The book reveals how the fantastic is used in modern theatre as a manipulative device to encode the unspeakable and control audience response, challenging conventional readings of all authors who use the fantastic.

Contemporary cultural studies have marginalized "agency," namely the power of people to shape social life. Here, Stephen Tumino offers a new materialist challenge to these tendencies and articulates an internationalist cultural theory that puts global agency in the forefront of cultural analysis.

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as 'fictions of gender', drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their 'raw material', the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliche, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Can comics be documentary, and can documentary take the form of, and thus be, comics? Examining comics as documentary, this book challenges the persistent assumption that ties documentary to recording technologies, and instead engages an understanding of the category in terms of narrative, performativity and witnessing. Through a cluster of early twenty-first century comics, Nina Mickwitz argues that these comics share a documentary ambition to visually narrate and represent aspects and events of the real world.

Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The contributors to this collection explore literary urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents and numerous cities.

Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, this book pursues what can be gained through a comparative approach to reading and readerships.

Moving across the boundaries of mainstream and experimental circuits, from the affective pleasures of commercially successful shows such as Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia! to the feminist possibilities of new burlesque and stand-up, this book offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance.

Gentlemen Callers provides a fascinating look at America's greatest Twentieth-century playwright and perhaps the most-performed, even today. Michael Paller looks at Tennessee Williams's plays from the 1940s through the 1960s against the backdrop of the playwright's life story, providing fresh details. Through this lens Paller examines the evolution of Mid-Twentieth-century America's acknowledgment and acceptance of homosexuality. From the early Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and one-act Auto-da-Fe , through The Two-Character Play and Something Cloudy, Something Clear , Paller's book investigates how Williams's earliest critics marginalized or ignored his gay characters and why, beginning in the 1970s, many gay liberationists reviled them. Lively, blunt, and provocative, this book will appeal to anyone who loves Williams, Broadway, and the theater.

Using the concept of otherness as an entry point into a discussion of poetry, Jonathan Hart's study explores the role of history and theory in relation to literature and culture. Chapters range from trauma in Shakespeare to Bartolome de Las Casas' representation of the Americas to the trench poets to voices from the Holocaust.

"My greatest thought in living is  Heathcliff. If all else perished, and he remained, I should  still continue to be... Nelly, I am  Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as  a pleasure... but as my own being."  Wuthering Heights is the only novel of  Emily Bronte, who died a year after its  publication, at the age of thirty. A brooding Yorkshire tale  of a love that is stronger than death, it is also  a fierce vision of metaphysical passion, in which  heaven and hell, nature and society, are  powerfully juxtaposed. Unique, mystical, with a timeless  appeal, it has become a classic of English  literature.

Hazlitt the Dissenter is unique in providing the first book-length account of Hazlitt's early life as a dissenter. As the first multi-disciplinary account of Hazlitt's early literary career, it provides a new insight into the literary, intellectual, political and religious culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Peter, Wendy, Captain Hook, the lost boys, and Tinker Bell have filled the hearts of children ever since Barrie's play first opened in London in 1904 and became an immediate sensation. Now this funny, haunting modern myth is presented with Bedford's wonderful illustrations, which first appeared in the author's own day, have long been out of print, and have never been equaled.


From the Hardcover edition.

Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores nineteenth-century Italian sexualities from a variety of viewpoints, illuminating in particular personal and political relationships, same-sex desires, gender roles that defy societal norms, sexual behaviours of different classes and transnational encounters.