Literary studies: general Books

R. W. Sharples provides a new edition, with introduction and commentary in English, of the Greek text. The Mantissa is a collection of short discussions, transmitted as a supplement to the treatise On the Soul by the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of...

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes...

This Pivot studies the influence of Julia Kristeva's work on American literary and film studies.  Chapters consider this influence via such innovative approaches as Hortense Spillers's and Jack Halberstam's to Paule Marshall's fiction and Bram...

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce's much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and...

This book examines how the cultural and ethical power of literature allowed writers and readers to reflect on the practice of capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US between 1890 and 1950. It explores how connections between 'high' and 'popular'...

This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this topic has been relatively neglected in criticism, especially in...

Located at the intersection of world-literary studies and the environmental humanities, this book analyses how fiction and poetry respond to the ecological transformations entailed by commodity frontiers. Examining the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil...

This book looks at a cohort of poets who studied at University College Cork during the 1970s and early 1980s. Based on extensive interviews and archival work, the book examines the notion that the poets form a "generation" in sociological terms. It...

This book is a timely study of young women's life writing as a form of human rights activism. It focuses on six young women who suffered human rights violations when they were girls and have gone on to become activists through life writing: Malala...

This book examines how contemporary global novels by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner have evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. Paying close attention to...

This book examines the topic of excess in modern Irish writing in terms of mysticism, materialism, myth and language. The study engages ideas of excess as they appear in works by major thinkers from Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx through to Nietzsche,...

This book examines the representation of figures, memories and images of childhood in selected contemporary diasporic African fiction by Adichie, Abani, Wainaina and Oyeyemi. The book argues that childhood is a key framework for thinking about...

The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and evolutionary import of Beckett's works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and...

Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature brings together the latest understandings of how central music was to Bishop's writing. This collection considers Bishop's reworking of metrical and rhythmic forms of poetry; the increasing presence of...

Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With...

This book explores the extraordinary proliferation of novels based on Henry James's life and works published between 2001 and 2016, the centenary of his death. Part One concentrates on biofictions about James by David Lodge and Colm Tóibín, and those...

Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an...

This book is the first to examine life writing and disability in the context of Irish culture. It will be valuable to readers interested in Disability Studies, Irish Studies, autobiography and life writing, working-class literature, popular culture, and...

Pound, Frost, Moore and Poetic Precision: Science in American Modernist Poetry examines three major poets in light of the demand that poetry aspire to scientific precision. The critical insistence that poetry be precise affected every one of these poets,...

Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance focuses on the incest motif as used in numerous medieval narratives. Explaining the weakness of great rulers, such as Charlemagne, or the fall of legendary heroes, such as Arthur, incest stories...

The traditional view of Shakespeare's mastery of the English language is alive and well today. This is an effect of the eighteenth-century canonisation of his works, and subsequently Shakespeare has come to be perceived as the owner of the vernacular...

This book explores the contradictions of biography. It charts shifting approaches to the writing and reading of biographies, from post-hagiographical attitudes of the Enlightenment, heroic biographies of Romanticism and irreverent modernist...

Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and...

Henry Miller and Modernism: The Years in Paris, 1930-1939 represents a major reevaluation of Henry Miller, focusing on the Paris texts from 1930 to 1939. Finn Jensen analyzes Miller in the light of European modernism, in particular considering the...

In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of "How-I-Feel" ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward...

The contemporary novel is not as silent as we tend to believe, nor does it only attend to human plots and characters. As this book shows, writers in a range of subgenres have devoted considerable attention to the voices of...

This book reveals how Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera understood metaphor and imagination, and their role in the way human beings describe God. It demonstrates how these medieval Jewish thinkers engaged with...

This book examines the earliest writings of Edward Said and the foundations of what came to be known as postcolonial criticism, in order to reveal how the groundbreaking author of Orientalism turned literary criticism into a form of political...

This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis's London Fields, Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Pat Barker's Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro's...

This book simultaneously examines the specific theoretical issues raised by Elizabeth Gaskell's use of characterization in her shorter fiction, and addresses the larger question of how literary critics ought to use theory. The text gives a history of...

This book examines several distinctive literary figurations of posthuman embodiment as they proliferate across a range of internationally acclaimed contemporary novels: clones in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, animal-human hybrids in Margaret Atwood's...

This book attends to four poets - John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney - whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of...

This book represents the first full-length study of the relationship between neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. It examines the diverse and multiple legacies of Victorian popular fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary...

Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy examines contested notions of fatherhood in written and visual texts during the development of the mercantile economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. It analyzes...

This book explores women's short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts enabled an interrogation of women's changing circumstances, ghosts could have both...

This book considers the influence that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century mathematical thinking exerted on the writing and production of popular drama between about 1587 and 1603. It concentrates upon six plays by five early modern...

The concept of resonance collapses the binary between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, evoking a sound or image that is prolonged and augmented by making contact with another surface. This collection uses resonance as an innovative framework...

This book explores Italian science fiction from 1861, the year of Italy's unification, to the present day, focusing on how this genre helped shape notions of Otherness and Normalness. In particular, Italian Science Fiction draws upon critical race...

This book explores the intersection between the recent work on queer temporality and the experiments of literary modernism. Kate Haffey argues that queer theory's recent work on time owes a debt to modernist authors who developed new ways of representing...

This book identifies, in contemporary fiction, a new type of novel at the interface of science and the humanities, working from the premise that a shift has taken place in the relations between the two cultures in the last two or three decades. As...

This book provides a historical study on the evolution of editorial style and its progress towards standardisation through an examination of early modern English style guides. The text considers the variety of ways authors, editors and printers directly...

The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement showcases environmental literature from writers who fought for women's rights, native rights, workers' power, and the abolition of slavery during the Romantic Era. Many Romantic texts take...

This book focuses on the role that the Oxford classical curriculum has had in shaping Oscar Wilde's aestheticism. It positions Wilde as a classically trained intellectual and outlines the path he took to gain recognition as a writer and promoter of the...

This book explores how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, it argues that Shakespeare systematically exploits early modern physiological,...

What is work? Why do we do it? Since time immemorial the answer to these questions, from both the left and the right, has been that work is both a natural necessity and, barring exploitation, a social good. One might criticise its management, its...

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key...

This book investigates the relationship between the fascinating and misunderstood penny blood, early Victorian popular fiction for the working class, and Victorian anatomy. In 1832, the controversial Anatomy Act sanctioned the use of the body of the...