Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the local abbot and then abducted by her feudal superior. Agnes Grantham was a successful businesswoman ambushed and assaulted in a forest whilst on her way to dine with the Master of St Leonard's Hospital. Alice Brathwell was a respectable widow who attracted the attentions of a supposedly aristocratic conman. These are their stories.

On the World and Religious Life "(c. 1381) is the first surviving treatise of Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406), chancellor of the Florentine Republic (1375-1406) and the leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. The work was written for a lawyer who had left secular life to enter the Camaldulensian monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, located in the heart of Florence. The new monk prevailed on Salutati to write a treatise encouraging him to persevere in the religious life. His request led to this wide-ranging reflection on humanity's misuse of God's creation and the need to orient human life in accordance with a proper hierarchy of values. This work is here translated into English for the first time.

For four centuries Twelfth Night has inspired theatre directors and performers: some have found class war; some have seen Malvolio as a tragic hero; some have found a passive Viola and others have found an action woman. Whether a production's emphasis is on gender bending, festivity, or trying to reinvent Shakespeare as Chekhov, the sheer variety of Twelfth Nights on offer over the centuries attests to the play's power as a stimulus to theatrical creativity. The dazzling range of the Twelfth Nights considered here includes the productively wayward as well as the conventionally respectable, productions which play to the contemporary market as well as those that seek to flout tradition. This indispensable stage history covers changing fashions in the fortunes of Twelfth Night, and includes a survey of a wide variety of theatrical interpretations of the play in the English-speaking world.

George Orwell's famous satire of the Soviet Union, in which "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust advances the idea that the Holocaust undermined confidence in basic beliefs about human rights and shows steps of salvage and retrieval that need to be taken if ethics is to be a significant presence in a world still besieged by genocide and atrocity.

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and queer theory to explore the unstable relationship between heterosexual masculine identity and cultural representation, this book examines the ways straight men are queered and abjected in literature, theory, and film.

The north African roots of Jacques Derrida - he was born in Algeria, and lived there until he was nearly twenty - have yet to receive due consideration. Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East investigates the iconic theorist s claim to "Black, Arab, and Jewish" identity, demonstrating for the first time his significance for Africa and the Middle East while remaining mindful of the conflict between these Jewish and Arab heritages. Even as it criticizes Derrida s analyses of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it shows why Derrida s idiosyncratic politics should not deter his critics. Further, this study reveals similarities between deconstruction and ancient Egypto-African ways of thinking about language, and posits a new critical lineage - one with origins outside the bounds of Greco-Roman thought.

This volume focuses on the publisher's series as a cultural formation - a material artifact and component of cultural hierarchies. Contributors engage with archival research, cultural theory, literary and bibliometric analysis (amongst a range of other approaches) to contextualize the publisher's series in terms of its cultural and economic work.

This is one of the first books to offer a rigorous analysis of the enormous changes in the musical theatre during the 1980s and 90s. In addition, it focuses on the contribution of well-known, serious theatre directors to the mainstream Musical Theatre and it is the first book to offer a dual Anglo-American perspective on this subject.

This book draws on a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, and feminist theory, to consider the ways that strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations offer insight into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.

The sixteenth century was an age of politically powerful women. Queens, acting in their own right, and female regents, acting on behalf of their male relatives, governed much of Western Europe. Yet even as women ruled - and ruled effectively - their right to do so was hotly contested. Men s voices have long dominated this debate, but the recovery of texts by women now allows their voices, long silenced, to be heard once again. Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe is a study of texts and textual production in the construction of gender, society, and politics in the early modern period. Jansen explores the "gynecocracy" debate and the larger humanist response to the challenge posed by female sovereignty.

As it traces the textual history of the works of authors like Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams, this book analyses Republican resistance to disciplinary structures, demonstrating the ways in which prisoners appropriate space through discursive strategies.

Rob White reconsiders Freud's controversial theory of inherited memory, referring it both to Anglo-American commentary and post-structuralist work on psychoanalysis. White proposes that this theory is evidence of an underlying haunted retrospection in Freudian theorizing, which time and again discovers that meaning has been lost.

This is a landmark anthology of international feminist theatre research. A three-part structure orientates readers through Cartographies of feminist critical navigations of the global arena; the staging of feminist Interventions in a range of international contexts; and Manifestos for today's feminist practitioners, activists and academics.

When human beings do horrifying things, are they evil? By exploring such popular literature as "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Dante's "Inferno," "The Turn of the Screw," and "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Koehn illustrates that the roots of human violence are not true evil but a symptom of our failure to really know who we are. It is this lack of understanding of our selves that can lead humans to perform horrifying deeds, rather than "evil" itself. This is a deep look into human nature, its beauty and its failings. "The Nature of Evi"l offers an insightful and engaging exploration at a time when we are all struggling to understand the roots of violence and suffering.

"I am a sick man . . .  I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out.  And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing:  it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov

After forty years of feminism, views of the traditional Jewish family, religion, and gender roles have changed. In the process a new literature has been created, new paradigms born, and many Jewish women writers have been reevaluated, reclaimed, and renamed, with their Jewish heritage often overlooked or misinterpreted." Modern Jewish Women Writers in America "includes groundbreaking essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

This book examines literature by African, Native, and Jewish American novelists at the beginning of the twentieth century, a period of radical dislocation from homelands for these three ethnic groups as well as the period when such voices established themselves as central figures in the American literary canon.

This is a literary and anthropological analysis of historical narratives that illuminate regional notions of cosmological kingship, cosmopolitan notions of Islamic law and mysticism, and global notions of the modern bureaucratic state. These notions have coexisted in Southeast Asia since the Sixteenth century and influence politics to this day.

While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period's social, political and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms and audiences.

The author demonstrates the significant role that some of the Edwardian philosophers played in the formation of Russell's work on the problem of the external world done at the tail-end of a controversy which raged between about 1900-1915.

Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of topics relating Guattari's works to the current political conjuncture.

This book looks at modes of performance and forms of theatre in Nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. On subjects as varied as the vogue for fairy plays to the representation of economics to the work of a parliamentary committee in regulating theatres, the authors redefine what theatre and performance in the Nineteenth century might be.

This book discusses the visual and verbal city sketches which proliferated during the 'journalistic revolution' of the 1830s and 1840s. It shows how sketches transformed models of visual and printed media and of life science into a unique kind of sociology, presenting a self-critique of the middle class on the brink of industrial modernity.

Cruelty, corruption, sensuality, desperation and death: the sensationalism and morbid pessimism that characterized French decadence in the late nineteenth century quickly attracted converts throughout Europe, including Russia. Here are the horrifying, dramatic and erotic short stories and poetry, most of which have never before been translated into English, by the most decadent Russian writers. These explore the depths of the unconscious, as their characters experience sadism, masochism, rape, murder, suicide, and, in a story by Gippius, even passionate love for the dead. * describes the spread of madnessand the collapse of advanced, but decadent, civilizations that indulge in refined pleasures * Andreyev portrays the collapse of all moral values on a personal level in his famous story The Abyss Femmes fatales lure men to destruction, but the most seductive enchantress in the anthology is death itself.