This book is a critical introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, but it also advances an argument about the novel in the context of Tolkien's larger literary and philosophical project. Notwithstanding its canonical place in the fantasy genre, The Hobbit is ultimately a historical novel. It does not refer directly to any "real" historical events, but it both enacts and conceptualizes history in a way that makes it real. Drawing on Marxist literary criticism and narrative theory, this book examines the form and content of Tolkien's work, demonstrating how the heroic romance is simultaneously employed and subverted by Tolkien in his tale of an unlikely hero, "quite a little fellow in a wide world," who nonetheless makes history. First-time readers of Tolkien, as well as established scholars and fans, will enjoy this engaging and accessible study of The Hobbit.

Louise de la Balliere is the middle section of The Vicomte de Bragelonne or, Ten Years After. Against a tender love story, Dumas continues the suspense which began with The Vicomte de Bragelonne and will end with The Man in the Iron Mask. It is early summer, 1661, and the royal court of France is in turmoil. Can it be true that the King is in love with the Duchess d'Orleans? Or has his eye been caught by the sweet and gentle Louise de la Valliere? No one is more anxious to know the answer than Raoul, son of Athos, who loves Louise more than life itself. Behind the scenes, dark intrigues are afoot. Louis XIV is intent on making himself absolute master of France. Imminent crisis shakes the now aging Musketeers and d'Artagnan out of their complacent retirement, but is the cause just? This new edition of the classic English translation of 1857 is richly annotated and sets Dumas's invigorating tale in its historical and cultural context. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In the company of wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves as portrayed in different media and genres. We begin with the wolf itself as it has been interpreted as a cultural symbol and how it figures in contemporary debates about wilderness and nature. Alongside this, we consider eighteenth-century debates about wild children - often thought to have been raised by wolves and other animals - and their role in key questions about the origins of language and society. The collection continues with essays on werewolves and other shapeshifters as depicted in folk tales, literature, film and TV, concluding with the transition from animal to human in contemporary art, poetry and fashion. -- .

From Loki to Thor, Ragnarok to Beowulf A gripping and truly mesmerising delve into the Norse legends From bestselling books to blockbusting Hollywood movies, the myths of the Scandinavian gods and heroes are part of the modern day landscape. For over a millennium before the arrival of Christianity, the legends permeated everyday life in Iceland and the northern reaches of Europe. Since that time, they have been perpetuated in literature and the arts in forms as diverse as Tolkien and Wagner, graphic novels to the world of Marvel. This book covers the entire cast of supernatural beings, from gods to trolls, heroes to monsters, and deals with the social and historical background to the myths, topics such as burial rites, sacrificial practices and runes.

Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life includes new research on the best-known of the posthumous publications: A Moveable Feast, 1964 (and the 2009 A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition); Islands in the Stream, 1970; and The Garden of Eden, 1986. Linda Wagner-Martin provides background and intertextual readings-particularly of the way Hemingway's unpublished stories ("Phillip Haines was a writer") and his fiction from Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing interface with the memoir. The revised edition also highlights and provides background on Hemingway's treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, his life in Paris in the 1920s, and his connection to the poetry scene there-putting this in conversation with Mary Hemingway's edits of A Moveable Feast. The new chapters also illuminate the reception of Islands in the Stream and a new way of understanding the role of gender and androgyny in The Garden of Eden. On a whole, the book draws from extensive archival research, particularly correspondence of all four of Hemingway's wives.

RICHARD AND JUDY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Gripping, emotional, utterly engrossing' Lisa Ballantyne 'Stunning writing and wonderful nuanced characterisation. I was hooked' Rosamund Lupton For fans of Maggie O'Farrell and Celeste Ng, How It Ends is a sweeping and turbulent drama about the anxieties of post-war Britain, where one strong and inspirational young woman looks to find her place, no matter the cost... 1957: Within a year of arriving at an American airbase in Suffolk, the loving, law-abiding Delaney family is destroyed. Did they know something they weren't allowed to know? Did they find something they weren't supposed to find? Only one girl has the courage to question what really went on behind closed doors . . . Hedy's journey to the truth leads her to read a manuscript that her talented twin brother had started months before he died, a story inspired by an experience in the forest surrounding the airbase perimeter. Only through deciding to finish what her brother started does Hedy begin to piece together what happened to her family. But would she have continued if she'd known then what she knows now? Sometimes, it's safer not to finish what you've started... Praise for Saskia Sarginson: 'An intense and brooding read, with a brilliantly claustrophobic sense of place' Sunday Mirror on How it Ends 'An engrossing read with endearing characters thrust into traumatic circumstances. It stayed with me long after the last page' Lisa Ballantyne on How It Ends 'Outstandingly good. Part thriller, part love story, I guarantee you will not be able to put it down' Sun on The Twins 'Atmospheric, readable, beautifully evoked' Sunday Mirror on Without You 'Stunning in its insight and beautifully written' Judy Finnigan on The Twins 'This enthralling read will keep you up long into the night' Ruth Ware on The Other Me 'Inspirational and compelling' Candis Review on How it Ends 'A stunning writer with deep insight into people, their thoughts and behaviour' NZ Women's Weekly

When Ovid, already renowned for his love poetry, the Metamorphoses and other works, was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he continued to write. After five books of Tristia, he composed a collection of verse letters, the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he appeals to his friends and supporters in Rome, lamenting his lot and begging for their help in mitigating it. In these epistolary elegies his inventiveness flourishes no less than before and his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging as ever, although in a minor key. This commentary on Book I assists intermediate and advanced students in understanding Ovid's language and style, while guiding them in the appreciation of his poetic art. The introduction examines the literary background of the Epistulae ex Ponto, their relation to Ovid's earlier works, and their special interest and appeal to readers of Augustan poetry.

When Ovid, already renowned for his love poetry, the Metamorphoses and other works, was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he continued to write. After five books of Tristia, he composed a collection of verse letters, the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he appeals to his friends and supporters in Rome, lamenting his lot and begging for their help in mitigating it. In these epistolary elegies his inventiveness flourishes no less than before and his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging as ever, although in a minor key. This commentary on Book I assists intermediate and advanced students in understanding Ovid's language and style, while guiding them in the appreciation of his poetic art. The introduction examines the literary background of the Epistulae ex Ponto, their relation to Ovid's earlier works, and their special interest and appeal to readers of Augustan poetry.

This textbook introduces readers to the academic scholarship on the history of childhood and youth in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial eras. In a series of seven chapters, it addresses key themes in the historical scholarship, arguing that age serves as a useful category for historical analysis in African history. Just as race, class, and gender can be used to understand how African societies have been structured over time, so too age is a powerful tool for thinking about how power, youth, and seniority intersect and change over time. This is, then, a work of synthesis rather than of new research based on primary sources. This book will therefore introduce mainstream scholars of the history of childhood and youth to the literature on Africa, and scholars of youth in Africa to debates within the wider field of the history of children and youth.

'the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community and individualism. Eliot follows the fortunes of the town's central characters as they find, lose, and rediscover ideals and vocations in the world. Through its psychologically rich portraits, the novel contains some of the great characters of literature, including the idealistic but naive Dorothea Brooke, beautiful and egotistical Rosamund Vincy, the dry scholar Edward Casaubon, the wise and grounded Mary Garth, and the brilliant but proud Dr Lydgate. In its whole view of a society, the novel offers enduring insight into the pains and pleasures of life with others, and explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life:. art, religion, science, politics, self, society, and, above all, human relationships. This edition uses the definitive Clarendon text.

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.

The first extended Lacanian reading of J. L. Austin's ordinary language philosophy, this book examines how it has been received in the continental tradition by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciere and Oswald Ducrot. This is a tradition that neglects Austin's general speech act theory on behalf of his special theory of the performative, whilst bringing a new attention to the literary and the aesthetic. The book charts each of these theoretical interactions with a Lacanian reading of the thinker through a case study. Austin, Derrida and Butler are respectively read with a Hollywood blockbuster, a Shakespearean bestseller and a globally influential May '68 poster - texts preoccupied with the problem of subjectivity in early, high and postmodernity. Hence Austin's constatives (nonperformative statements) are explored with Dead Poets Society; Derridean naming with Romeo and Juliet; and Butlerian aesthetic re-enactment with We Are all German Jews. Finally, Ranciere and Ducrot enable a return to Austin beyond his continental reception. Austin is valorised with a theory as attractive, and as irreducible, to the continental tradition as his own thought, namely Jacques Lacan's theory of the signifier. Drawing together some of the giants of language theory, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist thought, Habjan offers a new materialist reading of the 'ordinary' status of literary language and a vital contribution to current debates within literary studies and contemporary philosophy.

The Dedalus Press series of budget pamphlets presents works by major voices in world poetry. Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009) was one of Denmark's best-known poets and was widely celebrated throughout Europe and the United States. She wrote several volumes of poetry as well as novels, plays, children's books and essays, winning many major European prizes and awards, including the prestigious Nordic Prize in 1994. Butterfly Valley is a tour de force, exploring the major themes of life, love, death and art. The form is simple yet complex, a sequence of fifteen sonnets building to a final sonnet of extraordinary power composed of lines taken from the preceding fourteen sonnets in the sequence. Life, love, art, all are transient - like the butterfly - yet beautiful, even in their ephemerality. The translator Susanna Nied is a former insructor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University in California. Her translation of Inger Christensen's alphabet won the 1982 ASF/PEN Translation Prize.

"Turn the Pulpit Loose" features the lives and words of eighteen women evangelists including Sojourner Truth and Evangeline Booth, and lesser-known figures such as Jarena Lee (an African Methodist from the early 1800s) and Uldine Utley (a child evangelist in the early 1900s) who helped to shape American religious life from the nation's infancy to the present. Highlighting substantial primary sources - sermons, articles, diaries, letters, speeches, and autobiographies - Priscilla Pope-Levison weaves together fascinating narratives of each woman's life: her conversion and calling to preach, her primary evangelistic method, and her reflections about women in general. This anthology, complete with photographs of each evangelist, is an indispensable resource for a wide range of academic fields, including religion, history, women's studies, and literature.

How did a single genre of text have the power to standardise the English language across time and region, rival the Bible in notions of authority, and challenge our understanding of objectivity, prescription, and description? Since the first monolingual dictionary appeared in 1604, the genre has sparked evolution, innovation, devotion, plagiarism, and controversy. This comprehensive volume presents an overview of essential issues pertaining to dictionary style and content and a fresh narrative of the development of English dictionaries throughout the centuries. Essays on the regional and global nature of English lexicography (dictionary making) explore its power in standardising varieties of English and defining nations seeking independence from the British Empire: from Canada to the Caribbean. Leading scholars and lexicographers historically contextualise an array of dictionaries and pose urgent theoretical and methodological questions relating to their role as tools of standardisation, prestige, power, education, literacy, and national identity.

Tracing representations of the Rushdie affair from 1989 to 2009, this study establishes a genealogy of how British Muslims appeared on the public scene and how an imaginary and politics of this subject position developed.

The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain of religious mystics and believers. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion. Through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period, Lewis identifies the unique ways that literature addressed the changing spiritual situation of the early twentieth century. He challenges accounts that assume secularisation as the main narrative for understanding twentieth-century literature. Lewis explores the experiments that modernists undertook in order to invoke the sacred without directly naming it, resulting in a compelling study for readers of twentieth-century modernist literature.

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.

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and is the text that philosophers look to first when attempting to define Kierkegaard's own philosophy. Familiar Kierkegaardian themes are introduced in the work, including truth as subjectivity, indirect communication, the leap, and the impossibility of forming a philosophical system for human existence. The Postscript sums up the aims of the preceding pseudonymous works and opens the way to the next part of Kierkegaard's increasingly tempestuous life: it can thus be seen as a cornerstone of his philosophical thought. This volume offers the work in a new and accessible translation by Alastair Hannay, together with an introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical contexts.

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and is the text that philosophers look to first when attempting to define Kierkegaard's own philosophy. Familiar Kierkegaardian themes are introduced in the work, including truth as subjectivity, indirect communication, the leap, and the impossibility of forming a philosophical system for human existence. The Postscript sums up the aims of the preceding pseudonymous works and opens the way to the next part of Kierkegaard's increasingly tempestuous life: it can thus be seen as a cornerstone of his philosophical thought. This volume offers the work in a new and accessible translation by Alastair Hannay, together with an introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical contexts.