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Novels of George Eliot
by Barbara HardyBarbara Hardy's Novels of George Eliot is a classic study of Eliots's outstanding powers as a great formal artist. The book's continuing appeal is due not simply to the perceptiveness and freshness of its writing but to the fact that form is interpreted in the widest sense to include whatever is relevant to the novels as organised, articulated, imaginative wholes and also as the direct expression of George Eliot's profound analysisof the human condition.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, Volume 7 (Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition)
by Judith M. Kennedy Richard F. KennedyThis study traces the response to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" from Shakespeare's day to the present, including critics from Britain, Europe and America.
German Literature in the Age of Globalisation
by Stuart TabernerLiterary fiction in Germany has long been a medium for contemplation of the 'nation' and questions of national identity. From the mid-1990s, in the wake of heated debates on the future direction of culture, politics and society in a more 'normal', united country, German literature has become increasingly diverse and seemingly disparate - at the one extreme, it represents the attempt to 'reinvent' German traditions, at the other, the unmistakable influence of Anglo-American forms and pop literature. A shared concern of almost all of recent German fiction, however, is the contemporary debate on globalisation, its nature, impact and consequences for 'local culture'. In its engagement with globalisation the literature of the Berlin Republic continues the long-established practice of reflection on what it is to be 'German'.This book investigates literary responses to the phenomenon of globalisation. The subject is approached from a wide range of thematic and theoretical perspectives in twelve chapters which, taken together, also provide an overview of German fiction from the mid-1990s to the present. The book serves both as an introduction to contemporary German literature for university students of German and as a resource for scholars interested in culture and society in the Berlin Republic.
Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1860-1879: An Annotated Biobibliography
by Catherine ReillyMid-Victorian Poetry 1860-1879 is the second volume of a comprehensive three-volume Bibliography of Victorian poetry. National libraries, university libraries, and older-established public libraries contain thousands of volumes of poetry and verse, yet the majority of the authors are quite unknown as no bibliography of Victorian Poetry has existed until now. The identifies 2,605 authors of the United Kingdom.
Adorno and Literature
by David Cunningham Nigel MappDespite the recent upsurge of interest in Theodor Adorno's work, his literary writings are generally under-represented. However, literature is a central element in his aesthetic theory. Bringing together original essays from a distinguished international group of contributors, this book offers a wide ranging account of the literary components of Adorno's thinking. It is divided into three sections, dealing with the concept of literature, with poetry, and with modernity and the novel respectively. At the same time, the book provides a clear sense of the unique qualities of Adorno's philosophy of literature by critically relating his work to a number of other influential theorists and theories including contemporary postmodernist theory and cultural studies.
Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and Histories
by Jeni WilliamsThe poetic nightingale is so familiar it seems hardly to merit serious attention. Yet its ubiquity is significant, suggesting associations with erotic love, pathos and art that cross culture and history. This book examines the different nightingales of European literature, starting with the Greek myth of Philomela, the raped girl, silenced by having her tongue cut out, and then transformed into the bird whose name means poet, poetry and nightingale simultaneously. Moving from the classical to the Christian worlds, Jeni Williams discusses nightingales and nature in the early church and sees the emergence of the figure as an emotive emblem of the aristocracy in mediaeval vernacular debate poetry. Her final chapters use the nightingale and the myth to examine Elizabeth Barrett Browning's struggle for an active female voice in Victorian poetry.
The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, Volume 5 (Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition)
by William Baker Brian VickersThe Merchant of Venice has always been regarded as one of Shakespeare's most interesting plays. Before the nineteenth century critical reaction is relatively fragmentary. However between then and the late twentieth century the critical tradition reveals the tremendous vitality of the play to evoke emotion in the theatre and in the study. Since the middle of the twentieth century reactions to the drama have been influenced by the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. The first volume to document the full tradition of criticism of The Merchant of Venice includes an extensive introduction which charts the reactions to the play up to the beginning of the twenty first century and reflects changing reactions to prejudice in this period. Material by a variety of critics appears here for the first time since initial publication. Reactions are included from: Malone, Hazlitt, Jameson, Heine, Knight, Lewes, Halliwell-Phillips, Furnivall, Irving, Ruskin, Swinburne, Masefield, Gollancz and Quiller-Couch.
Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear
by Dani CavallaroThe Gothic Vision examines a broad range of tales of horror, terror, the uncanny and the supernatural, spanning the late-eighteenth century to the present, and of related theoretical approaches to the realm of dark writing. It argues that such narratives are objects for historical analysis, due to their implication in specific ideologies, while also focusing on the recurrence over time of themes of physical and psychological disintegration, spectrality and monstrosity. This is an excellent overview of a genre that is increasingly studied in literature, film, and cultural studies courses.
Measure for Measure: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition. Volume 6 (Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition)
by George L. GeckleIn this critical evaluation of the classic, the discussion focuses on the nature of the major characters, the morality of their behavior, the conclusion of the play, and the genre of a play that was listed in the First Folio as a comedy. The contents of this volume cover texts by English, American and European scholars and critics including Malone, Stevens, Schlegel, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Hallam, Gervinus, Bagehot, Pater, Dowden, Furnivall, Swinburne, Symons, Boas, Shaw, Bradley, Chambers, Bridges, Masefield and Croce.
Swedish Women's Writing 1850-1995 (Women in Context: Women's Writing)
by Helena Forsas-ScottProvides a survey of women's writing in Sweden, from the beginnings of the struggle for emancipation in the 1850s to the present day. These writers are seen within the political, cultural and economic context of women's lives. Modern critical currents are also assessed and Swedish feminist criticism is considered alongside the French and American traditions.
Jane Austen and Her Art
by Mary LascellesFirst published in 1939, Jane Austen and Her Art is a landmark in Jane Austen criticism. This was the first book to provide a full-scale account of the writer based upon thoroughhistorical and biographical scholarship; and on the critical front, Mary Lascelles broke new ground in applying the ideas of Henry James on the 'art' of the novel.In the years since the first publication of Jane Austen and Her Art, there has come an overwhelming body of critical writing about Jane Austen. But this classic study maintains its unique position, unchallenged and unimproved upon in its analysis of Jane Austen's style and narrative art and the experience of life and literature which formed the novels. A book for all students of Jane Austen, it is equally, as WinifredHusbands wrote in the Modern Language Review, a book for 'all lovers of Jane Austen'.
Spanish Women's Writing 1849-1996 (Women in Context: Women's Writing)
by Catherine DaviesTraces the tradition of Spanish women's writing from the end of the Romantic period until the present day. Professor Davies places the major authors within the changing political, cultural and economic context of women's lives over the past century-and-a-half -- with particular attention to women's accounts of female subjectivity in relation to the Spanish nation-state, government politics, and the women's liberation movement.
Character and Satire in Post War Fiction (Continuum Literary Studies)
by Ian GregsonThis monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known postwar novelists including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter and Will Self, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.
Anna Lombard (Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers)
by Victoria Cross Gail CunninghamAppearing in the final year of Victoria's reign, Anna Lombard captured many preoccupations of the fin-de-siecle period and pushed them beyond the bounds of Victorian acceptability towards the greater freedoms of the twentieth century. This hugely popular novel (thirty editions, six million copies sold) examines male and female sexuality, extending the notion of New Woman feminism and proposing a new masculinity to match it. Its transgressive interracial sexual and social relations are set in a highly eroticized Indian landscape and against the rigidities of Victorian imperialism. Anna Lombard challenges and subverts a wide range of the most fiercely defended ideologies of its time. For modern readers familiar with late Victorian conventions, it retains its power to surprise and shock, and extends our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which Victorian writers reflected and constructed social attitudes. For all readers, then as now, it is mesmerisingly readable. This new edition will extend understanding of women's writing of the period, and introduces a new generation of readers to the work of a once popular and continually engrossing novelist, Victoria Cross (a pen name of Annie Sophie Cory).
Index of English Literary Manuscripts: Volume 3, Part 4, Sterne-Young
by Alexander LindsayThis volume, the third in the series, discusses the works of 11 British 18th-century writers, providing information on the nature of the MS, date, variant title(s), state of completion, provenance and location, date and first form of publication, any scholarly use of the MS, and the existence of any published facsimiles. Information is drawn from material in libraries, record offices and private collections throughout the world. The listing of each author's manuscripts is preceded by an introduction. The book records many hitherto unrecorded manuscripts. The writers considered are: Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, James Thomson, Hester Lynch Thrale, Horace Walpole, Joseph Warton, Thomas Warton the Younger, Isaac Watts, Anne Finch, Mary Wollstonecraft and Edward Young.
Shakespeare in China
by Murray J. LevithShakespeare in China provides English language readers with a comprehensive sense of China's past and on-going encounter with Shakespeare. It offers a detailed history of twentieth-century Sino-Shakespeare from the beginnings to 1949, followed by more recent accounts of the playwright in the People's Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The study pays particular attention to translation, criticism and theatrical productions and highlights Shakespeare's fate during the turbulent political times of modern China. Chapters on Shakespeare and Confucius and The Paradox of Shakespeare in the New China consider the playwright in the context of 'old' and 'new' Chinese ideologies. Bringing together hard to find materials in both English and Chinese, it builds upon and extends past research on its subject.
The Reception of David Hume In Europe (The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe)
by Peter JonesThe intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European 'fortunes'. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which David Hume has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. This is the first collection of essays to consider how and where Hume's works were initially understood throughout Europe. They reflect on how early European responses to Hume relied on available French translations, and concentrated on his Political Discourses and his History, and how later German translations enabled professional philosophers to discuss his more abstract ideas. Also explored is the idea that continental readers were not able to judge the accuracy of the translations they read, nor did many consider the contexts in which Hume was writing: rather, they were intent on using what they read for their own purposes.
The Creators (Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers)
by May Sinclair Lyn PykettMay Sinclair's The Creators is a study of a group of writers and would-be writers and their struggles and/or accommodations withing the literary marketplace. It deals with the trials and tribulations of literary celebrity and with lack of recognition. It also focuses on the doubts and self-divisions of the artist and on his or her battles with conventional gender roles. The novel's subtitle - 'a comedy' - puzzled some of its first readers and reviewers, the TLS to speculate that the comedy must lie in that fact that the creators believe that they are geniuses. Sinclair does not take her characters as seriously as they take themselves, but her social comedy also exposes the limitations of the conventional middle-class world which either exploits or fails to understand them. First serialized in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine between November 1909 and October 1910, The Creators was first published in book form by John Constable in 1910. This edition restored the numerous and extensive cuts that were made to Sinclair's manuscript during the process of the novel's serialization.
Crossing Boundaries: Thinking through Literature
by Julie Scanlon Amy WasteThis eclectic collection interrogates boundaries with reference to nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, performance, music and film from a diverse range of critical and theoretical perspectives. The authors probe the issue of negotiating boundaries in their innovative and imaginative investigations of science in Dickens, Eliot and Pater; narrative in Hawking and Weinberg; Bakhtin and the feminization of translation; lesbian romance by Jeanette Winterson; transitional females in migrant postcolonial fiction; pedagogy in South Africa; materiality and hypertext; the semiotic and money in Jay McInerney; the role of clichT in Beckett; music in Wim Wenders; the 'real' in fiction, theory and performance; creative and academic writing; politics and aesthetics. Original contributions by Terry Eagleton and Sally Shuttleworth support this volume's exciting challenge to established boundaries and help to make it a scintillating and thought-provoking read.
Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives On Eliza Fraser's Shipwreck
by Ian J. McNivenOne of the most famous shipwreck sagas of the 19th century took place on the tropical coast of north-east Australia. In 1836 the Stirling Castle was wrecked off the Queensland coast and many of the crew, together with the captain's wife, Eliza Fraser, were marooned on Fraser Island. Early sensationalized accounts represent Mrs Fraser as an innocent white victim of colonialism and her Aboriginal captors as barbarous savages. These "first contact" narratives of the white woman and her Aboriginal "captors" impacted significantly on England and the politics of Empire at an early stage in Australia's colonial history. The text critically examines the Eliza Fraser episode by bringing together an interdisciplinary team of authors, artists, members of the Fraser Island Aboriginal community and academics in the areas of cultural and women's studies, literature, history, anthropology, archaeology, the visual and creative arts. This book Essays include feminist analyses of the incident, investigations of textual and visual representations of Aboriginal people, and considerations of the role played by Elisa Fraser as creative inspiration for the arts. The text explores the constructions of Empire, colonialism, identity, femininity, savagery, otherness, captivity and survival.
Dreams, Visions and Realities: An anthology of short stories by turn-of-the-century women writers (Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers)
by Stephanie ForwardThis anthology introduces stories written by British and American Women from 1877 to 1910. The collection and the detailed, authoritative, introduction and notes, will enable the twenty-first-century reader to explore the themes and techniques these women developed as the Victorian was superseded by a new, Modernist, sensibility. Authors covered include Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin.
Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe
by Rictor NortonThis is the biography of the Gothic novelist, Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), author of "The Mysteries of Udolpho", the world's first "best seller". The text clarifies Radcliffe's emergence from a Dissenting Unitarian, rather than a conventional Anglican, background. This places Radcliffe within the circle of other women writers nurtured in radical Dissenting backgrounds (such as Wollstonecraft, Hays, Inchbauld and Barbauld). Radcliffe's childhood and family background are documented and the rumours of her madness and reclusiveness investigated leading to an evaluation of the resons for her probable mental breakdown. The text constitutes a "cultural history" of a writing woman, demonstrating her place within radical culture, literary tradition and aesthetic discourse, and examining her role in the rise of the professional woman writer. Her novels are analyzed mainly in the context of her biography and sources.
Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel (Continuum Literary Studies)
by James AnnesleyInterpreting recent American fiction in terms linked to the growing appreciation of culture's place in the globalization debate, this book offers an innovative, critical approach to the study of contemporary literature. Prompted by the contemporary American novel's preoccupation with consumerism and the market, this book considers the implications these texts raise for the analysis of globalization and suggests that they offer unique ways of knowing and understanding contemporary social and economic contexts. Far from simply reflecting existing realities, The Fictions of Globalization reads contemporary writing's focus on consumption and the market as the sign of a productive exchange between the forces of commercial coordination and the enduringly creative and expressive patterns of modern culture.
Moliere: The Theory and Practice of Comedy
by Andrew CalderThe history of ideas provides an important means of understanding and reinterpreting the literature of the past; and in this study Dr. Calder demonstrates the illumination that this informed approach brings to the comedies of MoliFre. In the course of this study, the author outlines a fresh theory of classical comedy which applies to the works of other French writers of the 17th century; and the historical reinterpretations of MoliFre's two most difficult plays -- Le Tartuffe and Dom Juan -- break entirely new ground.Although this is a work which specialists will admire, it is also intended to serve as an introduction to MoliFre and French classical comedy at large and will be of considerable value to younger students and readers of MoliFre in general.
Tales, Tellers and Texts
by Morag Styles Gabrielle Cliff Hodges Mary Jane DrummondOffers analysis of a wide range of narratives - oral, visual and written. The contributors include writers, academics, critics, teachers and a museum educator. The book is designed to appeal to school teachers and those involved in the study of children's literature.