Literary studies: general Books

This cutting-edge collection of essays offers provocative studies of ancient history, literature, gender identifications and roles, and subsequent interpretations of the republican and imperial Roman past. The prose and poetry of Cicero and Petronius,...

For all that Cicero is often seen as the father of translation theory, his and other Roman comments on translation are often divorced from the complicated environments that produced them. The first book-length study in English of its kind, Roman Theories...

Letters were an important medium of everyday communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Soon after its emergence, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive markers and was used,...

A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio's impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe...

100 British Crime Writers explores a history of British crime writing between 1855 and 2015 through 100 writers, detailing their lives and significant writing and exploring their contributions to the genre. Divided into four sections: 'The Victorians,...

Vitality and change marked twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval Mediterranean society. Many sought to capitalize upon resurgences in economic success, political intrigue, and social cohesion. Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213)...

This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the "paternal dungheaps" of words, and tracing their origins not...

The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander's own plays were thought to...

What would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the "West"? Starting with the provocative premise that the "'West' is ten percent of the planet", World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global...

Truth and Wonder is an accessible introduction to Plato and Aristotle, showing their crucial influence for literary and cultural studies, modern languages and related disciplines. It focusses on both what Plato and Aristotle say about literature and how...

This monograph analyses Zadie Smith's White Teeth, On Beauty, NW, The Embassy of Cambodia, and Swing Time as trauma fictions that reveal the social, cultural, historical, and political facets of trauma. Starting with Smith's humorous critique of...

This collection analyzes the theme of the "afterlife" as it animated nineteenth-century American women's theology-making and appeals for social justice. Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria...

Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (1897-1979), and the immense potential of his ideas for thinking about literature, creative process, and creative writing.There is now renewed interest in...

This book examines apian imagery-bees, drones, honey, and the hive-in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary and oral traditions. In England and the New World colonies during a critical period of expansion, the metaphor of this communal society...

Dante and the Blessed Virgin is distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny's eloquent reading of one of western literature's most famous works by a Catholic writer. The book provides Catholic readers new to Dante's The Divine Comedy (or Commedia) with a...

There are several good histories of Greek literature of various shapes and sizes, but the purpose of this book is not simply to consider the literature of ancient Greece as an isolated subject, treating each of the literary modes - epic, lyric, drama,...

Theodora, A Novel by Dorothea Du Bois, published in 1770, is an entertaining and frequently shocking tale of a young woman's efforts to regain her position in high society after her aristocratic father's abandonment of and denial of marriage to her...

This collection explores the consequences of accentism-an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism-in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to...

How Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays. Brian Kulick dispels the...

This book relocates the long life and literary career of the poet, playwright, novelist, philanthropist and teacher Hannah More (1745-1833) in the wider social and cultural contexts that shaped her, and which she helped shape in turn. One of the most...

Originally published in 1984, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature looks at the impact of medievalism in the 18th and 19th centuries and the importance of post-Enlightenment literary religious medievalism. The book suggests...

This authoritative anthology puts to rest the general impression that traditional rhetoric had little impact during the years between the death of St. Augustine and Bracciolini's rediscovery of Quintilian. It covers 36 rhetorical treatises.

Examines the human-dog relationship in modernist literature, analyzing works by Jack London, Virginia Woolf, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, Samuel Beckett, and others to show how dogs challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanistic...

In Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, an international group of theologians and Dante scholars provide a uniquely rich set of perspectives focused on the relationship between theology and poetry in the Commedia. Examining Dante's treatment of...

This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andrés Laguna, Andrés Velásquez,...

The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante's vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante's global reception and...

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern...

Originally published in 1972 and based on extensive research and use of source materials including manuscripts, this book examines Puritan spiritual autobiographies written before 1725 and sets them in the context of the literary tradition out of which...

This book reconstructs Istanbul through the prism of Orhan Pamuk's fiction. It navigates the multiple selves and layers of Istanbul to present how the city has shaped the writings of Pamuk and has, in turn, been shaped by it. Through everyday objects and...

Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual...

This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact-to perform, to stage, to represent-human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in...

Shakespeare in the World traces the reception histories and adaptations of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, when his works became well-known to non-Anglophone communities in both Europe and colonial India. Sen provides thorough and searching...

This book is the first major study that explores the intrinsic connection between music and myth, as Nietzsche conceived of it in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in three great works of modern literature: Romain Rolland's Nobel Prize winning novel...

This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This...

This study imagines modernism as a series of conversations and locates Edith Wharton's voice in those debates

Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama uniquely brings together memory theory, medieval and contemporary images, cognition, and the English Corpus Christi drama. Lerud argues that the role of frames or backgrounds is integral to the image...

This book critically examines the origins of American diplomacy in the greater Persian Gulf region, arguing that it was the inability of the United States to contend effectively with the disintegration of British imperial authority in the Gulf that...