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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
Contributions by Amylou Ahava, Jeff Ambrose, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Daniel P. Compora, Penny Crofts, Keith Currie, Erin Giannini, Diganta Roy, Hannah Lina Schneeberger, Shannon S. Shaw, Maria Wiegel, and Margaret J. Yankovich First published in 1986, Stephen King's novel IT forever changed the legacy of the literary clown. The subject of a TV miniseries and a two-part film adaptation and the inspiration for a resurgence of the evil clown figure in popular culture, IT's influence is undeniable, yet scholarship to date is almost exclusively devoted to the adaptations rather than the novel itself. Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King's "IT" considers the pronounced cultural fluctuations of IT's legacies by centering the novel within the theoretical frameworks that animate it and ensure its literary and cultural persistence. The collection explores the ways the novel, so like its antagonist, replicates (or disavows) the icons of various canons and categories in order to accomplish specific psychological and cultural work. Gathering the work of scholars from diverse professional and disciplinary vantage points, editor Whitney S. May has curated an anthology that spans discussions of American surveillance culture, intergenerational conflict, the legacies of settler colonialism and Native American representation, serial-killer fanaticism, and more. In this volume, we read the protagonists' constellations of countermoves against Pennywise as productive outlines of critique effectuated by the richness of the clown's reflective power. The essays are therefore thematically arranged into a series of four categories of "counter"-countercurrents, countercultures, counterclaims, and counterfeits-where each supplies a specific critical lens through which to view Pennywise's disruptions of both culture and cultural critique.
'The word "mesmerising" is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove' Financial Times 'Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist...' Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator, Book of the Year Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally's childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God - their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally's baby brother vanishes from his pram, she becomes suspicious of the activities going on around her. What happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go? Disappearing into a world of books and reading, Sally adopts the tried and tested methods of Miss Marple. Taking books for hints and clues, she turns herself into a reading detective. Her discovery of Jane Eyre marks the beginning of a vivid journey through Victorian literature where she also finds the kind, eccentric figure of Charles Dickens' Betsey Trotwood. These characters soon become her heroines, acting as a part of an alternative family, offering humour and guidance during many difficult moments in Sally's life. Combining the voices of literary characters with those of her real-life counterparts, Girl With Dove reads as a magical series of strange encounters, climaxing with a comic performance of Shakespeare in the children's home where Sally is eventually sent. Weaving literary classics with a young girl's coming of age story, this is a book that testifies to the transformative power of reading and the literary imagination. Mixing fairy tale, literary classics, nursery rhymes and folklore, it is the story of a child's adventure in wonderland and search for truth in an adult world often cast in deep shadow.
Although alphabetically arranged, Glossalalia - An Alphabet of Critical Keywords is not a conventional glossary or dictionary. It is an agenda-setting volume which speculates on the state of theory in the twenty-first century. 26 newly commissioned essays provide distinct, original sometimes playful or unusual definitions of theoretical keywords - both unexpected terms as well as words well-established in the critical canon: Animality Biotechnologies Chora Difference Event Flirting Genetics Hypertext I Jouissance Knowledge Love Music Nation Origins Poetics Quilting Reification Schizoanalysis Tele-techno-theology Universals Visuality Wit X Yarn Zero The volume invites the reader to engage with and enjoy theory, to seek out connections and become aware of the process of critical thinking. Anyone with theoretical interests in the humanities and in the future possibilities of theory will be delighted and intrigued by this volume.
Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narratives. The volume also examines the public and personal everyday contexts within which popular texts are read, highlighting the ways in which such narratives have circulated across a variety of constantly changing media, including theatre, television, cinema and new computer-based digital forms. Case studies from key genres - crime fiction, romance and Gothic horror - as well as a full chronology and guide to further reading make this collection indispensable to all those interested in this complex and vibrant cultural field.
Latin American Literature in Transition 1800-1870 uses affect as an analytical tool to uncover the countervailing forces that shaped Latin American literatures and cultures during the first six decades of the nineteenth century. Chapters provide perspectives on colonial violence and its representation, on the development of the national idea, on communities within and beyond the nation, and on the intersectional development of subjectivity during and after processes of cultural and political independence. This volume includes interdisciplinary approaches to nineteenth-century Latin American cultures that range from visual and art history to historiography to comparative literature and the study of literary and popular print culture. This book engages with the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationship between felt ideas of community and the political changes that shaped these affective networks and communities.
The French Revolution ignited the biggest debate on politics and society in Britain since the Civil War 150 years earlier. The public controversy lasted from the initial, positive reaction to French events in 1789 to the outlawing of the radical societies in 1799. This Cambridge Companion highlights the energy, variety and inventiveness of the literature written in response to events in France and the political reaction at home. It contains thirteen specially commissioned essays by an international team of historians and literary scholars, a chronology of events and publications, and an extensive guide to further reading. Six essays concentrate on the principal writers of the Revolution controversy: Burke, Paine, Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Others deal with popular radical culture, counter-revolutionary culture, the distinctive contribution of women writers, novels of opinion, drama, and poetry. This volume will serve as a comprehensive yet accessible reference work for students, advanced researchers and scholars.
The desire to engage and confront traumatic subjects was a facet of Irish literature for much of the twentieth century. Yet, just as Irish society has adopted a more direct and open approach to the past, so too have Irish authors evolved in their response to, and literary uses of, trauma. In Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel, Costello-Sullivan considers the ways in which the Irish canon not only represents an ongoing awareness of trauma as a literary and cultural force, but also how this representation has shifted since the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. While earlier trauma narratives center predominantly on the role of silence and the individual and/or societal suffering that traumas induce, twenty-first-century Irish narratives increasingly turn from just the recognition of traumatic experiences toward exploring and representing the process of healing and recovery both structurally and narratively. Through a series of keenly observed close readings, Costello-Sullivan explores the work of Colm Toibin, John Banville, Anne Enright, Emma Donohue, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry. In highlighting the power of narrative to amend and address memory and trauma, Costello-Sullivan argues that these works reflect a movement beyond merely representing trauma toward also representing the possibility of recovery from it.
Ideal for readers new to Ulysses and written with a depth of knowledge invaluable to scholars, "Ulysses" Unbound is a clear and comprehensive guide to James Joyce's masterpiece from one of the foremost Dublin-based Joyce experts. Terence Killeen discusses the novel's eighteen episodes individually. For each episode, Killeen provides a brief narrative summary along with an account of the parallels from Homer's Odyssey. Next, he devotes attention to the episode's unique style, in recognition of the novel's remarkable stylistic diversity. He also includes a commentary section that surveys the episode's principal themes and function within the broader context of the development of the work as a whole. These sections are followed by notes that help explain some of the main characters and historical events in the text, illuminating the real people who provided so much of the book's material. Glossaries define many of the foreign language terms that pepper the text. Mindful of the needs of readers tackling Ulysses for the first time, Killeen begins his treatment of the episodes simply and expands his discussions as the novel's text expands. He concludes with an overall reading of Ulysses that considers possible approaches to interpreting the book in its entirety. The guide also features a brief account of Joyce's life and a description of the novel's eventful textual and publishing history. Accessible and authoritative, "Ulysses" Unbound is an indispensable companion for both students and specialists.
This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov's fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov's insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov's novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.
This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an overview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series aims for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end strives for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The language of publication is English. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will is imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume is a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editors of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editors only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume. To discuss your handbook idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
The Bobbio Missal was copied in south-eastern Gaul around the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. It contains a unique combination of a lectionary and a sacramentary, to which a plethora of canonical and non-canonical material was added. The Missal is therefore highly regarded by liturgists; but, additionally, medieval historians welcome the information to be derived from material attached to the codex, which provides valuable data about the role and education of priests in Francia at that time, and indeed on their cultural and ideological background. The breadth of specialist knowledge provided by the team of scholars writing for this book enables the manuscript to be viewed as a whole, not as a narrow liturgical study. Collectively, the essays view the manuscript as physical object: they discuss the contents, they examine the language, and they look at the cultural context in which the codex was written.
When it was first published in 1927, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets was intended by its compiler, Sir John Collings Squire, to complement the well-known poetry anthologies of Francis Turner Palgrave and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Squire began the task of assembling his anthology by deliberately omitting over one hundred greater poets, giving precedence to Nicholas Breton and John Clare in the place of Shakespeare and Tennyson. Although some familiar names such as Thomas Dekker, John Bunyan, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville appear in the collection, the focus remains on those who lack prominence in the canon, including many medieval poets whose identities are unknown. Drawing together a considerable number of first-rate and undervalued poets, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets is an essential supplement to the traditional anthologies of English verse of the past.
At the long-term care facility where Robert Rebein's father lands after a horrific car crash, a shadow box hangs next to each room, its contents suggesting something of the occupant's life. In Headlights on the Prairie, Rebein has created a literary shadow box of sorts, a book in which moments of singular grace and grit encapsulate a life and a world. In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, these essays bring a storyteller's gifts to life's dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains. Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairie-and yet never really get out of Dodge.
Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.
This book is about an alternative mode of reading, thinking, and representing the intricacies of human experience in Chinese literature of the late twentieth century, which the author calls the aesthetics of the 'beyond.' It investigates how contemporary Chinese writers, by means of dynamic interface of literary practice and cultural philosophical considerations, engage the reader in critical reflection on and aesthetic appreciation of the complexity of human conditions. By studying the 'beyond' in its various manifestations: the semiotics of human embodiment, the discourse of the phantasm, the politics of nostalgia with regard to 'origin' and 'center,' and the metaphysics of death in the writings of some major contemporary Chinese writers, the book explores the ways in which the 'beyond' is constructed as a new paradigm of critical thinking in literary, aesthetic, and philosophical terms. It examines how its discursive strategies, structural features, and aesthetic possibilities are presented and how varied literary tropes are used in an attempt to unravel human experience in all its aspects.
Daphne du Maurier is one of Britain's best-loved authors, her writing capturing the imagination in a way that few have been able to equal. Rebecca, her most famous novel, was a huge success on first publication and brought du Maurier international fame. This enduring classic remains one of the nation's favourite books. In this celebration of Daphne du Maurier's life and achievements, today's leading writers, critics and academics discuss the novels, short stories and biographies that made her one of the most spellbinding and genre-defying authors of her generation. The film versions of her books are also explored, including Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and The Birds and Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now. Featuring interviews with du Maurier's family and a long-lost short story by the author herself, this is the indispensable companion to her work. Contributors include Sarah Dunant, Sally Beauman, Margaret Forster, Antonia Fraser, Michael Holroyd, Lisa Jardine, Julie Myerson, Justine Picardie and Minette Walters
Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.
Dannie Abse, whose career as a poet spans sixty years, has made a huge contribution to the literature and literary life of Wales and to poetry and prose in the English Language. The Sourcebook is an essential companion to the poetry, prose, drama and critical writings of this major poet. Cary Archard has edited and written about Abse's work for over twenty years and collects here a marvellous representative selection of Abse's own writings, together with criticism of his work, which illuminates Abse's achievements for both students and general readers. * Biographical and critical introduction * Selection of Abse's criticism, autobiography and fiction * Interviews * Reviews of Abse's poetry over sixty years * Critical essays of Abse's poetry, some newly commissioned * Bibliography
French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages.
Greek myths have long been admired as beautiful, thrilling stories but dismissed as serious objects of belief. For centuries scholars have held that Greek epics, tragedies, and the other compelling works handed down to us obscure the "real" myths that supposedly inspired them. Instead of joining in this pursuit of hidden meanings, Sarah Iles Johnston argues that the very nature of myths as stories-as gripping tales starring vivid characters-enabled them to do their most important work: to create and sustain belief in the gods and heroes who formed the basis of Greek religion. By drawing on work in narratology, sociology, and folklore studies, and by comparing Greek myths not only to the myths of other cultures but also to fairy tales, ghost stories, fantasy works, modern novels, and television series, The Story of Myth reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which these ancient Greek tales forged enduring bonds between their characters and their audiences, created coherent story-worlds, and made it possible to believe in extraordinary gods. Johnston captures what makes Greek myths distinctively Greek, but simultaneously brings these myths into a broader conversation about how the stories told by all cultures affect our shared view of the cosmos and the creatures who inhabit it.
Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 74 is 'Shakespeare and Education. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.
Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.
The sale of authors' papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin and Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. Amy Hildreth Chen offers the history of how this multimillion dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considers what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others have had on this burgeoning economy.The market for contemporary authors' archives began when research libraries needed to cheaply provide primary sources for the swelling number of students and faculty following World War II. Demand soon grew, and while writers and their families found new opportunities to make money, so too did book dealers and literary agents with the foresight to pivot their businesses to serve living authors. Public interest surrounding celebrity writers had exploded by the late twentieth century, and as Placing Papers illustrates, even the best funded institutions were forced to contend with the facts that acquiring contemporary literary archives had become cost prohibitive and increasingly competitive.
Wordsworth's Reading 1800-1815, first published in 1996, lists all of the authors and (where possible) books known to have been read by William Wordsworth during the years which saw the composition of some of his greatest poetry, including Poems, in Two Volumes, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, The White Doe of Rylstone and The Excursion. The information is presented in an easy-to-use form, and includes dates of reading and full discussions of evidence. It draws on analyses of Wordsworth's manuscripts contained in current and forthcoming scholarly editions of his works, and incorporates hitherto unpublished research into the poet's intellectual development, including a thorough survey of manuscript materials. Together with Duncan Wu's companion-volume, Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1799, this is a most complete study of Wordsworth's reading, and it will be an essential reference tool for all scholars and students of his work. |
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