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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
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.
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.
This is the first book-length study of female adolescence in the French novel of this period. It analyzes representations of the "world apart" of female adolescence in selected novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, several factors contributed to the shaping of a new social category for young women, which then gained increasing attention from writers. Art and life echoed one another, as novels about female adolescents created a social stir, and incited further discussion about the proper role for young women in French society. In this book, the author considers key novels of female adolescence from the period as a means of understanding the concerns and desires they embody. Examining these novels thematically and chronologically, Dr. Gale traces shifting social values and sexual roles and examines the ways in which various artistic, intellectual, or literary influences of each period shape its portraits of female adolescence. Novelists create their young female characters as French society undergoes parallel transformation. In this sense, female adolescents represent, for the novelists, the possible futures of France.
Recounting the murder of an elderly woman by a student expelled from university, Crime and Punishment is a psychological and political novel that portrays the strains on Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, moves in a world of dire poverty, disillusionment, radicalism, and nihilism interwoven with religious faith and utopianism. In Dostoevsky's innovative style, which he called fantastic realism, the narrator frequently reports from within the protagonist's mind. The depiction of the desperate lives of tradespeople, students, alcoholics, prostitutes, and criminals gives readers insight into the urban society of St. Petersburg at the time. The first part of this book offers instructors guidance on Russian editions and English translations, a map of St. Petersburg showing locations mentioned in the novel, a list of characters and an explanation of the Russian naming system, analysis of key scenes, and selected critical works on the novel. In the second part, essays address many of Dostoevsky's themes and consider the role of ethics, gender, money, Orthodox Christianity, and social justice in the narrative. The volume concludes with essays on digital media and film adaptations.
Laurence Sterne, the author of the innovative fictions The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey, served most of his life as a rural Anglican clergyman in Yorkshire, England; for twenty years his sermons were his primary written labors. Sterne published the first two volumes of sermons as the Sermons of Mr. Yorick in 1760 after the initial, widely celebrated volumes of Tristram Shandy and the ensuing controversy revealed their complex paradoxes: they are both sacred and earthy, entertaining and instructional, products of art, duty, and the desire for profit and fame. The dozen essays in Divine Rhetoric, including an extensive critical history, examine the rhetorical and theological contexts of the sermons as well as their possible influences, discerning their intrinsic value to scholars of the fiction of Laurence Sterne and eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The book is accompanied by an audio CD of one of Sterne 's sermons.
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.
The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory - profoundly impacted Irish and World Literature. Recent research has uncovered new archives of previously neglected texts and authors. Organized according to multiple categories, ranging from single author to genre and theme, this volume allows readers to imagine multiple ways of re-mapping this crucial period. The book incorporates different, even competing, approaches and interpretations to reflect emerging trends and current debates in contemporary scholarship. As ongoing research in the field of Irish studies discovers new materials and critical strategies for interpreting them, our sense of Irish literary history during this period is constantly shifting. This volume seeks to capture the richness and complexity of the years 1880-1940 for our current moment.
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.
This book links popular British fiction from the 1790s through the 1860s to anxieties about time. The cataclysm of the French Revolution, discoveries in geology, biology, and astronomy that greatly expanded the age and size of the universe, and technological developments such as the railway and the telegraph combined to transform the experience of time and dramatize its aporetic nature-time as inarticulable contradiction. Themes of usurpation, bigamy, and stolen identity that characterize popular fiction during this period reflect anxieties about inheritance. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France characterizes English history as an unbroken and orderly chronicle of property, generations, and values, in contrast to the chaotic events taking place in France. Albright uses Burke's "sure principle of transmission" as the idealized, coherent view of time as narrative and argues that many popular novels of this period encode discourses on temporality in which time's aporias are imaginatively reconciled through a variety of narrative strategies. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, written during the Terror of the French Revolution, uses a past setting, descriptions of sublime and picturesque landscapes, and the heroine's prolonged suspension between memory and expectation to create a dreamy temporality that offers an antidote to revolutionary fears. Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer employs narrative to "humanize" what Frank Kermode calls the "disorganized time" represented by "the interval between tick and tock," an effort that assumes greater importance in response to industrialization's dehumanizing effects. Mary Shelley's The Last Man capitalizes on the Romantic theme of "lastness," weaving together memory and prophecy to attain a narrative perspective that encompasses the whole of human history. Albright concludes with a chapter on the sensation novels of the 1860's, which bring Gothic themes of usurpation from the distant past to the contemporary world of railways and divorce courts. Writing the Past, Writing the Future offers a fresh approach that focuses less on feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to Gothic and sensation fiction than on the contemporary temporal anxieties often encoded in these popular genres. While there has been some criticism that has dealt with temporal discourses within individual works-most notably, The Last Man?there has not been a wider exploration of the topic that encompasses the period from about 1790 to 1870. Rather than attempt an exhaustive survey of a large number of novels, Albright has focused on several key texts from this period, analyzing them with the aid of the temporal meditations of Aristotle, Augustine, and Heidegger, as well as Paul Ricoeur's work on the relationship between time and narrative.
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
This book recovers the earliest epistolary activity of one of America's most innovative and influential modernist poets. From 1902 to 1912, William Carlos Williams wrote more than 300 letters to his younger brother Edgar, an accomplished architect with whom Williams shared the desire to become 'a great artist'. This collection of 200 letters sheds new light on the aesthetic thoughts and practices with which Williams was engaged for a full decade before his unique voice emerged in the forerunner to 'Paterson', 'The Wanderer' (1914). Providing a comprehensive introduction, exhaustive annotation, images of poetry and artwork, and hundreds of letters never before seen by scholars, this critical edition provides substantially new material on Williams and will be an important addition to the study of early American modernism.
Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and contemporary fiction, 'New Versions of Pastoral' offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day. Dividing its analytic focus between periods, the volume contextualizes a wide range of exemplary practitioners, genres, and movements: contributors attend to early modernism's vacillation between critiquing and aestheticizing the rise of primitivist nostalgia; the ambiguous mythologization of the English estate by the twentieth-century manor house novel; and the post-national revisiting of the countryside and its sovereign status in contemporary imaginings of regional life.
Cormac McCarthy is a writer informed by an intense curiosity. His interests range from the natural world, to philosophy and religion, to history and culture. Cormac McCarthy in Context offers readers the opportunity to understand how various influences inform his rich body of work. The collection explores the relationship McCarthy has with his favourite authors, writers such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Other contexts are tremendously informative, including the American Romance tradition of the nineteenth century as well as modernity and the modernist literary movement. Influence and context are of absolute importance in understanding McCarthy, who is now being understood as one of the most significant authors of the contemporary period.
This book examines how the hierarchical structures of taste implied by the term middlebrow were negotiated by the best-selling novelist, Warwick Deeping (1877 - 1950). Deeping is the focus for three reasons: he was immensely popular, prolific, and his popularity was perceived by such critics as Q. D. Leavis as a threat to the "sensitive minority". His sixty-eight novels from 1903 to 1950 give the cultural historian the unusual opportunity of tracing the develpment of an author's attempts to protect both himself and his readers from a process of cultural devaluation. After 1925, the best-selling Sorrell and Son and its successors established "a" Deeping as a product about which both admirers and detractors had certain expectations. His response to these provides an exemplary site within which to examine how cultural distinctions were being negotiated and contested in Britain between the two World Wars. The introduction traces the genealogy of Dr. Grover's theoretical approach. The theories of the Frankfurt school and of Pierre Bourdieu do not account adequately for the generation of texts in response to perceived cultural hierarchies. Deeping's texts are increasingly explicit in the ways they dramatize and address their own questionable cultural status. Grover uses this self-consciousness to test the limits of the usefulness of available theories of cultural production. Chapter 1 historicizes the emergenceof the term middlebrow, contrasting its use on either side of the Atlantic to demonstrate class and cultural context. Chapter 2 shows how Deeping represented his own class positioning as bestselling author. Chapter 3 examines a group of novels, preceding Sorrell and Son and before the term middlebrow had currency, in which the writer is depicted as feminized and declassified. Chapter 4 concerns the reception of Sorrell and Son and Deeping's fictionalization of its reception. The final chapter deals with the animosity to which Sorrell's success exposed the culturally beleaguered Deeping
This book explores Cervantes's connection with the representational schemes that dominated the political, moral, literary, and iconographic anxieties of the 1600s. Whereas most research on Cervantes's aesthetic and artistic models has focused on Southern sources (Italian and Spanish), this study expands this reference to include Northern (Flemish and Netherlandish) cultural influence. Through this artistic dialogue between North and South, the book investigates the interrelationship of politics and aesthetics, and how these are negotiated in Cervantes's works, especially in two novels, Don Quixote and The Dialogue of the Dogs.
Cervantes in Seventeenth-century England garners well over a
thousand English references to Cervantes and his works, thus
providing the fullest and most intriguing early English picture
ever made of the writings of Spain's greatest writer. Besides
references to the nineteen books of Cervantes's prose available to
seventeenth-century English readers (including four little-known
abridgments), this new volume includes entries by such notable
writers as Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, William Wycherley, Aphra
Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, and John Locke, as well as many
lesser-known and anonymous writers. A reader will find, among
others, a counterfeiter, a midwife, an astrologer, a princess, a
diarist, and a Harvard graduate. Altogether this broad range of
writers, famed and forgotten alike, brings to light not only
sectarian and political tensions of the day, but also glimpses of
the arts-of weaving, singing, acting, engraving, and painting. Even
dancing, for there was a dance called the "Sancho Panzo."
Focusing on the core assessment objectives for GCSE English Literature 9-1, The Quotation Bank takes 25 of the most important quotations from the text and provides detailed material for each quotation, covering interpretations, literary techniques and detailed analysis. Also included is a sample answer, detailed essay plans, revision activities and a comprehensive glossary of relevant literary terminology, all in a clear and practical format to enable effective revision and ultimate exam confidence.
Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England argues for a theory of male subjectivity that subordinates questions of desire beneath the historical imperatives that inform those desires. Employing a post-closet identity theory, this book argues that writers like John Donne, William Shakespeare, and George Herbert created an ideology of masculinity in conjunction with and in response to the great epistemological upheavals in early modern England. Donne, Shakespeare, and Herbert helped to create a masculinity that embodies an ironic subject position that is constantly shifting between men's desires for women and men's simultaneous rejection of women's bodies, and the inevitable encounter with the figure of the sodomite that their rejection invites.
Focusing on the core assessment objectives for GCSE English Literature 9-1, The Quotation Bank takes 25 of the most important quotations from the text and provides detailed material for each quotation, covering interpretations, literary techniques and detailed analysis. Also included is a sample answer, detailed essay plans, revision activities and a comprehensive glossary of relevant literary terminology, all in a clear and practical format to enable effective revision and ultimate exam confidence.
In Writing the New World, Mauro Caraccioli examines the natural history writings of early Spanish missionaries, using these texts to argue that colonial Latin America was fundamental in the development of modern political thought. Revealing their narrative context, religious ideals, and political implications, Caraccioli shows how these sixteenth-century works promoted a distinct genre of philosophical wonder in service of an emerging colonial social order.Caraccioli discusses narrative techniques employed by well-known figures such as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo and Bartolome de Las Casas as well as less-studied authors including Bernardino de Sahagun, Francisco Hernandez, and Jose de Acosta. More than mere catalogues of the natural wonders of the New World, these writings advocate mining and molding untapped landscapes, detailing the possibilities for extracting not just resources from the land but also new moral values from indigenous communities. Analyzing the intersections between politics, science, and faith that surface in these accounts, Caraccioli shows how the portrayal of nature served the ends of imperial domination. Integrating the fields of political theory, environmental history, Latin American literature, and religious studies, this book showcases Spain's role in the intellectual formation of modernity and Latin America's place as the crucible for the Scientific Revolution. Its insights are also relevant to debates about the interplay between politics and environmental studies in the Global South today. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of Virginia Tech.
Modern literary scholarship has traced the ways in which a distinctly modern sense of selfhood and subjectivity, and of the individualist liberal society in which such a self takes shape, emerges from the drama and poetry of the early seventeenth century. John Milton, writer of the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost, takes up the challenge of modern character and social formation from Shakespeare and Donne and their contemporaries. He begins this task in his own early maturity, some thirty years before the publication of his great epic, with A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle,I>, more commonly known as Comus. There has not been a major book-length study of Milton's Maske in the past twenty years, so Lady in the Labyrinth fills a major gap in Milton and Renaissance criticism. It comprehensively surveys, evaluates, and integrates recent and traditional criticism of Comus in the context of Milton's other work, while developing new directions for study, focusing anthropological and psychological analysis on the poem's characters and mythological dimensions. Parallels between the ritual elements of the Maske and the rites of passage of non-European cultures will widen the horizons of both canonically based and multiculturally engaged scholars and writers. The book's study of Milton's identification with his female hero, and his advocacy of womens ethical, sexual, and political autonomy, gives a jolt to ongoing debates about Milton and feminism. The first of Milton's heroes of Christian Liberty, the fifteen-year-old Lady who performs in his Maske, is also the first of his characters to act out this transformation of human identity. Lady in the Labyrinth treats Comus, first performed in 1634, as a rite of passage for its Lady, and for the emerging culture whose hopes are invested in her. Displaying in song, argument and dance such character qualities as inferiority, self-consciousness, flexibility, and independence, the Lady gives vital form to
While differences among the three early printed texts of Hamlet have often been considered in terms of interpretive conequences in performances, The Hamlets instead considers practical issues in the playhouse and acting economy of early modern London. This book examines how Shakespeare's company operated, how it may have treated the authorial text, what the actors' needs might be, and how the three texts may be manifestations of the play's life in the theater. By collating and studying cue-line variation in the three texts, the book introduces a new method of analysis and constructs for Hamlet a new narrative of authorial, textual, and playhouse practices that challenges customary assumptions about the nature and transmission of Shakespeare's most textually troubling play.
This collection explores the rich literary and visual origins and afterlives of the popular legend. It examines Robin's portrayal as outlaw hero and the significance of his traditional setting in the 'merry greenwood,' both in England and in the Brandywine Valley that became the Sherwood Forest of illustrators Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. Complemented by thirty black-and-white illustrations and six color plates, the varied essays in this collection should deepen and enrich the study of a figure of seemingly endless variety. Through the analysis of various 'texts'_May games, ballads, broadsides, legal archives, operettas, illustrated children's book, English theater, Chinese outlaw fiction, and Japanese Kabuki drama_contributors illuminate the many ways in which the traditional images, and those of analogous legends, have been produced and reproduced across cultures and times.
This book of essays provides a significant reappraisal of discussions of anti-Semitism and philosemitism. An outstanding group of contributors from political theory, film, English, gender studies, and history demonstrates that analysis of philosemitic attitudes is as crucial as are investigations of anti-Semitism. Topics include F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Hannah Arendt's politics, self-help guides such as Boy Vey! The Shiksa's Guide to Dating Jewish Men, and contemporary cinema. This pathbreaking book shows the necessity of studying philosemitism as a critical manifestation of anti-Semitism and as a principle way that Jews have been and still are set apart from non-Jews. These essays will enable us to rethink historical debates surrounding the 'Jewish question.'
Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed and embodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has.com e to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualties. This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian and modernist writers re-imagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or performance power in figures of sexual difference- most often a feminized, often homosexual male body, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity. This study reconstructs the cultural history of this transsexual figure through readings of work by late Victorian and modernist writers Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley, who collaborated using the pen name 'Michael Field', and whose work may inaugurate the shift in Tiresian mythographies; T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land includes arguably the most well-known uses of Tiresias in modern English Literature; Djuna Barnes, whose queer Irish-American Tiresias provides an insistent voice of sexual and social marginalization; and Irish poet Austin Clarke who set out to revise Eliot's use of Tiresias but ended up narrating a myth of sexual panic. The book also examines work by writers whose use of Tiresian figures consistently linked sexual differences, especially homosexuality, to forms of performative, poetic, and aesthetic power. If The Waste Land established Tiresias as a figure of modernist textual and sexual ambiguity, this book displaces that canonically central representation into a more complex tra |
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