General

In early modern Europe, the circulation of visual and verbal transmissions of sati, or Hindu widow burning, not only informed responses to the ritualized violence of Hindu culture, but also intersected in fascinating ways with specifically European forms...

This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public...

Revises the semiotic paradigm of the early modern 'literary system' dominant since 1983 by adapting methods entailed in the idea that literary works emerge through a series of semiotic events. Davis analyzes Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Astrophil and...

Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction draws on three related bodies of knowledge: crime fiction criticism, masculinity studies, and the cultural analysis of food and consumption practices from a critical eating studies...

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present sheds new light on literary representations of precarious labor from 1840 until the present. With contributions by experts in American, British, French, German and Swedish culture, this...

This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss...

Polyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the cultural and aesthetic impact of Dylan’s musical and literary production. Significantly distinct in approach, each chapter draws attention to the function...

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This...

From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, hermaphrodites were discussed and depicted in a range of artistic, mythological, scientific and erotic contexts. Early Modern Hermaphrodites looks at some of those representations to explore the...

This book argues that the early modern public/private boundary was surprisingly dynamic and flexible in early modern literature, drawing upon authors including Shakespeare, Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn, and genres including lyric poetry, drama,...

This book critically examines the postcolonial canon, questioning both the disproportionate attention to texts written in English and their overuse in attempts to understand the postcolonial condition. The author addresses the non-representation of...

This essay collection examines the Shakespearian culture of Cold War Europe - Germany, France, UK, USSR, Poland, Spain and Hungary - from 1947/8 to the end of the 1970s. Written by international Shakespearians who are also scholars of the Cold War, the...

This book analyzes six key narratives of Hurricane Katrina across literature, film and television from the literary fiction of Jesmyn Ward to the cinema of Spike Lee. It argues that these texts engage with the human tragedy and political fallout of the...

This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare. It shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive, by...

Many events of the divided society from Elizabeth I to Charles I were taken as an unmistakable sign that the world was entering its last days. This text shows how pervasive was this pessimistic mood and how powerfully it affected English writing from...

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but...

This book reveals the economic motivations underpinning colonial, neocolonial and neoliberal eras of global capitalism that are represented in critiques of inequality in postcolonial fiction. Today's economic inequality, suffered disproportionately by...

How can one make state administrative systems interesting, embody an abstract public ethos and give heroism to homogeneity? The discipline of literature and bureaucracy dismisses Weber's 'neurocrat'. Milton, Trollope and Hare are case studies on...

This book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspere Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare's authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its...

As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare's time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity. No account of early modern literary...

Even in an age of emerging nationhood, English men and women still thought very much in terms of their parishes, towns, and counties. This book examines the vitality of early modern local consciousness and its deployment by writers to mediate the larger...

This book examines melodramatic impulses in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, as well as the series' film adaptations and fan-authored texts. Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the...

Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction offers an overview of the ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and influences the present in British detective fiction written between 1920 and 2020. Exploring a range of authors including Agatha...

An analysis of literary accounts of suffering from sub-Saharan Africa, this book examines fiction and life-writing in English and French over the last forty years. Drawing on writers from the canonical to the less well-known, it uses close readings to...

Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors' auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity...

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 Toibin, and those...

This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical...

This book presents a definition of literary postmodernism, using detective and science fictions as a frame. Through an exploration of both prior theoretical approaches, and indicators through characteristics of postmodernist fiction, this book identifies...

This book explores the inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in diverse texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate -or to...

The first book length study of this genre, Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography facilitates new understandings of how people and cultures are displaced and reinvent themselves. Through the examination of...

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...

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe's C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world where not...

The four prose texts discussed in Literary Rooms position themselves in a literary tradition which highlights the manifold purposes the private room may serve: it is a mirror of the inhabitant, a context in which to position the self, a place of and...

This book argues that McCarthy's works convey a profound moral vision, and use intertextuality, moral philosophy, and questions of genre to advance that vision. It focuses upon the ways in which McCarthy's fiction is in ceaseless conversation with...

Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s discusses the work of three prominent women writers by focusing on the response to the French Revolution and the struggle for reform in Britain. Examining previously-neglected texts as well as more familiar ones, the...

Irish detective fiction has enjoyed an international readership for over a decade, appearing on best-seller lists across the globe. But its breadth of hard-boiled and amateur detectives, historical fiction, and police procedurals has remained somewhat...

Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Border Violence focuses on the evidence of the effects of displacement as seen in narratives-cinematic, photographic, and literary-produced by, with, or about refugees...

With the backdrop of new global powers, this volume interrogates the state of writing in English. Strongly interdisciplinary, it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of postcolonial literary theory. An insistence on fieldwork and linguistics makes this...

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they...

This book explores contemporary British multicultural multi-genre literature. Considering socio-political and philosophical ideas about British multiculturalism, superdiversity and conviviality, Ulla Rahbek studies a broad range of texts by writers from...