This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other jurisdictions.

After the Human provides a comprehensive overview of how a range of philosophical, ethical, and political ideas under the framework of posthumanism have transformed humanities scholarship today. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars and perspectives, it puts into dialogue the major influences from philosophy, literary study, anthropology, and science studies that set the stage for a range of new questions to be asked about the relationship of the human to other life. The book's central argument is that posthumanism's challenge to and disruption of traditional humanist knowledge is so significant as to presage a sea-change from the humanities into the posthumanities. After the Human documents the emergence of posthumanist ideas in the fractures within traditional disciplines, examines the new objects of analysis that thus came into prominence, and theorizes new interdisciplinary methods of study that followed.

After the Human provides a comprehensive overview of how a range of philosophical, ethical, and political ideas under the framework of posthumanism have transformed humanities scholarship today. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars and perspectives, it puts into dialogue the major influences from philosophy, literary study, anthropology, and science studies that set the stage for a range of new questions to be asked about the relationship of the human to other life. The book's central argument is that posthumanism's challenge to and disruption of traditional humanist knowledge is so significant as to presage a sea-change from the humanities into the posthumanities. After the Human documents the emergence of posthumanist ideas in the fractures within traditional disciplines, examines the new objects of analysis that thus came into prominence, and theorizes new interdisciplinary methods of study that followed.

Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.

A poet of both the body and spirit, the work of Romulo Bustos Aguirre often explores the nature of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century--humankind's relationship to itself and the universe, the meaning or purpose, if any, of human existence, and the daunting task of discerning that meaning. Critics have described his poetry as highly refined lyricism, metaphysical, existential, and at times erotic. Semantics of the World introduces the English-speaking world to the exciting work of Romulo Bustos Aguirre, one of Colombia's most celebrated living writers. This selection of extraordinary poems, edited and translated by Nohora Arrieta Fernandez and Mark A. Sanders, presents Bustos Aguirre's works in Spanish alongside their English translations and features the critical apparatus necessary for making Bustos Aguirre's poetry more accessible to students, scholars, and the general reading public. The volume offers the perfect introduction to Romulo Bustos Aguirre and his poetry for critical and popular audiences throughout the Anglosphere.

Much has been written on Beckett and Sade, yet nothing systematic has been produced. This Element is systematic by adopting a chronological order, which is necessary given the complexity of Beckett's varying assessments of Sade. Beckett mentioned Sade early in his career, with Proust as a first guide. His other sources were Guillaume Apollinaire and Mario Praz's book, La Carne, La morte e il Diavolo Nella Letteratura Romantica (1930), from which he took notes about sadism for his Dream Notebook. Dante's meditation on the absurdity of justice provides closure facing Beckett's wonder at the pervasive presence of sadism in humans.

Bel-vedere; or The Garden of the Muses is an early modern printed commonplace book containing an anthology of nearly 4,500 short verse quotations arranged under topical headings. The book first appeared in 1600 and a second edition was published in 1610. It is of exceptional importance for the early historical reception of early modern authors such as William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and Christopher Marlowe (whose verse it includes); for the late Elizabethan practice of commonplacing; for the rising status of English literature (including dramatic literature); and for early modern English canon formation. Until now the book has never been properly edited. This edition provides the first full analysis of the contents of Bel-vedere, presenting the text for today's readers and filling an important gap in the study of early modern English literature.

This volume analyzes Portuguese texts from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, reading them as symptoms of a haywire paternal function. Authors studied include E&#231a de Queiros, Almeida Garrett, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Jose Regio, Jose Cardoso Pires, Helder Macedo, and Gomes de Amorim. Historical figures interrogated include Dom Sebastiao, Prince Henry the Navigator, and the dictators Sidonio Pais and Salazar. A Lacanian framework provides the backdrop for much of the discussion, as Rothwell draws parallels in the cultural appropriations of the father figure at different historical moments. He argues that both nineteenth-century and contemporary Portuguese authors suggest that the wholesale abandonment of the paternal function in favor of the market transaction after revolutions comes at an intolerably high price for the Portuguese individual's psychic well-being. At the same time, Rothwell shows how paternal metaphors have consistently been corrupted in the Portuguese imaginary from the time of Fernao Lopes through the imperial expansion and decline to the twentieth-century dictatorships.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating business-to-buzzness deals and international networks. In this Element, we pursue an Ullapoolist approach to excavate beneath the production of bestsellers at the Fair. Our investigation involved three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017-2019) including interviews and autoethnographic, arts-informed interventions. The Element argues that buzz at the Fair exists in two states: as market-ready media reports and partial, lived experiences linked to mood. The physical structures and absences of the Fair enact its power relations and direct the flow of books and buzz. Further, the Fair is not only a site for commercial exchange but a carnival of sorts, marked by disruptive historical events and problematic socio-political dynamics. Key themes emerging from the Element are the presence of excess, the pseudo(neo)liberal self-satisfaction of book culture, and the interplay of optimism and pessimism in contemporary publishing.

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.

Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett's prose, drama and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett's texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self-awareness, Beckett's late prose narratives - Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho - comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett's own oeuvre.

By Shakespeare's time, the debate over legitimate medical practice had become vociferous and public. The powerful College of Physicians fought hard to discredit some and reign in others, but many resisted, denied, or ignored its authority. Dramatists did not fail to notice the turmoil, nor did they fail to comment on it_and no one commented more profoundly on stage than William Shakespeare. Going beyond the usual questions posed about Shakespeare and medicine, this study, which won the first Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, explores Shakespeare's response to the early modern struggle for control of English medical practice. It does not rehearse the fundamentals of early modern medical thought such as the humoral system that have been more than adequately covered numerous times elsewhere. Instead, it undertakes a reading of popular English medical tracts in an effort to reconstruct the terms in which medical practitioners of all kinds were understood. Those who were not busy telling stories about the treatment of illness and injury were busy hearing such stories, and in a time of spectacular outbreaks of infectious disease, in a time of religious transition, and in a time of shifting modes of political power, such stories, held especial fascination.

This collection of essays presents a fresh analysis of the complete theater evening that was available to audiences in the Restoration in early nineteenth-century playhouses. The contributing scholars focus not on the mainpiece, the advertised play itself, but on what surrounded the mainpiece for the 'total' theater experience of the day. Various critical essays address artistic disciplines such as dance and theatrical portraits, while others concentrate on peripheral performance textsprologues, epilogues, pantomimes, and afterpiecesthat merged to define the overall theatrical event.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) remains a book of the moment. This Companion builds on successive waves of generational inheritance and debate in the novel's reception by asking new questions about how and why Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, what it means, and why it matters. Chapters on a selection of the novel's interpretative contexts, the literary histories from which it is inseparable, the urgent questions it raises, and the impact it has had on other kinds of media, ranging from radio to video games, open up the conversation in an expansive way. Established concerns (e.g. Orwell's attitude to the working class, his anxieties about the socio-political compartmentalization of the post-war world) are presented alongside newer ones (e.g. his views on evil, and the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on comics). Individual essays help us see in new ways how Orwell's most famous work continues to be a novel for our times.

Rebecca West is currently enjoying a long-overdue and sustained revival. The contemporary relevance of her ideas about gender relations, nationalism, warfare, cultural identity, art, and religion is startling and revealing. In an article on West's Survivors in Mexico (2003), Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe put it this way: 'It is a good thing that new writings of Rebecca West continue to appear; we still need her, permanently.' We also need new scholarship to keep up with the increased demand for critical engagements with the vast and richly diversified body of West's literary production. Rebecca West Today, the first-ever collection of essays on this prolific writer, employs cutting-edge as well as more traditional methodological approaches, ranging from historicism to gender studies, to textual analyses, to philosophical engagements. The book also contains a useful section on teaching the works of Rebecca West.

'Enlightenment' and 'Emancipation' as separate issues have received much critical attention, but the complicated interaction of these two great shaping forces of modernity has never been scrutinized in-depth. The Enlightenment has been represented in radically opposing ways: on the one hand, as the throwing off of the chains of superstition, custom, and usurped authority; on the other hand, in the Romantic period, but also more recently, as what Michel Foucault termed 'the great confinement, ' in which 'mind-forged manacles' imprison the free and irrational spirit. The debate about the 'Enlightenment project' remains a topical one, which can still arouse fierce passions. This collection of essays by distinguished scholars from various disciplines addresses the central question: 'Was Enlightenment a force for emancipation?' Their responses, working from within, and frequently across the disciplinary lines of history, political science, economics, music, literature, aesthetics, art history, and film, reveal unsuspected connections and divergences even between well-known figures and texts. In their turn, the essays suggest the need for further inquiry in areas that turn out to be very far from closed. The volume considers major writings in unusual juxtaposition; highlights new figures of importance; and demonstrates familiar texts to embody strange implications

He left everything just as it was.... Did he think he would come back?"
Jacob's Room" was the first book in Virginia Woolf's unique, experimental style, making it an important text of early Modernism. Ostensibly, the story is about the life of Jacob Flanders, the title character, who is evoked purely by other characters' perceptions and memories of him. Jacob remains an absence throughout. Elegiac in tone, the work beautifully memorializes the longing and pain of a generation that lost so many of its most promising young men to World War I.
Upon it's release E.M. Forster remarked, "amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view."
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

With no comparable study in the English language, the first English translation of Fan Boqun's A History of Popular Modern Chinese Literature presents one of the most authoritative and significant studies on modern Chinese literature to a new readership. Starting in the late Qing Dynasty, a period often overlooked by literary scholars, Fan maps the blueprint of modern Chinese popular literature through a broad range of popular literary genres. Thoughtfully illustrated throughout and utilising courtesan novels, martial arts fiction, pictorial journalism and detective novels, Fan's innovative approach to this rich material develops pioneering new arguments which will be of interest to all interested in modern Chinese literature, popular and visual culture in late Qing and Republican China.

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual, and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars. This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies which have been appearing in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. From mind-centred and philosophical approaches to theories focusing on gender, race, and sexuality, the chapters touch on poetry, drama, digital games, podcasts, coding, speculative fiction, the law, medical narrative, oral storytelling, and comics as well as the more traditional areas of fiction, TV, and film. This is the future of narrative theory. Key Features: Includes popular culture genres (comics, video games, coding) not covered in depth in other companions to narrative theory Showcases essays on narrative dimensions of law, medical ethics, linguistics, and philosophy as well as more obviously narrative genres Attention given to race, gender, sexuality distributed throughout the volume, not isolated in a single section New essays by superstars in narrative theory (Phelan, McHale, Lanser, Richardson, Abbott, Currie) as well as other well respected and emerging scholars

This volume lists all the important work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1992 and 1996. This bibliographic work is a continuation of the earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 9000 entries, some of which areannotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources. Also included are a substantial number of African newspaper and magazine articles.

Edited collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It is also often taken as axiomatic that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding do so agree. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format before even a word is read. After examining the origins of this critique, this Element explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. It examines each component part of the critique, showing that they are either largely unfounded or susceptible of solution. It proposes the edited collection as a model of one possible idea of scholarly community: collaboration, trust, and mutual obligation in pursuit of a wider good.

Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers both essential background to the understanding of this material and sixteen chapters by leading scholars which are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide range of fascinating but now little-known texts to the handful of more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More's Utopia, Milton's Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus. All Latin is translated throughout the volume.

This book re-examines the literary significance of poet and translator William Cowper (1731-1800). Too often, Cowper is pigeonholed as an eccentric, a hopeless depressive, or even as a religious lunatic. Often regarded as an 'early' Romantic, Cowper is reconsidered in this book in light of a rich eighteenth-century political and religious culture. Rather than read him as an old-fashioned Calvinist stranded in an increasingly secularized society, Cowper can be read as someone who well understood the increasingly imprecise and emotionalist quality of eighteenth-century religious discourse and who expressed this dominant tendency with uncanny insight.

Kerouac. Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation, but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World War II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era.

An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.

Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven't because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.

The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.

The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.