Harriet martineau

Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire is a new book of essays by distinguished US and UK scholars on this most influential and prolific of Victorian writers and thinkers.

Approaches to emotion in middle english literature

A significant new account of emotion in Middle English literature, proposing key methodologies for the analysis of feeling and affect in literary texts. It shows how contemporary audiences learned to understand emotion in themselves and others, through empathetic response, the development of fict...

Shakespeare's mystery play

Volumes of influence

Explores the work of a number of key writers and important books within the academic disciplines of politics and international relations. It revisits and re-evaluates some of the landmark books, and assesses the contribution of some of the most influential writers who have played a significant ro...

Colonial discourse / postcolonial theory

The issues of colonialism and imperialism have recently come to the forefront of thinking in the humanities. Disciplines such as history, literature and anthropology are taking stock of their extensive and usually unacknowledged legacy of Empire. At the same time, contemporary cultural theory has...

Bestsellers and masterpieces

Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon offers a comparative critique of the development of the ‘modern canon’ of medieval literature across European and Middle Eastern medieval studies.

Popular victorian women writers

'Popular Victorian women writers' is a collection of essays on a variety of women writers working within the Victorian literary marketplace. Diverse and inclusive, the great strength of this book is that its emphasis on neglected writers and refreshing new angles on more widely known authors se...

Shakespeare's london 1613

Incorporating material published and plays performed, Shakespeare’s London 1613 creates a narrative and analysis of this crucial year. Political events, such as the death of the young Prince of Wales and the marriage of the royal daughter, changed the country forever.

Political shakespeare

The new wave of cultural materialists in Britain and new historicists in the United States here join forces to depose the sacred icon of the "eternal bard" and argue for a Shakespeare who meditates and exploits political, cultural and ideological forces. Ten years on, this second edition presents...

Women's work

Women’s work challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour (as material reality and philosophical concept) shaped the lives and writings of a number of women authors working in the second half of the long eighteenth century

Reading, writing and the influence of harold bloom

Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom takes the work of the greatest living literary critic and discovers what it is like to read ‘with’, ‘against’ and ‘beyond’ his work.

Bess of hardwick

Born the daughter of a country squire, Bess of Hardwick made four marriages which brought her wealth and status. She built and furnished houses and founded a dynasty which included a granddaughter, Arbella Stuart, who had a claim to the thrones of both England and Scotland.

Pastoral poetry of the english renaissance

An invaluable, unique collection that combines classic texts with little-known material. This book will give a uniquely full picture of one of the most fashionable and dynamic areas of Renaissance poetry.

Mientras los hombres mueren

This is the first ever critical edition of Mientras los hombres mueren, the most important collection of war poetry to emerge from the Spanish Civil War. It chronicles the consequences of war on women and children: loss of menfolk at the front, physical deprivation, carpet bombing of cities.

The multicultural midlands

The multicultural Midlands is a unique, interdisciplinary study of the literature, music and food that shape the region’s irrepressible, though often overlooked, cultural identity. It is the first of its kind to give serious critical attention to a part of the world which is frequently ignored by...

Dickens and the dream of cinema

An original blending of literary and film studies which seeks to dissolve barriers between the two disciplines. Offers a new reading of Dickens from the perspective of film, technology and visuality. Proposes a new reading of the emergence of film in the light of social and industrial transformat...

Spenser and virgil

An engaging study that offers new and provocative re-readings of Spenser's pastoral poems, with a focus on Spenser's acknowledged debt to Virgil and his Eclogues. Reception studies, politics and classical studies are interweaved to provide a greater understanding of both poets.

Encountering the book of margery kempe

This innovative volume harnesses the interdisciplinarity and flexibility of ‘encounter’ to provide dynamic readings The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century. Incorporating thirteen original chapters and a critical introduction, it offers myriad exciting approaches to this important a...

A landscape of words

This book examines major literary texts by and about the Irish in the Middle Ages, providing an analysis of a spatial poetics developed over 600 years. It argues that the Irish theorised anew the concept of ‘place’ and developed a ‘spatial turn’ that reconfigured how communities in the Irish Sea ...

Michaelmas term

Michaelmas Term is one of five satiric city comedies that the young playwright Thomas Middleton wrote for the boy players of St Paul's Cathedral, sometime before 1607. Set in a vividly detailed, realistic urban milieu at the start of London's social season, the play comes alive through the centr...

Twenty-first-century fiction

Provides a collection of in-depth readings of British writers that have come to prominence in the 21stcentury.

Instead of modernity

At the heart of the book is a departure from the obsession with “modernity” that has been so prominent in nineteenth-century cultural studies.

Beginning realism

Realism is an essential concept in literary studies, yet for a variety of reasons it has not received the attention and clarity it deserves, often being dismissed as ‘too slippery’ to be of use. This accessible study remedies that failing for students and scholars of English Literature and Litera...

Gothic death 1740–1914

Drawing on a range of popular Gothic and Victorian novels, poems and short stories, this book provides the first full length study of representations of death and dying in Gothic texts between 1740 and 1914.

Soliman and perseda, by thomas kyd

Offers the fullest available textual analysis, together with a discussion of significant differences between the first and second quarto editions of this romantic tragedy by one of Shakespeare's leading contemporaries

Derek walcott

This book provides a unique account of Walcott's development as a writer in addition to being the fullest study of his poetry and plays to date.Discusses all his major works and includes information on his out-of-print and unpublished plays along with .

Between two stools

An engaging and lively tour through the scatological, the flatulent and the cloacal in English literature over four centuries. Will appeal to cultural historians, and English literature scholars and students.|A serious investigation into how the scatological impulse has been represented in litera...

New slaveries in contemporary british literature and visual arts

A study of the literature and visual arts concerned with the many and diverse forms of slaveries produced by globalisation in Britain since the early 1990s.

Catholic literature and secularisation in france and england, 1880–1914

This book comparitively explores the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Spilling the beans

Spilling the Beans shows how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century anxieties about women’s consumption and production are manifest in novelists’ and novels’ accounts of what heroines, readers and writers do with food.

The malcontent

Accessible edition of the play considered to be Marston's masterpiece. This is one of the most original and complex plays of the Elizabethan theatre - complex in genre, structure and language. Uses the same authoritative text as the standard Revels edition with glosses to help the student underst...

Empathy in the reading and teaching of english literature

Empathy in the Reading and Teaching of English Literature explores the educational potential of empathy for literary studies across a historical, generic and geographic continuum. The book draws on interdisciplinary methodologies to offer new readings of popularly taught literary texts and discus...

Gender, sexuality and feminism in pakistani urdu writing

This book sets out an unconventional literary history of progressive Urdu poetry by Pakistani women in the twentieth century. It introduces the resilient voices of poets who tread a fine line between the secular and sacred in an Islamic society to articulate a new feminist aesthetic. 

Douglas coupland

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction

Nordic terrors

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers ...

Beginning modernism

This book

People and piety

This compelling collection examines the ‘lived devotion’ of men and women in England’s Long Reformation. Through cutting-edge research, fourteen chapters explore how English piety was at once segregational and social, fixed in principle yet fluid in practice, and where authors worked out their fa...

Chernobyl trauma and gothic

This scholarly monograph explores the published eyewitness testimonies, poetry and literature surrounding the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It argues for the contextualisation of the disaster’s collective traumatic wound and its Soviet political repression through public articulation of surviv...

Samuel beckett and the arts

Beckett’s dialogue with the arts (music, painting, digital media) has found a growing critical attention, from seminal comprehensive studies (Oppenheim 2000; Harvey, 1967, to name just two) to more recent contributions (Gontarski, ed., 2014; Lloyd, 2018). Research has progressively moved from a g...

Swedish gothic

The monograph gives an overview of the development and characteristic features of Swedish Gothic from the Romantic age until today. 

Poetry and the idea of progress, 1760–90

‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ explores the role of poetry in eighteenth-century thinking on human progress. Its central contention is that the textural, verbal characteristics of poetry were a crucial form of response to ideas of human development. That is, the aesthetics of verse ...

A.s. byatt

This stimulating and comprehensive study of A. S. Byatt’s work spans virtually her entire career and offers insightful readings of all of Byatt’s fictions up to and including The Children’s Book (2009). The authors also consider her role as a critic, cultural commentator and public intellectual.

Lorca's romancero gitano

A poem-by-poem guide to Romancero gitano, Federico García Lorca's poetic masterpiece, containing comprehensive commentaries, introduction to relevant background material and select critical bibliographies for each poem. To be used alongside Ramsden's critical edition of Romancero gitano.

Back to the futurists

This collection of essays aims to reassess the activities and legacy of the Italian Futurist movement from an international and interdisciplinary perspective.

Science meets literature

"Science Meets Literature" analyzes and discusses Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel “Auto-da-Fé” (original German title, “Die Blendung”) as an example of the way in which literature can contribute to the scientific understanding of the human mind and human behavior.

New woman strategies

Recent years have seen a rennaissance of scholarly interest in the fin-de-siecle fiction of the New Woman. New Woman Strategies offers a new approach to the subject by focusing on the discursive strategies and revisionist aesthetics of the genre in the writings of three of its key exponents: Sar...

'volpone' in context

What would a Jacobean audience have made of this grim exposure of human greed? This guide to the various contexts that situate 'Volpone' in its time, explains the Christian ethics, the contemporary socio-political scene, the literary atmosphere and requirements of comedy that inform the backgroun...

The poet-hero in the work of byron and shelley

‘The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley’ explores the poetic heroism developed in Byron and Shelley’s poetry and drama. The book traces how the heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as both poets shape distinctive ...

German gothic literature

This collection not only provides a starting point for students and researchers of Gothic Studies interested in the variations and adaptations within the German tradition, but it also serves as a primer for Germanists interested in establishing––or reevaluating––the place of the Gothic in German ...

Alternative modernities in french travel writing

Examining the aesthetics and politics at stake in urban travel writing as spatial practice, this book explores French travellers’ representations of London and New York from 1851 to the 1980s.

Vyāsa redux

Vyāsa is the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and 'Vyāsa Redux' examines the many paradoxical dimensions of his narrative virtuosity in the poem where the poet is both the creator of the work and a character within it. Narrative is, in this view, cognitive rather than empiri...

'a midsummer night’s dream' in context

How might Shakespeare’s audiences have responded to this enduringly popular comedy? This guide to the various contexts that situate 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' in its time, explains the Christian ethics, the contemporary socio-political scene, the literary atmosphere and requirements of comedy th...

Poetics of race in latin america

Poetics of Race offers innovative approaches to the study of aesthetic and cultural representation of race and ethnicity in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean and the Andean region. Interdisciplinary studies elaborate on issues of marginalization, immigration, violence, ...

Reading to stay alive

This book explores how literary reading can enable people considering suicide to stay alive. 

The novels of frances hodgson burnett

Although she is remembered today mainly as a writer of children’s books, Frances Hodgson Burnett was a widely published novelist. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and...

Imagining gender, nation and consumerism in magazines of the 1920s

Offering the first comparative study of 1920s’ US and Canadian print cultures, ‘Imagining Gender, Nation and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s’ comparatively examines the highly influential ‘Ladies’ Home Journal’ (1883–2014) and the often-overlooked ‘Canadian Home Journal’ (1905–1958), reveal...

The mahatma misunderstood

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” is a study of the fiction about Gandhi produced in his lifetime, and explains why novelists both vehemently critiqued and lovingly collaborated with the Mahatma simultaneously.

Keywords for travel writing studies

‘Keywords for Travel Writing Studies’ draws on the concept of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text, ‘Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society’, in order to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form with cross-...

Wollstonecraft and religion

This book offers fresh perspectives about the religious convictions and faith of “the Mother of Feminism,” many of which have been ignored, misunderstood or misrepresented in Wollstonecraftian scholarship.

Dream and literary creation in women’s writings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley...

The identity politics of postcolonial feminism

The Identity Politics of Postcolonial Feminism provides an original analysis of the conceptual categories of essentialisms (situated and strategic) and the politics of location evoked and practised by five hyphenated South Asian postcolonial feminists in the contemporary Anglo-North-American acad...

Wittgenstein and modernist fiction

Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment shows how works of twentieth-century literature and philosophy together examine language’s capacity to acknowledge the inner lives of marginalized figures.

The crossroads of crime writing

This volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to and reflect collective fears and anxieties. The chapters within utilize theories of cultural m...

The (latin) american scene, present and future (im-)perfect

The author converses with five noted scholars who have done important academic work in the United States since the 1980s. The conversations address academic agendas and university life dilemmas in the vicinity of the signs “Latin” and “Hispanic” in the United States. The volume addresses Spanish ...

Postliberalization indian novels in english

“Postliberalization Indian Novels in English: Politics of Global Reception and Awards” focuses on trends in contemporary Indian novels and discusses the reception of these works at a global level.

Theory does not exist

A wide-ranging collection of essays that makes the case for the humanities as central to our self-understanding, for theory as the latest incarnation of a perennial concern with the relation between words and things, and for the ancient as constitutive of the modern.

Tis pity she's a whore

A scholarly, modern-spelling critical edition of John Ford’s 1633 play, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

Harley manuscript geographies

This first-ever monograph on the celebrated medieval miscellany Harley 2253 (c. 1340) uses methods derived from cultural geography to revise prevailing understandings of English literary history. The Harley manuscript's extraordinary diversity of texts has a counterpart in the monograph's topical...

A companion to pastoral poetry of the english renaissance

An essential supplement to Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance: An anthology. The full-length introduction offers a historical and critical analysis of the pastoral tradition and the circulation of texts.

James baldwin review

James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings together a wide array of peer-reviewed critical and creative work on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. This edition brings together all of the articles published in this year's volume.

William trevor

Offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of William Trevor

Hartly house, calcutta

This novel represents a key document in the literary representation of India and the imperial debate, profoundly challenging pre-existent discourses of colonialism.

God's only daughter

The first full-length study to be devoted to Una, the beleaguered but ultimately triumphant heroine of Book One of The Faerie Queene

Enacting the bible in medieval and early modern drama

The thirteen chapters in this collection open up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on multitemporality, the intersections of biblical narrative and performance, and the strategies employed by playwrights to rework and adapt the biblical source material in Ca...

Theophile gautier, conteur fantastique et merveilleux

Between 1831 and 1866, Théophile Gautier published two dozen tales which can be designated contes fantastiques or contes merveilleux. These works are examined in chronological sequence, in French, in order to follow the development of Gautier as a writer of fantastic stories. The analysis concent...

Shakespeare and spenser

Innovative approach and study of Spenser's literature. Original ideas and perspectives methodolodgy when studying Spenser. Will appeal to wide market of Renaissance students.

Finding shakespeare's new place

Unique report on the major archaeological dig at Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon home and the implications for the Shakespearian biography.

Shakespeare's liminal spaces

Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare’s forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures.

Aspects of knowledge

This book investigates the role of ‘texts’ – including books, maps, stones and caskets – in the conveyance and transformation of knowledge throughout the Middle Ages. It contains original contributions by top medievalists, who explore the topic from different yet complementary angles, offering in...

Revolution, empire, and the gothic dream

This monograph examines the centrality of dreams and their significant transformations in British Gothic novels and in Caribbean novels. The Gothic counters the Enlightenment’s internalization of dreams by reimagining dreams as social and political phenomena. They subsequently play vital roles in...

The magnetic lady

This is the new paperback edition of the first fully annotated volume of Ben Jonson's 'The Magnetic Lady' written in 1632. It contains textual and explanatory notes and the text is modernised for student use. The introduction places the play in the context of Jonson's later dramatic and poetic wo...

Dostoevsky's the idiot and the ethical foundations of narrative

In considering Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot', a novel less easily defined in terms of plot and ideas than his other major fictional works, Sarah Young addresses problems in the novel unresolved by previous interpretations, and in doing so fills a significant gap in Dostoevsky studies.

Performing women

This study investigates the 'exceptional' staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Integrating new approaches to drama, gender and patronage, it offers an original paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture.

The early roxburghe club 1812–1835

The Roxburghe Club, founded in 1812, has an unbroken publishing history from 1814 to the present day. This work offers a new narrative of the formative years of the Club and early nineteenth-century antiquarian culture and its relationship to the emergent popularity and status of English vernacul...

J.g. ballard

A comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, one of the most important fiction writers of the past forty years. Traces the development of his career, and the significant contribution he has made to contemporary writing.

Black refigurations

Black Refigurations is the third volume of a three-volume study of African-American literary history, with special attention to the internal dialogues regarding concepts of “tradition,” haunting, trauma, and re-vision. Texts studied extend from slave narratives to contemporary works, including bo...

Edmund spenser and the romance of space

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial and textual practices.

The 'imagined sound' of australian literature and music

‘Imagined Sound’ is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique methodology of ‘imagined sound’, a new way to read and listen to literature and ...

Soledades. galerías. otros poemas

Presents an alternative reading of this seminal collection of poems, in English for the first time.

Charlotte smith

This book offers a thorough and complete reading of Charlotte Smith's poetry, arguing that we need to engage more directly with historical ideas of gender.

Radical realism, autofictional narratives and the reinvention of the novel

This monograph treats modes of fictionality in contemporary auto/biography, memoir and autofiction. Adopting a case study approach, it demonstrates the extent to which contexts of production and reception are important in framing generic expectations with respect to the representation of lived ex...