Literary studies: general Books

Using the idea of 'parability,'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramón Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with...

These essays address the intersections between Shakespeare, history and the present using a variety of new and established methodological approaches, from phenomenology and ecocriticism to the new economics and aesthetics.

Tennyson experienced at first hand the all-pervasive nature of celebrity culture. It caused him to retreat from the eyes of the world. This book delineates Tennyson's reluctant celebrity and its effects on his writings, on his coterie of famous and...

Shakespeare's Boys: A Cultural History offers the first extensive exploration of boy characters in Shakespeare's plays, examining a range of characters from across the Shakespearean canon in their original early modern contexts and surveying their...

Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists - including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford - this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented...

Hardy's Geography reconsiders a familiar element in Hardy's novels: their use of place and, specifically, of Dorset. Hardy said his Wessex was a 'partly real, partly dream-country'. This study examines how reality and dream interact in his work. Should...

Dickens's career as a journalist spanned four decades, during which he wrote over 350 articles: reports, sketches, reviews, leaders, exposés, satires and reminiscences. This project offers the first critical guide to over a million words of vintage...

Exile defines the Shakespearean canon, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen . This book traces the influences on the drama of exile, examining the legal context of banishment (pursued against Catholics, gypsies and vagabonds) in...

Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage offers a timely alternative to theatre criticism's neglect of the intensely spatial character of theatrical performance. The book shows that early modern audiences were highly aware of the spatial aspects of...

Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance is an original study at the interface of a historicizing literary criticism and the study of modern performance. In a critical climate that views the cultural object of performance as authentic in itself, is...

This innovative study examines a range of canonical and non-canonical materials to open a new narrative on the mutually illuminating interchange between Romantic literature and philological theory in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...

British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce examines how, between 1680 and 1800, British maritime travellers became both friends and foes of the commercial state. These nomadic characters report on remote parts of the globe in the twin...

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens from Sesame and Lilies was read as a locus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions,...

John Clare, Politics and Poetry challenges the traditional portrait of 'poor John Clare', the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare's career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor...

Tauchert's book revisits the work of feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft to offer new readings which are both astute and adventurous. It demands that we leave behind the baggage of years of argument over whether or not Wollstonecraft is feminist and...

This study examines Hardy's prolonged struggle with his contemporary readers, whose bourgeois values he despised. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to strategies of subversion,...

As a writer, businessman and magistrate, Henry Fielding was in a singular position to textualize eighteenth-century English cultural conditions and materially to author the text of his society. Not only did he extol employment, he co-owned an employment...

Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic's engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century. Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the...

This is the first comprehensive study of the revival and appropriation of the Roman triumph from the 1580s to the 1650s. English versions of the triumph included ceremonial re-enactments, poetic or pictorial representations, and stage performances. As...

This innovative new study examines the significance given to the country house in Ireland under the Union and how this is represented in the works of Edgeworth, Lever, Trollope, Martin and Somerville, Bowen and Lady Gregory. The Irish country house is...

Georgian Bloomsbury completes the literary history of Old Bloomsbury that began with Victorian Bloomsbury (1987) and continued with Edwardian Bloomsbury (1994). Covering the years between the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition and The First World War,...

This book explores the construction of gender ideology in early modern England through an analysis of the querelle des femmes - the debate about the relationship between the sexes that originated on the continent during the middle ages and the...

The late-medieval movement into 'vernacular theology,' as it has come to be called, inspired many forms of literary expression, in all the languages of Europe. Spanning a wide field, the contributors to this volume consider hagiography, translations of...

Shakespeare Among the Animals examines the role of animal-metaphor in the Shakespeare stage, particularly as such metaphor serves to underwrite various forms of social difference. Working through texts such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream ,...

The Bible serves Wordsworth as a basis for his poetry and poetics, providing language, images, figures, and importantly, a paradigm of poetic genres. Working from three interrelated critical approaches - intertextuality, poetics, and metaphysics -...

Postmodern society seems incapable of elaborating an ethical critique of the market economy. Early modern society showed no such reticence. Between 1580 and 1680, Aristotelian teleology was replaced as the dominant mode of philosophy in England by...

While analyzing Damon Runyon's high spirited work in terms of historical contexts, popular culture, and of the changing function of the media, Schwarz argues that in his columns and stories Runyon was an indispensable figure in creating our public images...

Expectation of the millennium was widespread in English society at the end of the eighteenth century. The essays in this volume explore how exactly, this expectation shaped, and was shaped by, the literature, art, and politics of the period we now call...

This book charts the significant changes in contemporary Canada's literary profile since the mid-1990s, within a context of the new national rhetoric of multiculturalism. By looking closely at a representative range of fictions in English by women from a...

This book explores the political significance of formal experimentation in American poetry written during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It focuses on the use of procedural forms, which involve the invention of rules or methods designed to structure the...

Using the traditional genres of allegory, pastoral, and parable, this book develops alternative paradigms of literary realism with which to reexamine a group of crucial but marginalized 20th century writers who have been misread as conventional mimetic...

The study follows the early evolution of the American frontier hero, from its roots in Mary Rowlandson's narration of her experiences as a prisoner during King Phillip's war through works by Unca Eliza Winkfield, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore...

Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of "free labor" in mid-nineteenth-century America. Husband shows how the images of families split apart by...

The first full-length study of sensationalist and melodramatic elements in Hardy's novels uses six of his texts to demonstrate the ways in which Hardy uses the melodramatic mode to advance his critique of established Victorian cultural beliefs through...

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel is a richly historicized account that explores anxieties about crowds, fiction and disguise, women authors, and unstable gender roles. James P. Carson argues that the Romantic novel is a form...

Poetics of the Body examines representations of the body in the work of four important twentieth-century poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Drawing on both past and present discussions regarding the place...

This collection explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with José Martí and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Díaz. The contributors consider the way that spatial migration in...

The hero s descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets - British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from...

This study explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity in late medieval literature, documenting the trajectory of antimercantile ideology against major developments in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages.

Through penetrating analysis of twentieth-century historical fiction from Central America this book asks: why do so many literary texts in the region address historical issues? What kinds of stories are told about the past when authors choose the...

In this volume, Lebbady has compiled and translated seven Andalusi women's tales from the north of Morocco, and analyzes them from a postcolonial theoretical perspective, finding in the women far more wit and agency than western stereotypes would suggest.

This book is the first interdisciplinary treatment of the cultural significance of the Decembrists' mythic image in Russian literature, history, film and opera in a survey of its deployment as cultural trope since the original 1825 rebellion and through...

First published in 1991. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: A Case Book was published in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joyce's final work with 14 critical essays and a page-by-page outline of the novel. The book includes critical approaches and...

This collection, first published in 1963, includes 29 of George Eliot's essays written between 1846 and 1868. Through these essays, Pinney has managed to convey her range of subject-matters and variety of style. This title, with an introduction and...

Proper Words in Proper Places: Dialectical Explication and English Literary History explores how literary history intertwines cultural, political, philosophical, religious, and commercial influences with literary production to create new ways of reading,...

A study of Antonfrancesco Grazzini's place in theater history, revealing his experiments with performance technique, sexual themes, and varied linguistic registers. Grazzini celebrates the artistic and popular traditions of Renaissance Florence.

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...