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

In the first collection of its kind, the editors have gathered together fifty-two of the best poems, stories, memoirs, novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction by writers who have called the tiny state of Delaware their home. The volume offers meticulously selected work, alphabetized by author, much of it inspired by or set in the state, and all in a wide range of styles. The anthology is not limited to writers currently living in Delaware; rather, it ranges far beyond, including major writers such as Gibbons Ruark, McKay Jenkins, Julianna Baggott, Fleda Brown, Allison Funk, and Pulitzer Prize winner W. D. Snodgrass_writers who were originally from Delaware, or who lived in the state long enough for their work to have been influenced by its streets, its beaches, and its winding marshland waterways. The anthology includes substantial biographies of each author.

The early works of Herve Guibert explored every aspect of the body and its desires. He was influenced by the works of the Marquis de Sade, and this book discusses how both authors manipulate their identities; theatrical aspects of both authors' works; how story telling brings freedom to both authors; and disintegrating and disappearing bodies.

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings. Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposes that a riot's disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice. Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education-tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice. Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful ethical and moral implications. From Socrates's critique of writing in Plato's Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects. This multidisciplinary volume features contributions from scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main sections: ""Emergent Machines"" examines how technologies and algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes, ""Operational Codes"" explores how computational processes are used to achieve rhetorical ends, ""Ethical Decisions and Moral Protocols"" considers the ethical implications involved in designing software and that software's impact on computational culture, and the final section includes two scholars' responses to the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents) addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section. At the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.

A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France chronicles the emegence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more just. Lesley H. Walker contends that this attempt during the eighteenth century to 'rewrite' social relations in terms of greater social equality represents an important but overlooked strand of Enlightenment thought. During this period, popular domestic novels, the ever-raging debates about women's social roles, and highly sought-after genre paintings produced a remarkable image of motherhood. Through a focus on feminine virtue, Walker studies female writers and artists to argue that these women theorize the domestic sphere as a site of significant social and ethical productivity.

This wide-ranging collection of essays, written by leading specialists, furnishes previously unpublished evidence of France's role and importance in the early modern English literary and dramatic fields. Its chapter-length introduction offers an up-to-date critical presentation of the issues involved: representation, cultural identity, the construction of otherness, Frenchness, and the social and cultural dynamics of theater. The essays in the five sections of the book continue the debate with a series of in-depth studies touching on important critical themes such as intertextuality; old and new historicisms; language, semiotics, and nationhood; imagined geographies; and stereotypes and social satire. The book will appeal to students and specialists of Renaissance literature, to scholars working on the construction of national identity and will be required reading for anyone interested in cultural exchange or comparative literature.

'A holiday in the complex, joyful, indelicate medieval world' John Higgs, author of Watling Street Chaucer's People is an absorbing and revealing guide to the Middle Ages, populated with Chaucer's pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales. These are lives spent at the pedal of a loom, maintaining the ledgers of an estate or navigating the high seas. Drawing on contemporary experiences of a vast range of subjects including trade, religion, toe-curling remedies and hair-raising recipes, bestselling historian Liza Picard recreates the medieval world in glorious detail.

This book addresses the question of the legacies of Nietzsche's theories of tragedy as literary genre and of the tragic as ontological concept. Although The Birth of Tragedy was the most seminal in this sense, Nietzsche's followers also read, misread, and appropriated ideas on the tragic in his later works. Taking seriously the call for the rebirth of the tragic spirit in culture generally, dramatists, poets, novelists, philosophers, film makers, and theorists not always acknowledging a debt to Nietzsche incorporated the Dionysian and the Apollinian, as well as other aspects of Nietzsche's thinking on tragedy, into their own works. This volume gives a sampling of the multifaceted and widespread impact of this aspect of Nietzsche's thought in Eastern as well as in Western Europe and in the United States.

Literature is ostensibly a sequential and thus temporal medium, and painting a static and spatial one; yet writers like George Sand and Emile Zola have attempted repeatedly to represent visual and spatial phenomena in literary texts, just as painters like Eug ne Delacroix and Claude Monet have sought consistently to capture effects of time and movement on canvas. The incorporation of elements from one artistic medium into another creates a dynamic interplay of image and ideology, both between art forms and within individual texts and paintings, which constitutes the crux of this book. Each chapter involves the detailed analysis of a text and a painting, related through topic, theme, and technique. By juxtaposing the works of ten major writers and ten painters of comparable stature, the book explores the various modalities and layers of meaning in nineteenth-century French art, both verbal and visual, and proposes ways of reading the ambivalent artifacts of 'modernity.'

* TOLKIEN * Now a major motion picture Acclaimed as 'the best book about Tolkien', this award-winning biography explores J.R.R. Tolkien's wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. "To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 ... by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by launching his epic of good and evil. John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic experience in the First World War is the key to Middle-earth's enduring power. Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day. This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources.

This book explores Antonio Munoz Molina's creation of compelling narratives about Spain's immediate past by engaging in a dynamic dialogue with popular culture subgenres and the media. The author asserts that popular culture functions in Munoz Molina's novels as provider of a series of strategies that represent in the text aspects of Francoism and the Transition that, because of their relevance, are part of the structure of feeling of those periods. The study focuses on the role of popular music, film, photography, the thriller, the romance novel as well as the radio and other gadgets of modern technology in Munoz Molina's Novels. The Gaze on the Past argues that through the incorporation of popular culture in texts, Munoz Molina undertakes a deliberate and intense reflection on memory and on the creation of historical moments, highlighting their desire to be heard.

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.

George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has sparked a renewed interest in all things medieval. The pseudo-historical world of Westeros delights casual fans while offering a rich new perspective for medievalists and scholars of medievalism. This work is the first comprehensive study of Martin's Westeros as a reflection of the medieval concept of chivalry. It explores how Martin crafts a Westerosi chivalric code that intersects with and can illuminate well-known medieval texts, including both romance and heroic epic. Through characters such as Brienne of Tarth, Sandor Clegane, and Jaime Lannister, Martin variously challenges, upholds, and deconstructs chivalry as depicted in the literature of the Middle Ages. This book is primarily directed to scholars of medievalism, students of medieval literature, and teachers who are interested in including works of medievalism in their classes or developing courses solely devoted to medievalism. Casual readers of the novels and fans of the HBO series will also gain new insight into Martin's Westeros.

Across the academy, disciplines flock for scientific status, keen to demonstrate that their approach to their subject matter is "scientific." How might literary criticism achieve anything like this sort of methodological consonance? Looking at the history of twentieth-century attempts, from Northrop Frye's macrostructural systematizing and Roman Jakobson's microstructural analysis, through to the collapse of the structuralist project and the recent strategic embrace of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, this book looks at what hopes remain for a "science" of literary criticism and draws on the work of such thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Kurt Vonnegut to investigate the consequences of adopting a scientific perspective toward literary study. With an increasing number of departments teaching "literature and science" courses, the question of what literary study stands to gain (and what it might risk) from cleaving to the sciences is especially pressing.

Leyb Naydus (1890-1918) expanded the possibilities of Yiddish poetry via his rich cosmopolitan works, introducing a wealth of themes and forms seldom seen in that language, including some of its first sonnets of literary merit. A devotee of European Symbolism, Naydus's poems shimmer with his love of nature, especially that of his native Lithuania. His groundbreaking poetry explores classicism, exoticism, eroticism, Orientalism, and Judaism with equal verve. Naydus's work adds to our understanding of the creation of a major literature in a minor language. Indeed, this book shows how the poetics of minor-language literatures innovate simultaneously from within and without, and how those interactions can offer even greater creative possibilities than the major language literatures with which they were in conversation. Naydus's unique body of work not only expanded the repertoire of Yiddish poetry but also cemented it's place on the world literary stage, convincing young Yiddish writers that this was a language that could fulfill their artistic aspirations. Literary critic Naftoli Vaynig's lengthy essay on Naydus, written in 1943 in the Vilne Ghetto, makes a remarkable case for why the poems of this cosmopolitan aesthete, who died so tragically young, should serve as a fitting emblem for a culture threatened with extinction. Finkin's Exile as Home, published here with a translation of Vaynig's essay, Naydus Studies, extends that argument.

Aimed at examining the intersections between drama and the novel in nineteenth-century France, this collection of essays reorients scholarly attention to the central place of the theater in nineteenth-century life. Although not limited to a single critical approach, the essays in this collection share common intellectual concerns: the inscription of theatrical aesthetics within the novel; the widespread practice among nineteenth-century novelists of adapting their works for the stage; and the novel's engagement with popular forms of theater. Each of the ten essays provides insight into a specific aspect of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the nineteenth century. Read together, their distinct perspectives form an overview of the literary landscape of nineteenth-century France. Bridging the gap between the drama and the novel, Novel Stages engages readers across the sometimes divisive lines of critical theory, cultural studies, and genre studies.

This collection of twelve essays by colleagues, students, and friends of Everett Zimmerman treats four topics that Zimmerman explored during his career: the representation of the self in narratives, the early British novel and related forms, their epistemological and generic borders, and their intellectual and cultural contexts. In 'Boundaries, ' contributors explore epistemological and narrative distinctions between history and fiction as they meet or overlap in the novel's relationship to other forms, including providential history, travel narratives, utopias, autobiography, and visual art. In 'Forms, ' the contributors investigate fictional, historical, and material forms; the impact those cultural phenomena had on the meaning and value attributed to literary works; and how such forms arose in response to historical conditions. The essays describe the historical range of Zimmerman's work, beginning with Defoe and ending with Coetzee, and treat such key writers of the long eighteenth century as Fielding, Richardson, Walpole, Austen, and Scot

This book examines the life of Lady Charlotte Guest Schreiber, who provided the first complete translation of the Mabinogion and ran her late husband's ironmongery. This book examines how collecting porcelain, playing cards, and fans allowed her to create a series of private signifying systems that countered the prevailing Victorian discourse assigned to women.

Americans and other English speakers have long associated the name of Hans Christian Andersen exclusively with fairy tales for children. Danes and other Scandinavians, however, have preserved an awareness that the fairy tales are but part of an extensive and respectable lifework that embraces several other literary forms. Moreover, they have never lost sight of the fact that the fairy tales themselves address adults no less than children. Significantly, many of Andersens coevals in the U.S. knew of his broader literary activity and the sophistication of his fairy tales. Major authors and critics commented on his various works in leading magazines and books, establishing a noteworthy corpus of criticism. One of them, Horace E. Scudder, wrote a seminal essay that surpassed virtually all contemporary writing on him in any language. The basic purpose of this study, the first of its kind, is to trace the course of American Andersen criticism over the second half of the nineteenth century and to view it in several American contexts. The introduction sets the parameters of the study, interalia posing a number of questions that serve as guidelines for reading. For instance, how does the (in part) retrospective criticism of the early 1870s compare with that of the later 1840s? To what extent did Americans view Andersen as a writer for adults as well as for children? Chapter 1 presents a statistical overview of American Andersen criticism, seeking to show which works were reviewed when and how often as well as in which magazines and with what frequency. The chapter also highlights works that were not reviewed, suggesting the possible impact on Americans' view of Andersen.

Fair Philosopher, the first sustained scholarly study of The Female Spectator, brings together an impressive collection of established and upcoming Haywood scholars who challenge much of the received opinion about this groundbreaking journal. Several of the essays show that Haywood's periodical was far more political than is generally thought, that its connections to her career as a novelist are more intimate than has been recognized, and that The Spectator was a target as well as a model. This collection makes a convincing argument that Haywood's periodical deserves far more critical attention than it has received so far and suggests new lines of development for future Haywood scholarship.