Elegy for an age

A magisterial study of the Victorian longing for the past in the face of a turbulent present.

Jane austen and the morality of conversation

An ingeniously innovative analysis of Jane Austen's work, a highly respected and engaging critical study.

Outsiders looking in

A fascinating and comprehensive review of the position of the Rossettis within the social and cultural maelstrom of Victorian London.

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.

Unsettled accounts

Gissing's work reveals an unhappy accommodation with money's underwriting of human existence and culture, and how daily life in all its forms – moral, intellectual, familial and erotic – is transcended or made irrelevant by its commodification.

The vrttivarttika or commentary on the functions of words of appaya diksita

This text represents a significant improvement over the two previously published texts of Vrttivarttika. This volume includes commentary, transliterated Sanskrit text and notes.

Playing politics

This study focuses on the 1670–71 season in the Restoration playhouses, an exciting and formative moment in theatrical and political history. The year proved to be difficult and damaging to King Charles II, as political, religious, and personal matters provoked controversy and disquiet, and the c...

Beowulf

New, up-to-date bibliography which should give this edition another twenty years of life.. Excellent, scholarly introduction which focusses on the values and social relevance of the poem.. Explanatory notes drawing on archaeological sources.. Prose translation.

Chaucer in context

Amongst the most written about works of English literature, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales still defy categorization, claims the author of this book. Was Chaucer a poet of profound religious piety or a sceptic who questioned all religious and moral certainties? Do his pilgrims reflect the society of ...

Stories of women

Why is the nation in a postcolonial world so often seen as a motherland? Stories of women is a pathbreaking study of the perenially fascinating relationship between foundational fictions of the nation and gendered images. The book focuses critically on postcolonial spaces ranging from West Africa...

The voice of the people

‘The Voice of the People’ presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the pan-European folk revival from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.

Elizabeth gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell is best known as a novelist and biographer, but she was also a lively and sensitive letter writer, with a vivacious interest in all that was going on around her. This selection from her letters, with a linking commentary provides a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell largely in her o...

In the company of wolves

This volume of essays presents innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, children raised by wolves, and werewolves, as portrayed in different media and genres.

Suicide and the gothic

Suicide and the Gothic is the first study of the representation of suicide in Gothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present. Poems, short stories, novels, films and video games are covered from European, American and Asian contexts.

Deirdre madden

This pioneering set of essays explores the key motifs and themes in the works of the Irish novelist, Deirdre Madden, about the Northern Irish Troubles and their aftermath and changing social values in contemporary Ireland.

Struggle, resistance and decolonization in african american literature after 1960

Against an African, African American, and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement’s backdrop, this book examines six African American writers who use the cultural and historical past to imagine a different present and future.

Struggle, resistance, and decolonization in african american literature after 1960

Against an African, African American, and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement’s backdrop, this book examines six African American writers who use the cultural and historical past to imagine a different present and future.

Writing and muslim identity: representations of islam in german and english transcultural literature, 1990-2006

Writing and Muslim Identity is a comparative study of Islam in contemporary German- and English-language literature. At a time when the non-Islamic world seems to be defining itself increasingly in contrast to the Islamic world, this literary exploration of Islam-related issues sheds new and valu...

May alcott nieriker, author and advocate

May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the travel writings by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Her critical commentary on social and cultural concerns of the nineteenth century, such as gender and class discrimination, still resonate today.

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...

Crime fiction in the age of #metoo

Informed by fourth-wave feminism, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo presents a compelling and timely reading of crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. The book explores five major fourth-wave feminist topics, #MeToo, rape culture, toxic masculinity, LBGTQ+ perspectives, and transgender. These topic...

Unfinished austen: interpreting "catharine", "lady susan", "the watsons" and "sanditon"

Unfinished Austen is the first detailed study of four texts that Jane Austen left incomplete and unpublished: Catharine, or the Bower (1792–3), Lady Susan (1795?), The Watsons (1803–4?) and Sanditon (1817).

Mid-century women's writing

This book re-examines British women’s writing in the mid-century and its relationship to public and domestic spaces.

Colonial australian women poets

This book considers the political and feminist significance of non-canonical women poets, particularly those who were writing in newspapers and periodicals, in colonial Australia.

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.

Kiosk literature of silver age spain

The 'Silver Age' of Spain ran from 1898 to 1939 and was characterized by intense urbanization, widespread class struggle and mobility and a boom in mass culture. This book offers the most detailed scholarly analysis of kiosk literature, one of the mass culture's manifestations, examined through t...

Dante and the night journey

This book is a psychological reading, emphasizing Dante’s universality.  The Jungian concept of the “night journey,” the descent into the darkest areas of the self and of human nature, which is the precondition for spiritual growth, informs Dante’s journey through the three realms of the afterlif...

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...

Mapping post-war italian literature

Christian felix weiße the translator

Christian Felix Weiße (1726-1804) is best known as a dramatist and influential children’s writer of the Enlightenment period. This is the first book to explore his singularly extensive output as a literary translator, investigating the conditions which allowed Weiße to become the most prolific Ge...

Freethinkers, libertines and 'schwärmer': heterodoxy in german literature, 1750-1800

Religion mattered in the eighteenth century and has not ceased to matter since. How German writers responded to the crisis of orthodox forms of belief in the period is a matter of abiding interest. Some remained rooted in orthodoxy. Many others rejected it, often without knowing for certain what ...

Swedish gothic

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

Word on the street

At the site of everyday social interaction, the street has always provided a source of inspiration for writers, artists and musicians. It has also become the focus for critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau in their attempt to push the limits of textual analysis beyond l...

Urban microcosms 1789-1940

Urban microcosms are small-scale communal spaces that are integral to, or integrated into, city life. Some, such as railway stations or department stores, are typically located in city centres. Others, such as parks, are less quintessentially metropolitan, whilst harbours or beaches are often loc...

Spenserian satire

A detailed study of Spenser's poetic legacy, focusing on his reputation as a satirist and his influence on satirical poetry written by his contemporaries.

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.

Charles de foucauld’s reconnaissance au maroc, 1883–1884

Reconnaissance au Maroc is Charles de Foucauld’s adventurous memoir of exploring Morocco. For eleven months in 1883–84, Foucauld travelled incognito through a country then off-limits to Europeans, mapping its waterways. This book is a translation of Foucauld’s memoir into English, with an extensi...

The fevered novel from balzac to bernanos: frenetic catholicism in crisis, delirium and revolution

This book examines a corpus of frenetic novels – by Balzac, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Zola, Huysmans, Bloy and Bernanos – that foreground the motif of fever within a recurring masterplot: a pious young woman, just discovering her sexuality, finds herself torn between two father-figures, a doctor (typic...

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.

Poets as readers in nineteenth-century france

This volume of essays focuses on how poets approach reading as a notion and a practice that both inform their writing and their relationship to their readers. The nineteenth century saw a broadened and increasingly self-conscious concern with reading as an interpretive and political act, with sig...

Line endings in renaissance poetry

This book looks at how Renaissance poets ended their poetic lines. It considers a range of strategies and argues that line endings are crucial to our understanding of the poems. 

Theology in the early british and irish gothic, 1764–1834

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834 reassesses the relationship between contemporary theology and the Gothic. Investigating Gothic aesthetics, depictions of the supernatural and portrayals of religious organisations, it explores how the Gothic engages with contemporary theol...

Samuel richardson as anonymous editor and printer

During the first two decades of his career, Richardson’s role as printer was hardly limited to setting the type for the periodicals that issued from his shop. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of his intervention in producing text is the fact that both The True Briton (1723-24) and The Weekly Mis...

Caryl phillips, david dabydeen and fred d'aguiar

This book focuses on representations of slavery in the works of contemporary British authors Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar, specifically exploring how racial anxieties in twenty-first century Britain may be seen as legacies of this largely ignored, but deeply significant, past.

Touching god

The first book devoted to the study of love in the writings of Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘Touching God’ offers fresh readings of Hopkins’ poetry by considering love in relation to mutual touch.

Modernist afterlives in irish literature and culture

Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture explores manifestations of the themes, forms and practices of high modernism in Irish literature and culture produced subsequent to this influential movement. The interdisciplinary collection reveals how Irish artists grapple with modernist leg...

Jane austen and her readers, 1786–1945

‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of the history of reading Jane Austen’s novels, focused on the responses of ordinary readers.

Jane austen's families

“Jane Austen’s Families” focuses on family dynamics in Jane Austen’s six novels, especially on interaction between parents and children.  It examines with particular care the relations of fathers and daughters.      

Empire and the animal body

‘Empire and the Animal Body’ develops recent work in animal studies, ecocriticism and postcolonial studies to reassess the significance of exotic animals in Victorian adventure literature.

Fragmenting modernism

Fragmenting modernism' is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution.

Graham swift

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to Booker Prize-winning novelist Graham Swift. Detailed analysis of his work provides an informative, lucid and accessible insight into the writing of one of Britain's most significant contemporary authors.

Dickens and the sentimental tradition

‘Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition’ is a timely study of the ‘sentimental’ in Dickens’s novels, which re-evaluates his presentation of emotion as part of a complex literary tradition that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society.

George eliot's grammar of being

Drawing on original manuscripts and Victorian psychological theory, this study shows that George Eliot was an author who shaped her sentences as carefully as she wanted her public to read them.

Gamle norge and nineteenth-century british women travellers in norway

‘Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway’ explores the surprising significance of Norway in the writing of British women during the nineteenth century, the country offering a place of freedom and possibility beyond Victorian Britain.

William morris and the uses of violence, 1856–1890

‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ offers a new and challenging reading of William Morris’s work, focusing on his representations of violence and arguing that the idea of regenerative battle is central to his literary and political vision.

The dreadful name of henry hills

Rereading chaucer and spenser

Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete offers dynamic new approaches to the relationship between the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Contributors draw on current and emerging preoccupations in contemporary scholarship and offer new perspectives on poetic autho...

Perception and analogy

This book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the eighteenth century. It draws novel connections between theories of perception and the creative methods employed by poets, theologians, and scientists in their explorations of astronomy, light, colour, and the body.

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 ...

Beowulf and beyond

Beowulf & Beyond is the first and only set of poetic translations to include not only Beowulf but all of the best-known works of Anglo-Saxon literature in a single convenient volume.

Spanish romance in the battle for global supremacy

By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of the so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how tales of love and arms mystified global conquest (in such places as Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California, and Australia) and rooted the idea of English empire as a civilized alternative...

The sense of early modern writing

Offers a new and challenging account of the relationships between rhetoric and aesthetics, informed by literature, critical theory and philosophy. Offers readings of familiar and unfamiliar early modern texts by Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson and others that will be of interest to researchers and st...

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 ...

British culture after empire

This book follows the afterlives of empire from 1945 to present day, providing an interdisciplinary analysis of how the legacy of empire continues to shape the cultures, politics, spaces and memories of contemporary Britain. The essays it contains illustrate this with reference to a series of loc...

Anton chekhov through the eyes of russian thinkers

This volume offers modern perspectives, from a strong international team of scholars, on the perception of Anton Chekhov's works by three leading cultural figures of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov.

The european byron

This book considers how Byron’s cosmopolitanism, mobility, and chameleon style influenced Byron’s identity in West and Eastern Europe. Transformed by French translations, Byron’s work was read by Thomas Moore, Ugo Foscolo, Lady Mosergan, Madame de Staël, Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin. His...

The poetry of anna akhmatova

Outlines a fresh and coherent framework, reviewing Akhmatova's oeuvre in its totality for the first time.

Politics and the theory of language in the ussr 1917-1938

'Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917-1938' provides ground-breaking research into the relationship between linguistic theory and politics during the first two decades of the USSR.

Performing noncitizenship

This exacting study examines the role that theatre, film and activism responsive to asylum seekers has played in the emergence of ‘irregular’ noncitizenship as a cornerstone idea in contemporary Australian political and social life.

Yeats and revisionism

The books collects Daniel T. O’Hara’s half century of essays and review-essays on Yeats and his major poetry an drama and how leading critics and theorists have sought to revise their reception for their periods of time and indeed for the future. Its aim is to trace a critical history of the last...

On beckett

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.

Imaginary plots and political realities in the plays of william congreve

Imaginary Plots and Political Realities in the Plays of William Congreve is a study of the political and social milieu that informs William Congreve’s writings. The book attempts to read Congreve’s plays and his novella, Incognita, against the political and social upheaval of the period initiated...

Making and unmaking in early modern english drama

Explores the significance of visual things that are ‘under construction’ in works by playwrights including Shakespeare, Robert Greene and John Lyly