Literary studies: general Books

This book identifies a major turn in contemporary British literature in response to environmental crisis. It argues that the pastoral is emerging as a new critical framework in which to explore the understanding of people and place in this context. The...

This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the...

Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature undertakes a comparative transnational reading to develop more expansive literary models of good mothering. Abigail L. Palko argues that Irish and Caribbean literary representations of...

Part of a new phase of post-1960s U.S. Latino literature, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros both engage in unique networks of paratexts that center on the performance of latinidad. Here, Ellen McCracken...

This book examines a pivotal moment in the history of science and women's place in it. Meredith Ray offers the first in-depth study and complete English translation of the fascinating correspondence between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617), a natural...

This book investigates the literary imaginings of the postcolonial city through the lens of crime in texts set in Naples and Mumbai from the 1990s to the present. Employing the analogy of a 'black hole,' it posits the discourse on criminality as a way to...

This book is the first monograph in English that comprehensively examines the ways in which Italian historical crime novels, TV series, and films have become a means to intervene in the social and political changes of the country. This study explores the...

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze "real" and "representational" animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian...

This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that...

This book offers a fundamental and comprehensive re-evaluation of one of Joyce's most pervasive themes. By showing that betrayal was central to how Joyce understood and depicted the difficulties and terrors at the heart of all relationships, this...

This book is a survey of personal illness as described in various forms of early modern manuscript life-writing. How did people in the seventeenth century rationalise and record illness? Observing that medical explanations for illness were fewer...

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history,...

If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its...

This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the...

This book offers a new approach to reading the cultural memory of Africa in African American fiction from the post-Civil Rights era and in Black British fiction emerging in the wake of Thatcherism. The critical period between the decline of the Civil...

Since the turn of the millennium, the Arabian Peninsula has produced a remarkable series of adaptations of Shakespeare. These include a 2007 production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in Kuwait in 1898; a 2011 performance in Sharjah of Macbeth, set in...

In 1908, Joseph Conrad was criticised by a reviewer for being a man 'without either country or language': even his shipboard communities were the product of a 'cosmopolitan' vision. This book takes off from that criticism and begins by exploring the...

The reconfiguration and relinquishing of one's conviction in a world system long held to be finite required for many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a compromise in one's beliefs and the biblical authority on which he or she had relied - and...

This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality,Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles...

This book examines conceptions of authority for and in Shakespeare, and the construction of Shakespeare as literary and cultural authority. The first section, Defining and Redefining Authority, begins by re-defining the concept of Shakespeare's sources,...

This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area of literature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term 'environment' the work aims to draw together new approaches to...

Focusing on British women writers' knowledge of ancient Egypt, Youngkin shows the oftentimes limited but pervasive representations of ancient Egyptian women in their written and visual works. Images of Hathor, Isis, and Cleopatra influenced how British...

The first book to put contemporary affect theory into conversation with early modern studies, this volume demonstrates how questions of affect illuminate issues of cognition, political agency, historiography, and scientific thought in early modern...

This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings...

Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime argues that Virginia Woolf transformed the sublime experience in her writing to make room for the democratic invention of female genius. From canonical to lesser known works, O'Hara places her ironic novels in the...

Continuing his explorations of T. S. Eliot's most captivating yet difficult works, G. Douglas Atkins' new and insightful book takes on the question of Eliot and hermeneutics: understanding and being understood, putting-in-other-words, and, in Eliot's own...

What are the theoretical parameters that produce the category public intellectual? By pondering the conceptual elements that inform the term, this book offers not just a political critique, but a sense of the new challenges its meanings present. This...

During the Renaissance, moral philosophy came to permeate the minds of many, including the spectators that poured into Shakespeare's Globe theatre. Examining these strains of thought that formed the basis for humanism, Raspa delves into King Lear,...

CONTENTS Acknowledgements    1. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, "Introduction: Interrogating an Indo-Caribbean Feminist Epistemology"                      Part...

This book explores representations of same-sex desire in Indian literature and film from the 1970s to the present. Through a detailed analysis of poetry and prose by authors like Vikram Seth, Kamala Das, and Neel Mukherjee, and films from Bollywood and...

This volume considers the work and life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). It looks not only at Frankenstein and its composition, sources, themes and reception but at the wide range of other work by Shelley including such novels...

The essays in this collection examine the connections between the forces of empire and women's lives in the early Americas, in particular the ways their narratives contributed to empire formation. Focusing on the female body as a site of contestation,...

This book is the first ever collection about twenty-first century genre fiction. It offers accessible yet rigorous critical interventions in a growing field of popular culture and academic study, presenting new genres as a fascinating and powerful means...

 In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien's narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics,...

This volume examines the anxieties that caused many nineteenth-century writers to insist on literature as a laboured and labouring enterprise. Following Isaac D'Israeli's gloss on Jean de La Bruyère, it asks, in particular, whether writing should be...

Michael Arntfield interrogates the legacy of Victorian-era crime fiction and Gothic horror on investigative forensic methods used by police today.

Through a series of case studies spanning the bounds of literature, photography, essay, and manifesto, this book examines the ways in which literary texts do theoretical, ethical, and political work. Nicole Simek approaches the relationship between...

The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will...

An interdisciplinary collection of essays, Reworking Postcolonialism explores questions of work, precarity, migration, minority and indigenous rights in relation to contemporary globalization. It brings together political, economic and literary...

In the field of literary and cultural studies, the understanding of decadence is usually confined to aesthetic phenomena from Baudelaire to the European fin-de-siècle. The present interdisciplinary anthology, with contributions by Canadian, German,...

Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, c.1100-1500 examines one of the most popular expressions of religious belief in medieval Europe-from the promotion of particular sites for political, religious, and financial reasons to the experience of pilgrims and their...

This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and...

This book is an interdisciplinary volume that explores the social, psychological, and historical impact of acceleration through the medium of culture. Its eleven original chapters highlight the wide range of cultural responses to acceleration in...

This book offers a critically informed yet relaxed historical overview of the legal thriller, a unique contribution to crime fiction where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges.The legal thriller typically...

Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds offers fresh perspectives on Alasdair Gray's literary and pictorial works, with contributions by established critics including Alan Riach, Kirsten Stirling, Liliane Louvel, Gray's biographer Rodge Glass, Sorcha Dallas...

This book explores modalities and cultural interventions of translation in the early modern period, focusing on the shared parameters of these two translation cultures. Translation emerges as a powerful tool for thinking about community and citizenship,...

This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan's innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating ...