Literary studies: general Books

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...

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...