General

Locating a shared interest in the philosophy of "art for art's sake" in aestheticism and modernismo , this study examines the changing role of art and artist during the turn-of-the-century period, offering a consideration of the multiple dichotomies of...

This is the first book-length analysis of Shakespeare s depiction of specula (mirrors) to reveal the literal and allegorical functions of mirrors in the playwright s art and thought. Adding a new dimension to the plays Troilus and Cressida, Julius...

This concise biography surveys Jonson's career and provides an introduction to his works in the context of Jacobean politics, court patronage and his many literary rivalries. Stressing his wit and inventiveness, it explores the strategies by which he...

By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial...

This collection of essays traces the emergence of the Western poem from the standpoint of its collision with "American" otherness, particularly, the Latin American tradition. Unlike works extending Western conceptions of writing or searching for an...

This book puts the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies and questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing on short fiction between 1975 and today - the period in which critical theory came to determine...

This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre...

Discusses crucial moments in the historical development of natural theology in England from the time of Francis Bacon to that of Charles Darwin. While the argument from design remains the rhetorical method of choice for natural theologians throughout the...

This original, witty, illustrated study offers the first analytical history of the rise and development of literary tourism in nineteenth-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats, Burns and Scott, the Bronte sisters, and...

This book concludes Sumie Okada's trilogy concerning cultural relationships between Japan and the West. This volume discusses six Japanese authors (Soseki, Mishima, Akiko Yosano, Hiroshi Yosano, Endo and Murakami), analysing the encounter between their...

This is the first comprehensive study of early modern texts, readings, and readers of Shakespeare's poems in print and manuscript, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England makes a compelling contribution both to Shakespeare studies and the...

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has inspired interpretations in every genre and medium. This book offers perspectives on the ways in which practitioners have used Renaissance drama to address contemporary concerns and reach new audiences...

This innovative book provides an original approach to the analysis of the representation of myth, ritual, and 'magic' in African literature. Emphasizing the ambivalent nature of the sacred, it advances work on the religious dimension of canonical African...

This innovative project unites leading scholars of English, History and French to examine the challenges of teaching early modern literature, history and culture within higher education. The volume sets out a variety of approaches to teaching the period...

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that...

This collection of essays concerns perceptions of the West as reflected in the work of Russian writers of the Third Wave of emigration. The authors include several well-known writers such as Aksenov, Gladilin, Zinik and Loseff as well as Soviet and...

The advent of relatively cheap editions in the mid-sixteenth century produced an explosion of verse, much of which represented the first person speaker as a version of the author. This book examines ways in which writers, often seeking advancement in...

This study of the sub-Saharan African novel interprets representations of Islam as a central organising presence that generates new conceptual questions and demands new critical frameworks with which to approach categories like nationhood, race,...

Through penetrating analysis of twentieth-century historical fiction from Central America this book asks: why do so many literary texts in the region address historical issues? What kinds of stories are told about the past when authors choose the...

A sweeping intellectual history of the relationship between literary translation, authoritarian politics, linguistic ideologies, juristic philology, religion, and poetry in late nineteenth-century Colombia.About the AuthorJOSE MARIA RODRIGUEZ-GARCIA,...

Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre is a collection of essays that both explores the tradition of revenge drama in Japan and compares that tradition with that in European Renaissance drama. Why are the two great plays of each...

Sir Walter Ralegh created a powerful public identity by means of the prose texts he wrote from prison. This new study not only offers a much-needed analysis of these neglected political writings, but also demonstrates the ways in which his readers...

Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) was arguably the foremost bookseller of the late eighteenth century in England, publishing Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecroft, Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others, and his output...

Bringing together a range of critics working on the hispanic and francophone as well as anglophone post-colonial regions, this book aims to dislocate some of the commonly accepted cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries that have previously...

Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them, the importance...

Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and...

This study traces the steady decline of classical authority in English literature from the mid-seventeenth century and the role of translation in shifting the emphasis away the classical learning. The author focuses on Virgil, once the most revered of...

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...

Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England examines in detail both how the practice of censorship shaped writing in the Shakespearean period, and how our sense of that censorship continues to shape modern understandings of what was...

Starting with a re-examination of the role of the colonial/racial Other in mainstream Gothic (colonial) fiction, this book goes on to engage with the problem of narrating the 'subaltern' in the post-colonial context. It engages with the problems of...

This book explores the varied ways in which modernist and postcolonial innovations in fiction are motivated by crises and revolutions in the human perception and appropriation of space. 'Space' for the writers concerned has its political, historical,...

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...

'...Rubinstein is far from innocent and comes to our aid with a lot of learning...and is quite right to urge that not to appreciate the sexiness of Shakespeare's language impoverishes our own understanding of him. For one thing, it was a strong element...

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history. From Atlantis to the Deists of the Napoleonic Wars, this book addresses why the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in the...

Contemporary South African literature reflects a fascination with Russian and Eastern European stories of revolution and transformation as well as resistance to state oppression. In this groundbreaking book, Monica Popescu studies the formative role...

What did Britain look like to the Muslims who visited and lived in the country in increasing numbers from the late eighteenth century onwards? This book is a literary history of representations of Muslims in Britain from the late eighteenth century to...

An examination of how the space of the downtown served dual purposes as both a symbol of colonial influence and capital in Egypt, as well as a staging ground for the demonstrations of the Egyptian nationalist movement.About the AuthorMARA NAAMAN...

India was the object of intense sympathetic concern during the Romantic period. But what was the true nature of imaginative engagement with British India? This study explores how a range of authors, from Edmund Burke and Sir William Jones to Robert...

This book is the first study of disability in postcolonial fiction. Focusing on canonical novels, it explores the metaphorical functions and material presence of disabled child characters. Barker argues that progressive disability politics emerge from...

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of...