What was a book in early modern England? By combining book history, bibliography and literary criticism, Material Texts in Early Modern England explores how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books were stranger, richer things than scholars have imagined. Adam Smyth examines important aspects of bibliographical culture which have been under-examined by critics: the cutting up of books as a form of careful reading; book destruction and its relation to canon formation; the prevalence of printed errors and the literary richness of mistakes; and the recycling of older texts in the bodies of new books, as printed waste. How did authors, including Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Nashe and Cavendish, respond to this sense of the book as patched, transient, flawed, and palimpsestic? Material Texts in Early Modern England recovers these traits and practices, and so crucially revises our sense of what a book was, and what a book might be.

In the English-speaking world, the Catholic Literary Revival is typically associated with the work of G. K. Chesterton/Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. But in fact the Revival's most numerous members were women. While some of these women remain well known?Muriel Spark, Antonia White, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day?many have been almost entirely forgotten. They include: Enid Dinnis, Anna Hanson Dorsey, Alice Thomas Ellis, Eleanor Farjeon, Rumer Godden, Caroline Gordon, Clotilde Graves, Caryll Houselander, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Jane Lane, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Alice Meynell, Kathleen Raine, Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, Edith Sitwell, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Josephine Ward, and Maisie Ward. There are various reasons why each of these writers fell out of print: changes in the commercial publishing world after World War II, changes within the Church itself and in the English-speaking universities that redefined the literary canon in the last decades of the 20th century. Yet it remains puzzling that a body of writing so creative, so attuned to its historical moment, and so unique in its perspective on the human condition, should have fallen into obscurity for so long. The Catholic Women Writers series brings together the English-language prose works of Catholic women from the 19th and 20th centuries; work that is of interest to a broad range of readers. Each volume is printed with an accessible but scholarly introduction by theologians and literary specialists. The first volume in the series is Caryll Houselander's The Dry Wood. Houselander is known primarily for her spiritual writings but she also wrote one novel, set in a post-war London Docklands parish. There a motley group of lost souls are mourning the death of their saintly priest and hoping for the miraculous healing of a vulnerable child whose gentleness in the face of suffering brings conversion to them all in surprising and unexpected ways. The Dry Wood offers a vital contribution to the modern literary canon and a profound meditation on the purpose of human suffering.

Offering an innovative perspective on early modern debates concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Wiradjuri woman, Anita Heiss, is arguably one of the first Aboriginal Australian authors of popular fiction. A focus on the political characterises her chick lit; and her identity as an author is both supplemented and complemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual. Heiss has discussed genre as a means of targeting audiences that may be less engaged with Indigenous affairs, and positions her novels as educative but not didactic. Her readership is constituted by committed readers of romance and chick lit as well as politically engaged readers that are attracted to Heiss' dual authorial persona; and, both groups bring radically distinct expectations to bear on these texts. Through analysis of online reviews and surveys conducted with users of the book reviewing website Goodreads, I complicate the understanding of genre as a cogent interpretative frame, and deploy this discussion to explore the social significance of Heiss' literature.

In modern-day Hong Kong, major constitutional controversies have caused people to demonstrate on the streets, immigrate to other countries, occupy major thoroughfares, and even engage in violence. These controversies have such great resonance because they put pressure on a cultural identity made possible by, and inseparable from, the 'One Country, Two Systems' framework. Hong Kong is also a city synonymous with film, ranging from commercial gangster movies to the art cinema of Wong Kar-wai. This book argues that while the importance of constitutional controversies for the process of self-formation may not be readily discernible in court judgments and legislative enactments, it is registered in the diverse modes of expression found in Hong Kong cinema. It contends that film gives form to the ways in which Hong Kong identity is articulated, placed under stress, bolstered, and transformed in light of disputes about the nature and meaning of the city's constitutional documents.

Positive thinking is good for you. You can become healthy, wealthy, and influential by using the power of your mind to attract what you desire. These kooky but commonplace ideas stem from a nineteenth-century new religious movement known as 'mind cure' or New Thought. Related to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, New Thought was once a popular religious movement with hundreds of thousands of followers, and has since migrated into secular contexts such as contemporary psychotherapy, corporate culture, and entertainment. New Thought also pervades nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children's literature, including classics such as The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, and A Little Princess. In this first book-length treatment of New Thought in Anglophone fiction, Anne Stiles explains how children's literature encouraged readers to accept New Thought ideas - especially psychological concepts such as the inner child - thereby ensuring the movement's survival into the present day.

Clement of Alexandria's Stromateis were celebrated in antiquity but modern readers have often skirted them as a messy jumble of notes. When scholarship on Greco-Roman miscellanies took off in the 1990s, Clement was left out as 'different' because he was Christian. This book interrogates the notion of Clement's 'Christian difference' by comparing his work with classic Roman miscellanies, especially those by Plutarch, Pliny, Gellius, and Athenaeus. The comparison opens up fuller insight into the literary and theological character of Clement's own oeuvre. Clement's Stromateis are contextualised within his larger literary project in Christian formation, which began with the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus and was completed by the Hypotyposeis. Together, this stepped sequence of works structured readers' reorientation, purification, and deepening prayerful 'converse' with God. Clement shaped his miscellanies as an instrument for encountering the hidden God in a hidden way, while marvelling at the variegated beauty of divine work refracted through the variegated beauty of his own textuality.

"Ancient Greek dance" traditionally evokes images of stately choruses or lively Dionysiac revels - communal acts of performance. This is the first book to look beyond the chorus to the diverse and complex representation of solo dancers in Archaic and Classical Greek literature. It argues that dancing alone signifies transgression and vulnerability in the Greek cultural imagination, as isolation from the chorus marks the separation of the individual from a range of communal social structures. It also demonstrates that the solo dancer is a powerful figure for literary exploration and experimentation, highlighting the importance of the singular dancing body in the articulation of poetic, narrative, and generic interests across Greek literature. Taking a comparative approach and engaging with current work in dance and performance studies, this book reveals the profound literary and cultural importance of the unruly solo dancer in the ancient Greek world.

This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of the crowd engages with the transformation of popular subjectivity from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with intersectional conditions of oppression and precarity. Modernist works, many of which were composed during the ascendancy of fascism and other populist politics claiming to be based on the action of the crowd, frequently stage the crowd as a primal scene for violence; at the same time, they posit a counterforce in more agile collective gatherings which clarify the changing relations in literary modernity between subjects and power.

Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates - contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.

During the period of decolonisation in Africa, the CIA covertly subsidised a number of African authors, editors and publishers as part of its anti-communist propaganda strategy. Managed by two front organisations, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the Farfield Foundation, its Africa programme stretched across the continent. This Element unravels the hidden networks and associations underpinning African literary publishing in the 1960s; it evaluates the success of the CIA in secretly infiltrating and influencing African literary magazines and publishing firms, and examines the extent to which new circuits of cultural and literary power emerged. Based on new archival evidence relating to the Transcription Centre, The Classic and The New African, it includes case studies of Wole Soyinka, Nat Nakasa and Bessie Head, which assess how the authors' careers were affected by these transnational networks and also reveal how they challenged, subverted, and resisted external influence and control.

While literary modernism is often associated with Euro-American metropolises such as London, Paris or New York, this book considers the place of the colonial city in modernist fiction. From the streets of Dublin to the shop-houses of Singapore, and from the botanical gardens of Bombay to the suburbs of Suva, the monumental landscapes of British colonial cities aimed to reinforce empire's universalising claims, yet these spaces also contradicted and resisted the impositions of an idealised English culture. Inspired by the uneven landscapes of the urban British empire, a group of twentieth-century writers transformed the visual incongruities and anachronisms on display in the city streets into sources of critique and formal innovation. Showing how these writers responded to empire's metrocolonial complexities and built legacies, Modernism in the Metrocolony traces an alternative, peripheral history of the modernist city.

In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

Collects more than sixty foundational documents from student protest from the frontlines of revolution Few people know that student protest emerged in Latin America decades before the infamous student movements of Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s. Even fewer people know that Central American university students authored colonial agendas and anti-colonial critiques. In fact, Central American students were key actors in shaping ideas of nation, empire, and global exchange. Bridging a half-century of student protest from 1929 to 1983, this source reader contains more than sixty texts from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, including editorials, speeches, manifestos, letters, and pamphlets. Available for the first time in English, these rich texts help scholars and popular audiences alike to rethink their preconceptions of student protest and revolution. The texts also illuminate key issues confronting social movements today: global capitalism, dispossession, privatization, development, and state violence. Key Features Makes available for the first time to English-language readers a diverse archive of more than sixty foundational documents and ephemera accompanied by an introduction, section introductions and further reading Expands the geographic scope of anti-colonial movement scholarship by presenting anti-colonial thought in the most contentious decades of the 20th century from a region peripheral even within anti-colonial and postcolonial studies Advances anti-colonial and postcolonial studies by taking urban students as critical actors and so recasting thematics of the peasantry, the rural/urban divide, and religion Suggests a new social movement chronology beyond the so-called "Global 1968," or the common notion that student movements peaked in May 1968 in Paris, New York City, Berkeley, and Mexico City

Shakespeare's tragic characters have often been seen as forerunners of modern personhood. It has been assumed that Shakespeare was able to invent such lifelike figures in part because of his freedom from the restrictions of classical form. Curtis Perry instead argues that characters such as Hamlet and King Lear have seemed modern to us in part because they are so robustly connected to the tradition of Senecan tragedy. Resituating Shakespearean tragedy in this way - as backward looking as well as forward looking - makes it possible to recover a crucial political dimension. Shakespeare saw Seneca as a representative voice from post-republican Rome: in plays such as Coriolanus and Othello he uses Senecan modes of characterization to explore questions of identity in relation to failures of republican community. This study has important implications for the way we understand character, community, and alterity in early modern drama.

An investigation of interwar African American critiques of racism and colonialism This volume re-publishes key texts produced by African American anti-colonial activists between 1917-1937. Some of these texts remain well-known, but many have disappeared from view and are once again re-inserted in their original polemical contexts. The context for these writings is the turbulent politics of 'race' in the US in the interwar years and the emergence of a particular 'race'/class politics. The framing of the material in the book stresses those texts which are specifically concerned with finding connections between the plight of African Americans and those who suffer colonial oppression in order to emphasise the dialectical nature of anti-colonial struggle. The intention of many of these writers was to create a space for interracial class politics. Despite, or because of, the complexities of negotiating 'race', class and colonialism, this material gives us access to an historically specific attempt to create a 'race'/class politics attuned to the challenges of confronting racism of the USA and beyond. Key Features Introduces a powerful, but neglected, tradition of African American anti-colonial writing Locates African American anti-colonial writing of the interwar years in both a US and global context Stresses the dialectical nature of the relationship between anti-colonial politics and political activism Reflects upon the relevance of interwar African American anti-colonial writings to contemporary debates about racism and neo-colonialism Emphasises the relationship between African American politics and the Left during this period

The modernist bookshop, best exemplified by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. and Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, has received scant attention outside these more prominent examples. This writing will review how bookshops like David Archer's on Parton Street (London) in the 1930s were sites of distribution, publication, and networking. Parton Street, which also housed Lawrence & Wishart publishers and a briefly vibrant literary scene, will be approached from several contexts as a way of situating the modernist bookshop within both the book trade and the literary communities which it interacted with and made possible.

This book is a lively, passionate defence of contemporary work in the humanities, and, beyond that, of the university system that makes such work possible. The book's stark accounts of academic labour, and its proposals for reform of the tenure system, are novel, controversial, timely, and very necessary.

Acclaimed author Matt Ridley's thrilling follow-up to his bestseller Genome. Armed with the extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, Ridley turns his attention to the nature versus nurture debate to bring the first popular account of the roots of human behaviour. What makes us who we are?In February 2001 it was announced that the genome contains not 100,000 genes as originally expected but only 30,000. This startling revision led some scientists to conclude that there are simply not enough human genes to account for all the different ways people behave: we must be made by nurture, not nature. Matt Ridley argues that the emerging truth is far more interesting than this myth. Nurture depends on genes, too, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory. after the discovery of the double helix of DNA, Nature via Nurture chronicles a new revolution in our understanding of genes. Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. Nature via Nurture is an enthralling, up-to-the-minute account of how genes build brains to absorb experience.

The dream of political satire - to fearlessly speak truth to power - is not matched by its actual effects. This study explores the role of satirical communication in licensing public expression of harsh emotions defined in neuroscience as the CAD (contempt, anger, disgust) triad. The mobilisation of these emotions is a fundamental distinction between satirical and comic laughter. Phiddian pursues this argument particularly through an account of Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries. They played a crucial role in the early eighteenth century to make space in the public sphere for intemperate dissent, an essential condition of free political expression.

Ranging across literature, theater, history, and the visual arts, this collection of essays by leading scholars in the field explores the range of places where British Romantic-period sociability transpired. The book considers how sociability was shaped by place, by the rooms, buildings, landscapes and seascapes where people gathered to converse, to eat and drink, to work and to find entertainment. At the same time, it is clear that sociability shaped place, both in the deliberate construction and configuration of venues for people to gather, and in the way such gatherings transformed how place was experienced and understood. The essays highlight literary and aesthetic experience but also range through popular entertainment and ordinary forms of labor and leisure.

A priest receives an unexpected visitor from his past. A triumphant celebration ends in murder. A doctor tells of an unrequited love that only ended with death. Maupassant's direct treatment of sex and sexuality, and his insistence that the artist's primary duty was faithfulness to his own perceptions, made his work a challenge to many of his nineteenth-century English readers, but in Henry James's view, his vision was, 'altogether of this life'. His stories may have mystified contemporary moralists, but he was championed by writers who admired his resistance to self-censorship and applauded the economy of his style. In this new selection of his best stories, the sensitive and faithful translations of Ada Galsworthy and Elsie Martindale Hueffer show why writers like Conrad (whose preface is included) and Ford Madox Ford revered Maupassant's work.