Literary studies: general Books

Love and tragedy dominate book four of Virgil's most powerful work, building on the violent emotions invoked by the storms, battles, warring gods, and monster-plagued wanderings of the epic's opening. Destined to be the founder of Roman culture, Aeneas,...

Destins de femmes is the first comprehensive overview of French women writers during the turbulent period of 1750-1850. John Isbell provides an essential collection that illuminates the impact women writers had on French literature and politics during a...

As the most successful comic dramatist at the court of Louis XIV, Molière was certainly known to his London counterparts. During his early acting years in a touring troupe, the English theatres had been closed by the Civil Wars, but after 1660...

The poet Céline Arnauld (1885-1952) was at the heart of Paris Dada. Her experimental texts appeared in the most prominent avant-garde journals and she published almost a dozen books. Yet Arnauld predicted as early as 1924 that she would be written...

Galician literature has historically played an integral role in the consolidation of Galician identity. Yet female novelists writing in Galician have only managed to achieve visibility in the Galician cultural sphere as recently as the turn of the...

In this first full-length study of his work, Margaret Atack surveys not only Vilar’s novels but also his shorter fiction, journalism, photobooks, and contributions to art and exhibition catalogues. From the ludic, if entirely serious,...

While the ‘venereal peril’ of nineteenth-century France was responsible for thousands of deaths, much attention has focused on the range of social anxieties with which it was associated, including degeneracy, depopulation, state surveillance...

Since 1714 Catalan culture has had a troubled relationship with the Spanish state, which sometimes tolerated and sometimes repressed it. Nevertheless Catalan writing experienced a renaissance in the 1830s, and by the turn of the century had formed...

From accounts of migration and stories of personal alienation, through the fragmented memories of former incarnations, to fable-like tales of half-breeds and species metamorphosis, Ying Chen’s fiction evolves as it revolves around questions of...

Mary Shelley in Europe studies the European background of Mary Shelley’s works and their reception. This two-fold approach is inspired by Mary Shelley dans son œuvre, Jean de Palacio’s seminal work that has remained untranslated in...

In the 1990s and 2000s, at a time when newly-reunified Germany seemed to be turning towards its future, public debates were dominated by those who had spent their early lives under Nazism and were still wrestling with the past. In this wide-ranging study...

A ubiquitous presence in European chivalric literature, the multifaceted figure of the Saracen Other plays a vital role in shaping the knightly values and ideologies underpinning some of the most influential narrative poems of the Italian Renaissance. By...

Should a philosopher be vegetarian? This question had been famously answered in the affirmative in a classic work on philosophical vegetarianism: On Abstinence from Eating Animals, written by the Neoplatonist Porphyry in the third century AD. This study...

Ovid’s gruesome tale of rape, mutilation, and revenge, transformed into Philomena and retold in French octosyllables, found its way into the fourteenth century Ovide moralisé with a signature at its mid-point: Crestiens li gois, the great...

It studies 17th century texts which distinctions between the natural and the artificial interfold. It examines how 4 writers theorized bodies and objects as characters in sometimes scenarios involving human entanglements in the phenomenal world. The...

The purpose of this collection, which was first published in 1996, is to provide both an overview of the major critical approaches to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a selection of the best essays dealing with them. The essays examine the origins...

Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories as a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, this book addresses how race functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human...

This volume is the best-known and most widely discussed work of the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism

This critical edition of two early modern marriage sermons provides an important resource for students and scholars of early modern literature and history, allowing them to experience firsthand the competing and historically layered ideas about marriage...

Women's life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on...

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France provides the first comprehensive comparison of the printed debates over the superiority or inferiority of woman - the Querelle des femmes - and the dignity and misery of man, revealing the striking overlap...

The First Crusade was arguably one of the most significant events of the Middle Ages. It was the only event to generate its own epic cycle, the Old French Crusade Cycle. The central trilogy at the heart of the Cycle describes the Crusade from its...

The Birth and Death of the Author　is a work about the changing nature of authorship as a concept. In eight specialist interventions by a diverse group of the finest international scholars it tells a history of print authorship in a set of author case...

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women's magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar　Vogue　(UK),　Eve,　Good Housekeeping　(UK), and　Harper's...

Employing a variety of creative, interdisciplinary approaches, contributors examine early modern Spanish children's lives, the role of children within the larger family, adult perceptions of childhood, images of children and childhood in art and...

Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its...

Contributors analyze works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others to track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health " physical, emotional, and spiritual. Focusing on literary genres...

This book considers the evolution and characteristics of Nigeria's third-generation literature, which emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s and is marked by expressive modes and concerns distinctly different from those of the preceding era...

This book examines the metanarratives promoted by the state that determine the ideological framework and how these respond under extraneous circumstances like conflicts.

Keats and Scepticism explores Keats's affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats's poetry anew in the light of this affinity.

Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster - the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

This book is a fierce argument against social and caste discrimination in India, especially untouchability and emphatic call for social justice. Written by a first-generation Kannada Dalit writer, the book provides an insider's view of caste...

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic.

Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later...

This book looks at texts produced before and after 9/11 by novelists with Muslim backgrounds in Britain. It delves into the ways in which the politics of representation have changed, the conflicts that arise in these coming-of-age narratives between the...

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) in a global context.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United...

In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late--twentieth--century intellectual traditions had...

This book applies new scientific research in the fields of biology and genetics to an empirical study of the Greco-Roman civilizations and the European Renaissance. These two periods were remarkable in part because of the dominance of empathy and...

Costume production distinguishes early civilization from the Paleolithic era as much as architectural production. Costume transcends boundaries, as it first unites and then divides mankind. The mode of dress differentiates friend from foe and peasant...

Sport as it is largely understood today was invented during the long eighteenth century when the modern rules of sport were codified; sport emerged as a business, a spectacle, and a performance; and gaming organized itself around sporting culture...

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary...

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary...