Literary studies: general Books

This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records. This...

This book focuses on representations of aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction, including shifting perceptions of physical and sexual prowess, depression, and loss, but also greater wisdom and confidence, legacy, as well as new affective...

Elionor of Sicily, 1325-1375: A Mediterranean Queen's Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about...

This book demonstrates how city literature addresses questions of possibility. In city literature, ideas of possibility emerge primarily through two perspectives: texts may focus on what is possible for cities, and they may present the urban environment...

This book provides a collection of essays representing the state of the art in the research into argumentation in classical antiquity. It contains essays from leading and up and coming scholars on figures as diverse as Parmenides, Gorgias, Seneca,...

This book takes a fresh look at Tolkien's literary artistry from the points of view of both linguistics and literary history, with the aim of shedding light on the literary techniques used in The Lord of the Rings. The authors study Tolkien's use of...

This book draws on literary, cultural, and critical examples forming a menstrual imaginary-a body of work by women writers and poets that builds up a concept of women's creativity in an effort to overturn menstrual prejudice. The text addresses...

Early Modern Debts: 1550-1700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early...

This book analyses colonial and postcolonial writing about Cyprus, before and after its independence from the British Empire in 1960. These works are understood as 'transportal literatures' in that they navigate the liminal and layered forms of...

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies...

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This...

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinová explores the works...

This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts. In order to better understand the human agency, creativity and forms of sanctity of medieval England,...

This book analyzes a significant group of contemporary historical fictions that represent damaging, even catastrophic times for people and communities; written "after the wreck," they recall instructive pasts.  The novels chronicle wars, slavery,...

The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of alternative religious currents and practices, appropriating earlier traditions, entangling geographically distinct spiritual discourses, and crafting a repository of mindscapes eminently suitable to be...

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the "spatial turn," contributors from disciplines...

This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and...

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings...

The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet...

This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an "early Anthropocene" in the literature, art, and science of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In chapters organized around the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water,...

This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism...

Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand's works and her wider Objectivist philosophy. While Rand's texts are often dismissed out of hand by those hostile to the ideology...

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the...

What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a...

Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a...

This book aims to develop a philosophy of leadership from the fiction of C.S. Lewis. Using such works as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Cosmic Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces, the author focuses on the benefits of fiction for leadership...

This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death.  Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while others trace her influence on a surprising...

This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are...

This collection of critical essays explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish suburbia, and the historical, social and aesthetic contexts in which these cultures have emerged. The lived experience and the artistic representation of Irish...

This book considers the historical and cultural origins of the gut-brain relationship now evidenced in numerous scientific research fields. Bringing together eleven scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, the volume examines literal and...

Tracing the shift from liberal to neoliberal education from the nineteenth century to the present day, this open access book provides a rich and previously underdeveloped narrative of value in higher education in England. Value and the Humanities draws...

This book is a critical study of the ancestors of contemporary poetry anthologies: the poetic miscellanies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that miscellanies are a distinctive kind of literary collection and that...

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines...

As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare's time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity. No account of early modern literary...

The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major...

This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to the science fiction of microbiologist Joan Slonczewski. Posthuman Biopolitics consolidates the scholarly literature on Slonczewski's fiction and demonstrates fruitful lines of engagement...

This book features a collection of essays, shedding subversively new light on Romanticism and its canon of big-six, white, male Romantics by focusing on marginalised, forgotten and lost writers and their long-neglected works. Probing the realms of...

Comprising nine original essays by specialists in material culture, book history,literary criticism and curatorial and archival studies, this co-edited volumeaddresses a wide range of Brontë's writing-from vignettes composed during herteenage years ("The...

Focusing on the transition from political economy to economics, this volume seeks to restore social content to economic abstractions through readings of nineteenth-century British and American literature. The essays gathered here, by new as well as...

This edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing on the PhraseoRom international project on the phraseology of contemporary...

This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world's most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central...

This volume challenges dominant imaginations of globalization by highlighting alternative visions of the globe, world, earth, or planet that abound in cultural, social, and political practice. In the contemporary context of intensive globalization,...

This book addresses the poetics of space and place in Scottish literature. Focusing chiefly on twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, with acknowledgement of historical and philosophical contexts, the essays address representation, narrative form,...

1. How Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett to Blanchot and Bataille; JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ.- 2. From Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword: Beckett as Late Modernist; SHANE WELLER.- 3. Late and Belated Modernism: Duchamp...Stein...

This book examines the phenomenon of the reappearance of characters in nineteenth-century French fiction. It approaches this from a hitherto unexplored perspective: that of the twin history of the aesthetic notion of originality and the legal notion of...

This book considers how Samuel Beckett's critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his...

1. Introduction: Pilar Villar-Argáiz.- 2. Dragging up the Past: Subversive Performance of Gender and Sexual Identities in Traditional and Contemporary Irish Culture: Jeannine Woods.- 3. The Wasted Island: Epistemic Friction...

This work addresses the erasure of popular women writers in the formation of Victorian studies. Mid-century critical work on the Victorian novel, which established a long-standing canon, was mainly concerned with the form of the novel rather than the...