Literary studies: general Books

Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as 'hybridity'. What is the...

Much theoretical and historical work engaged with the question of the "postcolonial" is built upon an imagined, unified premodern "Middle Ages" in Europe. One of the results of this has been that in recent years scholars in medieval and early modern...

Theories of authorship and material culture provide the framework for this study. It maps Anglo-American authorship as it shifts from a theoretical to a more material approach to its study in contexts recognized as key to its development: the...

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different...

Indispensable for students of film studies, in this book Reena Dube explores Satyajit Ray's films, and The Chess Players in particular, in the context of discourses of labour in colonial and postcolonial conditions. Starting from Daniel Defoe and moving...

Cultural Constructions of Madness in the Eighteenth Century deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond. Chapters cover the representation,...

Henry James and the Abuse of the Past explores the complex uses to which James puts his oblique experience of the American Civil War. Why does James use and abuse the past by fabricating and distorting people and events in his autobiographical work? The...

Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses...

This innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk. This interdisciplinary work offers important insights into a previously neglected area of social and...

This study considers parallel issues in revenge tragedies of the early seventeenth-century and violent cinema of the last thirty years. It offers a series of provocative explorations of death, revenge and justice, and gender and violence. What happens...

Tennyson is the most important English poet of the Victorian age. He knew its key figures and was deeply involved in its science, religion, philosophy and politics. The Palgrave Literary Dictionary for the first time gives easily accessible information,...

Blake's Night Thoughts discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth-century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking 'night' as the...

This much-needed collection examines the formation of a black British canon including writers, dramatists, film-makers and artists. Contributors including John McLeod, Michael McMillan, Mike Phillips and Alison Donnell discuss the textual, political and...

This new volume in the Author Chronology series offers an intense articulation of Henry James's biographical experiences, which are presented amid the detailed unfolding of his imaginative writing, and set in the larger context of historical developments...

Encounters in the Victorian Periodical Press focuses on the unique characteristic of the Victorian periodical press - its development of encounters between and among readers, editors, and authors. Encounters promoted dialogue among diverse publics,...

This is the first book to cover the whole range of epistolary verse in the period, including the discursive type favoured by Pope and the familiar and dramatic epistles. It advances a new model for defining the form, demonstrates the form's importance in...

This book examines continuities and changes in narrative strategies deployed to deal with female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century. By focussing on 'designing women' and the lengths to...

Detection existed in fiction long before Poe and Doyle. Its real origins lurk in the popular press of the early Nineteenth century, where the detective and the case were steadily developed. The well-known masters of early crime fiction, including Collins...

Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that...

The first study dedicated to the relationship between Alexander Pope and George Berkeley, this book undertakes a comparative reading of their work on the visual environment, economics and providence, challenging current ideas of the relationship between...

This book analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and early modern women's writing. Brady combines Literary Theory, social and cultural History,...

This new Chronology offers a unique and accessible overview of key dates relevant to Christopher Marlowe's life and works, and enables readers to navigate their way through the various pieces of evidence for the hotly contested dating of his plays and...

What was the appeal of 'the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground' to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth-century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces...

This volume combines a theoretical critique of the biographical method that dominates Larkin studies with a revolutionary interpretation of his works that better accounts for their profound influence upon leading Postmodernists like Ian McEwan, David...

This book examines a wide range of works written by and about child survivors and victims of the Holocaust. The writers analyzed range from Anne Frank and Saul Friedlander to Ida Fink and Louis Begley; topics covered include the Kindertransport...

This book links the leading innovators of modernism to the cult of the modern expert. In historicizing modernism as a distinct mode of knowledge that competes with other forms of expertise from law to psychology, Lois Cucullu shows how three modernist...

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression,...

This book uses the framework of cultural translation to explore the work of six significant modern writers from Ireland, India, Australia and the Caribbean. Written in an accessible and approachable style, it will be of interest not only to specialists...

How did Renaissance literature affect readers' minds, bodies and souls? In what ways did the history of literary experience overlap with the history of humours and emotions? This book argues that a new aesthetic vocabulary based on the theory of the...

This book examines professional literary criticism by Romantic-era British women to reveal that, while developing a conscious professionalism, women literary critics helped to shape the aesthetic models that defined Romantic-era literary values and made...

The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law is a study of the radical novel's critique of the evolving social contract in the 1790s. Focusing on selected novels by Thomas Holcroft, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Robert Bage, William...

The British Romantic poets were among the first to realise the centrality of the Divine Comedy for the evolution of the European epic. This study explores the significance of Dante for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and William Blake. What was their...

Royalist Identities shifts the emphasis from the question 'What is Royalism?' to 'What did Royalism want to be?' The texts analyzed show how Royalism was concerned with the construction of a set of binary roles and behavioural models designed to...

Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William...

Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari and that of Jean Laplanche - particularly his major and as yet still relatively unfamiliar notion of the phantasme - Social Formation in Hardy's Major Novels is an original and groundbreaking...

The Author Chronologies Series aims to provide a means whereby the precise chronological facts of an author's life and career can be seen at a glance. This chronology provides a synopsis of Joyce's first years in Dublin and, from 1900, a more detailed...

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall many East German writers were praised in the Western world as dissident voices of truth, bravely struggling with the draconian constraints of living under the GDR's communist regime. However, since unification, Germany...

Over the last twenty years, critics and historians of the late Eighteenth-century have developed a multidisciplinary approach to the history of culture. This dialogue between literary critics and theorists, art historians and social historians is...

Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory: A New Cosmopolitanism examines and interrogates recent work on nationality in literal, critical and cultural theory. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Spivak,...

The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood,...

During the 1790s and 1800s, cultural critics became convinced that Britain was being 'inundated' by pernicious literary translations imported from the European Continent. British Romanticism and Continental Influences discusses Romantic writers' complex...

The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles is concerned with Gothic representations of London in the late 19th century. Establishing that a modern Gothic literary mode relocates the traditional rural Gothic to the late 19th century metropolis, this volume...

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalisation in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most...

Examining a range of twentieth century writers, including Vera Brittain, Anne Frank and Eva Hoffman, this study focuses on how recent theories of trauma can elucidate the narrative strategies employed in their autobiographical writing. The historical...

Revolutionary thinking at the end of the Eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from 'Being' in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John...

This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend...

This chronology will set Elizabeth Gaskell in her historical, social and literary contexts. It will focus on her career as a writer but will also underline her interactive roles as wife, mother, practical and tolerant Christian, radical sympathizer...

This study of Lawrence's travel writings is the first book-length study to approach the subject with reference to contemporary post-colonial theory. Focusing on the writings of 1921-25, the period when Lawrence was most intensely engaged in travel, it...