Comparative Literature

The essays in this collection explore the concept of 'transubstantiation', its adaptations and transformations in English and European culture from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century. Favoring an interartistic and comparative perspective, a wide...

This collection of essays locates, investigates and challenges the manner in which the Balkans and the West have constructed each other since 1945. Scholars from the two sections of the continent explore a wide range of fiction, film, journalism, travel...

Among the many books in original bindings in Marsh's Library, Dublin, a surprisingly large number are in decorated blind- or gold-tooled, calf, pigskin or goatskin bindings, which date from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The bindings come from all over...

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that makes it appear to us that we have lived another life, that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. Henry James A concept...

In this study, the author examines the evolution of Byron's poetry from Childe Harold I and II through to the composition of Beppo. Beginning with a close reading of the sustained poetic experimentation that constitutes Childe Harold I and II, he charts...

Offering a profound re-assessment of the conceptual, rhetorical, and cultural intersections among sexuality, race and religion in English Renaissance texts, this study argues that antisemitism is a by-product of tensions between received Classical...

Authors not only create artworks. In the process of creating, they simultaneously bring to life their author personae. Approaching this phenomenon from an interdisciplinary point of view, Sonja Longolius develops a concept of "performative authorship" by...

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all...

An examination of political and cultural acts of commemoration, this study addresses the way personal and collective loss is registered in prose, poetry and drama in early modern England. It focuses on the connection of representation of violence in...

How do Austen's heroines find a way to prevail in their environments? How do they make the landscape work for them? In what ways does Austen herself use landscape to convey meaning? These are among the questions Barbara Britton Wenner asks as she...

In this book, Susan Mandala offers a series of in-depth investigations into how the dialogue of four modern plays 'works' with respect to the pragmatic and discoursal norms postulated for ordinary conversation. After an account of the often-heated...

As distinct from the many recent collections and studies of medieval literature and culture that have focused on gender and sexuality as their major themes, this collection considers and serves to re-think and re-situate religion and sexuality together. ...

This study commences with a simple question: how did Russia matter to England in the age of William Shakespeare? In order to answer the question, the author studies stories of Lapland survival, diplomatic envoys, merchant transactions, and plays for the...

Over the last decade there has been an intense and widespread interest in the writing and publishing of cookery books; yet there remains surprisingly little contextualized analysis of the recipe as a generic form. This essay collection asserts that the...

This study examines Tennyson's portrayals of the erotic and creative impulses, reading the poet's ubiquitous lover-artists as tropes that figure the desire for transcending the state of being human, a condition of personal fragmentation and limited...

The sixth and last queen of Henry VIII, and friend of Anne Askew, Katherine Parr (c.1513-1548) has a threefold claim to recognition for her contribution to the literary culture of her time. First, as a loving and adept stepmother to the royal children,...

The one work traditionally attributed to Susan DuVerger is her Admirable Events (1639) - a translation of a collection of novellas by Jean Pierre Camus, a French Catholic Bishop - which she dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria. There is some evidence...

This book studies the ways Hardy writes about music, and argues that this focus allows for a close and varied investigation of the affective dimensions of his poetry and fiction, and his recurrent preoccupations with time, community and love. Throughout...

Despite the fame their work brought them, and despite the importance of their parents in mid-Tudor England, relatively little is known of the lives of Anne, Margaret and Jane Seymour - daughters of Anne Stanhope and the Duke of Somerset. In 1550, aged...

The two translators whose printed works are contained in this volume were the daughters of Henry VIII. Whilst they both suffered from their father's changes of wives and faiths, after his marriage in 1543 to Katherine Parr they both benefited from their...

Through case studies from diverse fields of cultural studies, this collection examines how different constructions of identity were mediated in England during the long eighteenth century. While the concept of identity has received much critical...

Why and how did people read literature on North America by explorers, travellers, emigrants, and tourists? This is the central question Robin Jarvis takes up as he addresses a significant gap in scholarship on travel writing: its contemporary reception...

Little is known of Anna Hume except as the translator of the first three of Petrach's Trionfi and also as the daughter of David Hume of Godscroft whose History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus she edited in one of its troubled versions. This volume...

This study examines the relationship between Enlightenment and romance through the work of James Macpherson and in particular his The Poems of Ossian. By re-reading Macpherson's work in ways not restricted by the sterile and by now largely settled...

This lively and intellectually vigorous conspectus of studies approaches the subject of exile from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributions to this volume give due attention to the twentieth century migratory phenomena, theorised by...

The four works in this volume are the only known exclusively medical texts written by women during the Restoration. Their importance is denoted by their dramatic challenge to the generalisations once made about medical practice and female healers in...

Authors whose works are discussed in this collaborative book, covering a 'long' nineteenth century, include Sterne, Fielding, Scott, Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily BrontA", Gaskell, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Lawrence. Most of the chapters...

In the first full-length study of the figure of the female libertine in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature, Laura Linker examines heroines appearing in literature by John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, Delariviere Manley,...

In the 25 years since the last edition of Thornton and Tully's Scientific Books, Libraries and Collectors was published, scientific publishing has mushroomed, developed new forms, and the academic discipline and popular appreciation of the history of...

'No one of Shakespeare's plays is harder to characterize', said Coleridge of Troilus and Cressida. Over the centuries, generations of critics have faced the challenge of determining exactly what sort of play Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is. ...

This second volume, which completes the first comprehensive catalogue of Chaucer's manuscripts, describes the 56 extant copies and the fragments of 8 otherwise lost copies of the Canterbury Tales. These manuscripts, last examined together over 50 years...

In Dickens's lifetime, and for a generation or so after, Edmund Hodgson Yates and George Augustus Sala were the best known and most successful of his "young men" - the budding writers who acknowledged him as their guide and mentor and whose literary...

Jane Anger her Protection for Women A Mouzell for Melastomus Ester hath hang'd Haman The Worming of a mad Dogge Of the many tracts in defence of women published in early modern England only these four bear women's names. All four were written in...

In The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber tells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a psychoanalyst, by tracing dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerged from her analysis while also undertaking critical explorations of works of...

Samuel Johnson remains one of the most frequently discussed and cited of the eighteenth-century critics; but historians of criticism have invariably interpreted his work within conventions that have allowed for little evaluative commerce between the...

This is the first book-length study of Tennyson's record of publication in Victorian periodicals. Despite Tennyson's supposed hostility to periodicals, Ledbetter shows that he made a career-long habit of contributing to them and in the process revealed...

Patricia Comitini's study compels serious rethinking of how literature by women in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries should be read. Beginning with a description of the ways in which evolving conceptions of philanthropy were foundational...

Letters have long been an outlet for political expression, whether they articulate the personal politics of the daily routine or the political views of individuals who witness or participate in dramatic events. In addition, letters can be unusually...

The essays gathered here demonstrate and justify the excitement and promise of cognitive historicism, providing a lively introduction to this new and quickly growing area of literary studies. Written by eight leading critics whose work has done much to...

The Dream of Bernat Metge is the first English translation of Lo Somni, a prose dialogue written around 1397 by the Catalan humanist Bernat Metge (?1340-1413). It stands as a noteworthy example of nascent humanism and a vivid document of contemporary...