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.

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.

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.

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.

Through a discussion of diverse art and media such as apocalyptic thrillers, rap, and television, Swirski debunks the American political system, sieving out fact from a sea of bipartisan untruths. Engaging with close analysis and multiple case studies, this book forges a more accurate picture of contemporary American culture and of America itself.

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.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

A lively discussion of costume dramas to women's films, Shelley Cobb investigates the practice of adaptation in contemporary films made by women. The figure of the woman author comes to the fore as a key site for the representation of women's agency and the authority of the woman filmmaker.

What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontes to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.

Art and literature during the European fin-de-siecle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.

Catholic or Protestant, recusant or godly rebel, early modern women reinvented their spiritual and gendered spaces during the reformations in religion in England during the sixteenth century and beyond. These essays explore the ways in which some Englishwomen struggled to erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identities.

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.

Using each chapter to juxtapose works by one female and one male Spanish writer, Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature: 1789-1920 explores the concept of Spanish modernity. Issues explored include the changing roles of women, the male hysteric, and the mother and Don Juan figure.

Analyzing the renowned Saint Birgitta of Sweden from the perspectives of power, authority, and gender, this probing study investigates how Birgitta went about establishing her influence during the first ten years of her career as a living saint, in 1340-1349.

Nineteenth-century readers had an appetite for books so big they seemed to contain the whole world: immense novels, series of novels, encyclopaedias. Especially in Eurasia and North America, especially among the middle and upper classes, people had the space, time, and energy for very long books. More than other multi-volume nineteenth-century collections, the dictionaries, or their descendants of the same name, remain with us in the twenty-first century. Online or on paper, people still consult Oxford for British English, Webster for American, Grimm for German, Littre for French, Dahl for Russian. Even in spaces whose literary languages already had long philological and lexicographic traditions-Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin-the burgeoning imperialisms and nationalisms of the nineteenth century generated new dictionaries. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Newly automated technologies and systems of communication expanded the international reach of dictionaries, while rising literacy rates, book consumption, and advertising led to their unprecedented popularization. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. In this volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars investigate these lexicographers asking how the world within which they lived supported their projects? What did language itself mean for them? What goals did they try to accomplish in their dictionaries?

Examining a wide range of source material including popular culture, literature, photography, television, and visual art, this collection of essays sheds light on the misrepresentations of Latina/os in the mass media.

Demonstrating that the supposed drawbacks of the humanities are in fact their source of practical value, Jay explores current debates about the role of the humanities in higher education, puts them in historical context, and offers humanists and their supporters concrete ways to explain the practical value of a contemporary humanities education.

Examining Malory's political language, this study offers a revisionary view of Arthur's kingship in the Morte Darthur and the role of the Round Table fellowship. Considering a range of historical and political sources, Lexton suggests that Malory used a specific lexicon to engage with contemporary problems of kingship and rule.