins by looking at Austen's popular appeal and at how she is consumed today...

Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the...

This book focuses on health humanities in application. The field reflects many intellectual interests and practical applications, serving researchers, educators, students, health care practitioners, and community members wherever health and...

The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key...

This book is an interdisciplinary study of antebellum American literature and the problem of political emergency. Arguing that the United States endured sustained conflicts over the nature and operation of sovereignty in the unsettled era from the...

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante's Comedy be 'Mediterranean'? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic...

The book offers an innovative approach to the study of Ernest Hemingway's fiction and biography. It juxtaposes two perspectives that have been underrepresented in Hemingway studies so far: translation and interview. The book is divided into three...

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and...

This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this...

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality...

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice explores the impact of digital technologies on the theatrical performance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, both in terms of widening cultural access and developing new forms of artistry. Through...

This edited collection of essays brings together scholars across disciplines who consider the collaborative work of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, philologists, medievalists and early modernists, cryptologists, and education reformers...

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and...

This book explores the dark, unruly, and self-destructive side of gift-giving as represented in nineteenth-century literary works by American authors. It asserts the centrality and relevance of gift exchange for modern American literary and intellectual...

This book explores how confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s US responded to a Cold War political climate that used the threat of nuclear disaster and communist infiltration as affective tools for the management of public life. In an era that...

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But...

This book explores pedagogical approaches to decolonising the literature curriculum through a range of practical and theoretically-informed case studies. Although decolonising the curriculum has been widely discussed in the academe and the media,...

This book explores how phenomenological ideas about embodiment, perception, and lived experience are discussed within disability studies, critical race theory, and queer studies. Building on these disciplines, it offers readings of memoirs and novels...

This book offers new insights on socially and culturally engaged Gothic ghost stories by twentieth century and contemporary female writers; including Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Susan Hill, Catherine Lim, Kate Mosse, Daphne...

This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood - the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world - with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was...

This is the first book to view Shakespeare's plays from the prospect of the premodern death arts, not only the ars moriendi tradition but also the plurality of cultural expressions of memento mori, funeral rituals, commemorative activities, and...

This book presents a cognitive stylistic analysis of the writing of Siegfried Sassoon, a First World War poet who has typically been perceived as a poet of protest and irony, but whose work is in fact multi-faceted and complex in theme and shifted in...

Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century's received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies...

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present sheds new light on literary representations of precarious labor from 1840 until the present. With contributions by experts in American, British, French, German and Swedish culture, this...

Shakespeare in Cuba: Caliban's Books explores how Shakespeare is consumed and appropriated in Cuba. It contributes to the underrepresented field of Latin American Shakespeares by applying the lens of cultural anthropophagy, a theory with Latin American...

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe's C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world...

This book offers an innovative new framework for reading British and settler representations of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Taking the representation of the Southern African San as its case study, it uses methodologies drawn from...

Novel Approaches to Lesbian History tells a tale about history and community in our allegedly post-identity era, examining contemporary novels that depict lesbian characters in recognizable historical situations. These imaginative stories provide a...

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here-"Indigeneities"; "Political Landscapes"; "Space, Place, Materiality"; "Revising an...

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays...

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists...

This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products 'as they are' and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the...

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or...

This book frames British Romanticism as the artistic counterpart to a revolution in subjectivity occasioned by the rise of "The Rule of Law" and as a traumatic response to the challenges mounted against that ideal after the French Revolution. The bulk of...

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children's fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and...

This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a...

This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical...

This book explores the significance of professional writers and their role in developing British storytelling in the 1920s and 1930s, and their influence on the poetics of today's transmedia storytelling. Modern techniques can be traced back to the early...