William blake as natural philosopher, 1788-1795

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early illuminated works, and reveals the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. 

After the end

Through sources from literature and film to comics, music and the built environment across the globe, this work studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality and apocalypse.

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-...

Shakespeare's borrowed feathers

This book uses the latest techniques in textual analysis to reveal the influence of a community of English playwrights on the celebrated works of William Shakespeare.

The merchant of venice

This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader fr...

Antony and cleopatra

This books looks at Antony and Cleopatra in performance from 1606 to 2018, examining how actors, directors and designers pick up the play's themes of desire and delinquency, exoticism and erotic politics to locate the most ambituous love story ever told in a new present. Is the play tragedy? Come...

Old, bold and won’t be told

A lively exploration of ageing women in Shakespeare’s day – onstage and off.

'antony and cleopatra' in context

Tragic love story or the downfall of a drunken fool and a ruthless schemer? How did Jacobeans see this play? This guide recovers the various contexts that situate ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ in its time, explains the Christian ethics, the contemporary political scene, the literary atmosphere and requi...

'king lear' in context

How did the court audience of 1606 respond to Shakespeare’s most disturbing tragedy? This guide to the various contexts that situate ‘King Lear’ in its time uncovers the Christian ethics, contemporary political scene, literary atmosphere and requirements of tragedy that all inform the background ...

Courteous exchanges

This book offers new connections between Spenser and Shakespeare by showing how their works hone readers’ and audiences’ judgement about the social construction of aristocratic identity.

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.

Power

Power: A philosophical analysis is the first full-length attempt to analyse what we mean when we talk about power. This revised second edition includes an extended new forward which brings the book up to date by discussing recent developments in the literature, including those which were initiate...

A theory of thrills, sublime and epiphany in literature

A psychological explanation of goosebumps and tears, of the epiphanic experience of seeing something ordinary in a profoundly new way, and of the overwhelming perception of the sublime. These experiences found in life and literature involve a feeling of coming to know something deeply important b...

The problem of literary value

This book addresses the vexed status of literary value, focusing on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, using Chaucer studies as a case in point. It explores how we may reconcile literary value’s inevitability with its uncertainties and complicities, seeking to forge a viable rationale...

Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism

This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.

Bakhtin and his others

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality, research into his theoretical backgrounds, and case studies where these insights are employed in literary analysis.  

Christian fiction and religious realism in the novels of dostoevsky

This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'.

The bakhtin circle

This book is a collection of essays on the most important figures associated with the Bakhtin Circle. It offers new biographical material, valuable translations of important Russian texts, a timeline and extensive bibliographical references.

Two lamentable tragedies

A photographic facsimile of the quarto held by the British Library, printed in 1601. The play combines a plot based on a real-life London murder case of 1594 with one deriving from an Italian tale of an evil father and his son.

David, donne, and thirsty deer

Essays by Anne Lake Prescott on French and English early modern writers and cultures, from Du Bellay to Spenser, Ronsard to Donne.

Studies of petrarch and his influence

Brings together papers on Petrarch and his influence on the Renaissance, covering various aspects of Petrarch's presence in Renaissance literature, art, and scholarship. The essays explore the connections between Petrarch's work and the broader Renaissance imagination, demonstrating his lasting i...

Thomas nashe and literary performance

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, ‘non-literary’, non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe’s use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, ...

Like a dark rabbi

Wallace Stevens' dark rabbi, from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", provides a title for this work on modern Jewish poetry in English. Norman Finkelstein here offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture—and to American poetry.

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 ...

Kostas varnalis's papers

Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974) was a Bulgarian-born Greek writer and member of the demoticist movement in Greece. As a poet he was an important contemporary of Angelos Sikelianos and Nikos Kazantzakis. This book presents for the first time an in-depth view of this poet's literary work and life throu...

Amis and amiloun, robert of cisyle, and sir amadace

The Middle English texts of three "Legendary Romances of Didactic Intent". An edition aimed at students and designed for classroom use, with contextual introductions and marginal glosses of unfamiliar words and phrases.  Second, revised edition.

King arthur's death

This edition-with contextualizing introductions, helpful glosses, plentiful notes, and useful glossary-comprises a great introduction to Middle English Arthuriana for students of the Middle Ages.

The chaucerian apocrypha

The poems in this volume were prized and preserved because of their association with Chaucer’s name and have been, paradoxically, almost entirely ignored by modern readers for the same reason. The various genres represented in this sampler attest to the diversity of late medieval literary tastes ...

Wynnere and wastoure and the parlement of the thre ages

This edition contains two poems valuable to the study of satire of social abuses in the fourteenth century: Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages. The editions include notes, glosses, an introduction, and a glossary, making them accessible to beginning and advanced students in M...

Ten bourdes

A "bourde" is an English comedic poem similar to a French fabliau but with a moralizing element and less of an emphasis on violence. Collection of ten Middle English bourdes, specifically designed for students, and has contextualizing introductions, copious notes, glosses, and a glossary..

The assembly of gods

Anonymous English dream vision allegory produced, probably, in the third quarter of the 15th century. Blends didacticism with the mythological and the courtly, and seeks to bring Reson and Sensualyté into accord by means of an assembly of the classical gods that is called to adjudicate the relati...

Performances and audiences in pindar's sicilian victory odes (bics supplement 95)

Six scottish courtly and chivalric poems, including lyndsay's squyer meldrum

These six poems explore some of the courtly and chivalric themes that preoccupied late medieval Scottish society.

Reading fiona sampson

Integrating analysis and a honed interpretation of the near-total gamut of the oeuvre to-date of Professor Fiona Sampson, the book synthesizes its rigorous discussions of the poetry, prose in different genres, and literary practices of Professor Sampson over a decades-long and much-lauded literar...

Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure

Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure provides a reading of Rochester’s poems, dramatic works, and letters in a biographical context. It argues that there is a thematic unity--the pursuit of pleasure--underlying his work, that this pursuit is religiously motivated and reflects Rochester’s preoccu...

Marginal scholarship and textual deviance (bics supplement 84)

Sexual violence and literary art

Sexual Violence and Literary Art addresses the complicity of representation in what is represented, and its creative transformations, by re-examining classic poetic, dramatic and fictional texts by men in light of women’s philosophical, theoretical and critical responses to them.

Studia occitanica

The first of two volumes dedicated to the memory of Paul Remy and having as theme the scientific domain to which he had dedicated his research for nearly forty years: the Occitan literature and language.

Four romances of england

Ample introductions, notes, and glosses, this volume will make an excellent text for a class of any level on Middle English romance. Spanning the mid thirteenth to the late fourteenth century, these works provide an excellent cross section of the wonderful world of Middle English romances featuri...

Loosen the fetters of thy tongue, woman

Maverick Israeli poet Yona Wallach (1944-1985) is remembered for her outrageous and unconventional personality and the controversies engendered by her sometimes shamelessly erotic verse. She is regarded by many as the most important among the Israeli poets of her generation, perhaps even the grea...

The poetics of adonis and yves bonnefoy

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Saïd).

Fitzgerald’s rubáiyát of omar khayyám

For all its fame in the wider world, Edward FitzGerald’s ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ (1859) has been largely ignored by the academic establishment. This volume explores the reasons for both its popularity and neglect.

Essays and interviews on contemporary american poets, poetry, and pedagogy

In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” ab...

Poetry and freedom: discoveries in aesthetics, 1985–2018

This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of poetic freedom, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Questions about the elusiveness of poetic freedom are tested vis-à-vis the works of Whitman, Dickins...

French crime fiction and the second world war

By investigating representations of the war years in a selection of French crime novels from the mid-1940s to the present day, this book argues for the importance of crime fiction, and popular culture more generally, as active agents of memory in the ongoing debates over the legacies of the war y...

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...

David bowie, enid blyton and the sun machine

A dazzling act of literary-critical rebellion, casting new light on the lives of David Bowie and Enid Blyton

Mozart and the wolf gang

Mozart and the Wolf Gang is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of Anthony Burgess's fictions.. With its sizzying swirl of formal and thematic invention, this slim book may strike one as something even more impossible that any of Burgess' earlier tours de force.

Reading greek australian literature through the paramythi

This book explores Greek Australian literature through its paramythic tropes and focuses on reading it as a bridge between multiculturalism and world literature.

The varieties of joycean experience

A collection of essays on Joyce’s work stressing variations of approach. Forays into and across Joyce’s oeuvre would draw upon a number of new and recent modes of criticism, including textual genetics, cognitive studies, and ecocriticism.

V. s. naipaul of trinidad

The book collects material from local critics, newspapers and interviews to present V. S. Naipaul in new light as a “true blue” Trinidadian writer. The book foregrounds Naipaul’s deep connections not only with the land of his birth but with its literary and historical heritage and its peoples. 

Raymond federman and samuel beckett

This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. 

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 beast 666

John Symonds was Crowley's literary executor, and his biography of Aleister Crowley is the fullest account of the life of this most bizarre Englishman. The present edition has been considerably revised and augmented, and remains the standard work on Crowley.

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 ...

Penny dreadfuls

This study participates in the ongoing scholarly effort to re-appraise the penny dreadful phenomenon as a cornerstone of literary history and of popular culture, both within the nineteenth century and the development of Victorian popular fiction and beyond its specific context. The growing presen...

Speculative endeavors

This book focuses on alternative forms of knowledge production and speculation in nineteenth century US-American society, and highlights the strategies that minoritarian subjects developed to understand and navigate these complex cultures of knowledge and capital.

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...

Reinventing marie corelli for the twenty-first century

‘Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century’ is a collection of essays about a novelist who once was the ‘second most famous Englishwoman in the world’ after Queen Victoria and whose books broke every previous sales record. The essays account for Corelli’s popularity and reintroduce h...

Poetic innovation in wordsworth 1825–1833

"Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833" uses extensive manuscript study of Wordsworth’s poems to present, for the first time, an account of his poetics during the supposedly "fallow" years, 1825–1833. The poetry of this period appears in a "landscape" that includes manuscripts, streams and pa...

Neo-victorian lesbians on screen

Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen, by Maier and Friars, argues that the on-screen portrayal of lesbians situated in the long nineteenth century across various countries is at the very least a dual task; the imperative project of revoicing lesbian silence and female companionship is complicated by ...

Visuality in the novels of austen, radcliffe, edgeworth and burney

‘Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney’ examines the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney. It offers new insights into vision, fiction and depiction by exploring how the visual details in women’s novels published be...

Satire, comedy and tragedy

This book provides a closereading of the satiric, comic, and tragic plot structures of TristramShandy and then traces the themes that inform Laurence Sterne’s greatest novel to his letters, sermons, and other writings. The book also argues for a writing-to-learn approach to teaching Sterne’s recu...

Quantitative literary analysis of the works of aphra behn

This book explores the works of Aphra Behn (1640–1689) synchronically through word counts and statistical measures. It analyzes, by genre, poetry, drama, and prose, examining the quantification of Behn’s literary style. The conclusion applies thematic questions to the full corpus for an innovativ...

Bare ruined choirs

The book discusses the demarcation of secular and sacred territory in early modern English drama. It focuses primarily on four plays, Thorney Abbey, A Knack to Know a Knave, A Shoemaker a Gentleman and The Lovesick King, but puts these in dialogue with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Doctor Faustus.

Anthony munday: the honourable, pleasant and rare conceited historie of palmendos

Anthony Munday (1560?-1633) published this English translation of a Spanish heroic romance in 1589; it follows the adventures of Palmendos on his journey to Constantinople. This is an original-spelling edition producing a reliable text, as close as possible to the author's original manuscript.

Pouring water on time

This bilingual (Arabic/English) anthology presents the best of Arabic classical poetry's musings over the many faceted states of the human condition, among them love, generosity, life, time, youth, beauty, ecstasy, longing, wine, death, and plenty more.

On generosity

The Ḥilyat al-kuramā', literally "The Ornament of the Magnanimous", was compiled in Cairo and Medina in the ninth/fifteenth century. This study of the work and its author is the first reliable critical edition of the Arabic text. An annotated English translation and glossaries make the text acces...

Two middle english prayer cycles

This book is the first critical edition of two fascinating but overlooked devotional texts, each shining its own light on medieval faith. Both texts are accompanied by extensive notes and introductory essays to aid students and specialists alike.

Exploring greek manuscripts in the gennadius library (english)

Among the collections of the Gennadius Library in Athens are over 300 Greek manuscripts, ranging in date from the 13th to the 19th century. This book presents a collection of studies of various aspects of the collection written by leading paleographers, Byzantine art historians, and theologians.

William caxton's "paris and vienne" and "blanchardyn and eglantine"

These texts are English versions of romances well known in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, but outside the modern canon of early English literature. This edition incorporates recent scholarship and criticism, including new critical editions of French texts closely related to Caxton's sourc...

The miracle of theophilus by gautier de coinci

The legend of Theophilus is a medieval miracle story which reveals the period's deep fear of hell and the Devil. This first English translation of Gautier de Coinci's pre-Faustian version of the legend is presented in a facing-page translation with the original Old French, along with a full intro...

The lover's confession

John Gower's Confessio Amantis (The Lover's Confession) is one of the most important English works of the C14th. Within its frame of the lovesick lover's confession are well over a hundred stories which exemplify the Middle Ages. This is the first translation of the entire (33,000-line) Middle En...

Blandin de cornoalha: a comic occitan romance

This volume makes available for the first time in English an edition of the medieval romance Blandin de Cornoalha, including the original Occitan text, a translation and an introduction to the work.

Of knyghthode and bataile

Composed for King Henry VI in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, Of Knyghthode and Bataile adapts the most widely used military manual in the Middle Ages into English verse. This edition of the poem also provides a contextualizing introduction and copious notes and glosses to assist the modern ...