Literary studies: general Books

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.

In this study of Bernard Mandeville's A Modest Defence of Publick Stews , Irwin Primer breaks new ground by arguing that in addition to being an advocation for the establishment of state-regulated houses of prostitution, Mandeville's writing is also a...

This book explores the Islamic roots of the Western values of tolerance and religious pluralism, and considers Dante from the perspective of the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition. It examines the relations between Islamic and Western thought, the...

Through extended readings of English, French, and Italian writers of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries, Claustrophilia shows that medieval enclosures actually make room for desires and communities that a poetics of pure openness would exclude.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This study rediscovers the lives and notable accomplishments of five prominent, yet...

An important part of the national imaginary, Yeat's work has helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern state that emerged from it's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of...

This collection explores how Old French fabliaux disrupt literal and figurative bodies. Essays cover theoretical issues including fragmentation and multiplication, social anxiety and excessive circulation, performative productions and creative...

This study addresses the topics of literacy and texuality in order to develop a new line of interpretation for a landmark of Middle High German literature. Albrecht's Der jüngere Titurel is an intellectually ambitious narrative written ca. 1270 as a...

This study argues that Conrad portrays Marlow and his relationships with a psychological depth that is unsurpassed in literature. In Youth , Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim , he is a continuously-evolving character whose thoughts, feelings, and behaviours...

Random Destinations examines how novels and short stories portray those who managed to escape from Central Europe in the 1930s following the rise of Nazism. They faced many concrete and psychological problems at their random destinations: language...

Challenging the commonplace that suspends migrants between two worlds', this study turns a refreshingly curious eye to complex cultural relations and literary novelties wrought by Turkish migration to Germany. At interpretive and historic crossroads...

This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space...

This book explores representations of love and desire between female characters in nearly seventy plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed...

This is a set of essays from many of the leading scholars in the world of medieval studies, which addresses a wide diversity of texts and genres and their diverse perspectives on love. Attention is given to interaction between English writings and...

This book demonstrates how D.H. Lawrence's prophetic ambitions impelled him to create novels that would radically transform the consciousness of his readers. Charles Burack argues that Lawrence's major novels, beginning with The Rainbow , are structured...

This is the first book to study the work and influence of Elizabeth Cary, author of the first original play by a woman to be printed in English, The Tragedyie of Mariam (1613). Previous criticism focused concentrated on this and The History of Edward II...

This book considers why narrative realism in literature is seen as a 'full account' of 'real life' and the individual self. Unconventionally, Carnell shows that the formal conventions of narrative realism emerged in the seventeenth century in response to...

One way and another, nearly all of Shakespeare's countrymen and women (including the playwright himself) spent at least parts of their lives as servants of someone else. But until now that fact has gone largely unregarded. This book remedies the...

This book is a significant gathering of ideas on the subject of modern Chinese literature and culture of the past several years. The essays represent a wide spectrum of new approaches and new areas of subject matter that are changing the landscape of...

Thirty-five years ago Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the Author. For medievalists no death has been more timely. The essays in this volume create a prism through which to understand medieval authorship as a process and the medieval author as an...

Andersen-Wyman's book undoes most scholarly uses and understandings of De amore by Andreas Capellanus. By offering a reading promoted by the text itself, Andersen-Wyman shows how Andreas undermines the narrative foundations of sacred and secular...

Leaving the traditional focus on Arthurian romance and Gothic tales, the essays in this collection address how the Victorians looked back to the Middle Ages to create a sense of authority for their own ideas in areas such as art, religion, gender...

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism through reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of...

This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic...

This book studies the print culture of the nineteenth century as it shaped the meanings and the cultural significance of literary works by women writers - Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Blessington, Lady Morgan, Caroline...

The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London examines the cultural phenomenon of the urban crowd in the context of early modern London's population crisis. The book explores the crowd's double function as a symbol of the city's growth and as the...

In God and Elizabeth Bishop Cheryl Walker takes the bold step of looking at the work of Elizabeth Bishop as though it might have something fresh to say about religion and poetry. Going wholly against the tide of recent academic practice, especially as...

This book is a critical biography of Grant Allen, (1848-1899), the first for a century, based on all the surviving primary sources. Born in Kingston, Ontario, into a cultured and affluent family, Allen was educated in France and England. A mysterious...

Lady Caroline Lamb , among Lord Byron's many lovers, stands out - vilified, portrayed as a self-destructive nymphomaniac - her true story has never been told. Now, Paul Douglass provides the first unbiased treatment of a woman whose passions and...

Jean Rhys is widely credited for exposing issues of gender, nationality, race, and class in technically sophisticated, arresting narratives. Her lifelong exploration of the dynamics of the human psyche has, however, gone unrecognized. This examination...

Exploring the Japanese tradition of hidden (or the secret transmission of) knowledge within a closed and often hereditary group, the author investigates how esoteric practices function, how people make meaning of their practices, and how this form of...

This collection of essays attempts to address the disparate historical and critical ways religion informs the literature and culture of nineteenth century England, showing how a representative group of major Victorians negotiated its impact. The...

This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of...

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become...

An examination of the representation of the lesbian in modernity from the multiple perspectives of literary, visual and cultural studies, this book shows how the sapphic figure, in her multiple and contradictory guises, refigured and redefined...

In African-American Servitude and Historical Imaginings Margaret Jordan initiates a new way of looking at the African American presence in American literature. Twentieth-century retrospective fiction is the site for this compelling investigation about...

In Trespassing Boundaries , ten contemporary Woolf scholars discuss a broad range of Woolf's short stories. Despite being now easily available these stories have not yet received the attention they deserve. Complex yet involving, they deserve to be read...

An examination of whether Chinese writers of the Creation Society, a Chinese literary coterie, successfully appropriated shishosetsu, a quintessentially Japanese form of autobiographical narrative, into a form to be exploited for their own ends,...

Colletta uses psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humour to argue that dark humour is an important, defining characteristic of Modernism. She brings together the usual suspects alongside more often overlooked writers from the period, and...

In this collection literary scholars, theorists and historians deploy new economic techniques to illuminate English Renaissance literature in fresh ways. Contributors variously explore poetry's precarious perch between gift and commodity; the longing for...

This book re-evaluates the perception of "courtly love" in Old French verse. Adams traces how these verses explore the emotional trials of amour and propose coping methods for the lovelorn.

'Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism is a private affair, intimate theater'. So writes Firmat in this ground-breaking study of the interweaving of life and languages in a group of bilingual Spanish,...

Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse contains analysis of sexual perversion and narrative creativity in fictions from the Latin American boom and post-boom. O'Connor's main argument is that orthodox criticism of Latin American...

Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the...

Based on extensive archival research, this book looks at the earlier contest of empires in the New World, especially among Spain, France and England, and then examines the opposition to empire, the promotion of empire and the question of slavery. Hart's...

In what might seem an unusual pairing, Barlett brings together the insights of Albert Camus and feminist thought, and in doing so sheds new light on both. Looking through a Camusian lens, Bartlett reveals a 'rebellious feminism' that simultaneously...

For centuries, the Arthurian legends have fascinated and inspired countless writers, artists, and readers, many of whom first became acquainted with the story as youngsters. From the numerous retellings of Malory and versions of Tennyson for young people...

Blending a flair for textual nuance with theoretical engagement, Theaters of Desire not only contributes to our understanding of the most influential form of early Chinese song-drama in local and international cultural contexts, but adds a Chinese...