First published in 1906, this edition of Magnyfycence aimed to highlight the true significance of the play within both the canon of John Skelton's work and English drama. Robert Lee Ramsay situates Magnyfycence as a morality play which functioned as a bridge between medieval miracle plays and the modern comedy. He demonstrates the text's significance as the first example of a play by an English man of letters and our first example of a secular and literary rather than theological morality play. This edition features an extensive scholarly introduction exploring areas such as the staging, versification, sources and characterisation, followed by the Middle-English text itself along with glosses.

Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his stagecraft. 15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing, smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature, and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and page. The volume explores and develops current methods for studying Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges created by this emergent and influential area of scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.

This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions, and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality, and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies, and the history of storytelling in America.

Charles Fort was an American researcher from the early twentieth century who cataloged reports of unexplained phenomena he found in newspapers and science journals. A minor bestseller with a cult appeal, Fort's work was posthumously republished in the pulp science fiction magazine Astounding Stories in 1934. His idiosyncratic books fascinated, scared, and entertained readers, many of them authors and editors of science fiction. Fort's work prophesied the paranormal mainstays of SF literature to come: UFOs, poltergeists, strange disappearances, cryptids, ancient mysteries, unexplained natural phenomena, and everything in between. Science fiction authors latched on to Fort's topics and hypotheses as perfect fodder for SF stories. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, and others are examined in this exploration of Fortean science fiction-a genre that borrows from the reports and ideas of Fort and others who saw the possible science-fictional nature of our reality.

A disproportionate number of male writers, including such figures as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Haki Madhubuti, continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. Though there has arisen an increasing amount of scholarship that recognizes leading women artists, activists, and leaders of this period, these new perspectives have yet to recognize adequately the ways women aspired to far more than a mere dismantling of male-oriented ideals.

In "Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement," Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement. Angela Jackson, Johari Amiri, and Carolyn Rodgers reflect in their writing specific cultural, local, and regional insights, and demonstrate the capaciousness of Black Art rather than its constraints. Expanding from these three writers, Phelps analyzes the breadth of women's writing in BAM. In doing so, Phelps argues that these and other women attained advantageous and unique positions to represent the potential of the BAM aesthetic, even if their experiences and artistic perspectives were informed by both social conventions and constraints. In this book, Phelps's examination brings forward a powerful and crucial contribution to the aesthetics and history of a movement that still inspires.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols, a review quiz and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

With the decline of formalism and its predilection for Old English poetry, Old English prose is leaving the periphery and moving into the center of literary and cultural discussion. The extensive corpus of Old English prose lends many texts of various kinds to the current debates over literary theory and its multiple manifestations. The purpose of this collection is to assist the growing interest in Old English prose by providing essays that help establish the foundations for considered study and offer models and examples of special studies. Both retrospective and current in its examples, this collection can serve as a "first book" for an introduction to study, particularly suitable for courses that seek to entertain such issues as authorship, texts and textuality, source criticism, genre, and forms of historical criticism as a significant part of a broad, cultural teaching (and research) plan.

In the six essays of this book, Ksana Blank examines affinities among works of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and their connections to the visual arts and music. Blank demonstrates that the borders of authorial creativity are not stable and absolute, that talented artists often transcend the classifications and paradigms established by critics. Featured in the volume are works by Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Kazimir Malevich, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Over the past four decades, source criticism--the analysis of a writer's source material--has emerged as one of the most popular approaches in exploring the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Since Tolkien drew from a wide range of disparate sources in the construction of his legendarium--from The Book of Lost Tales to The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, and beyond--an understanding of the sources Tolkien used, as well as how and why he incorporated them, can enhance readers' appreciation of his works immeasurably. This compendium by leading Tolkien scholars describes the theory and methodology for proper source criticism of Tolkien's works and then provides practical demonstrations of the approach. Ranging widely across Tolkien's works, as well as across the periods and genres from which he took inspiration, the essays provide the most balanced and comprehensive demonstration of source criticism ever collected in a single volume.

Join Mike Ashley on a characterful tour of the most ingenious and often forgotten books from the rich history of classic British science fiction. From the enrapturing tales of H. G. Wells to the punishing dystopian visions of 1984 and beyond, the evolution of science fiction from the 1890s to the 1960s is a fascinating journey into the hopes and fears of those years. Establishing this period as what we can now appreciate as the 'classic' age of the genre, which for most of this time had no name, Mike Ashley takes us on a tour of the stars, utopian and post-apocalyptic futures, worlds of AI and techno-thriller masterpieces asking piercing questions of the present. Though not seeking to be exhaustive, this book offers an accessible view of the impressive spectrum of imaginative writing which the genre's classic period has to offer. Towering science fiction greats such as Ballard and Aldiss run alongside the, perhaps unexpected, likes of G. K. Chesterton and J. B. Priestley and celebrate a side of science fiction beyond the stereotypes of space opera and bug-eyed monsters; the side of science fiction which proves why it must continue to be written and read, so long as any of us remain in uncertain times.

First published in 1954, A Handbook of Latin Literature is an attempt to put together a cohesive account of classical and early post-classical writings in the Latin tongue, and is a companion to the Handbook of Greek Literature. The book traces the history of Latin literature from the earliest times down to the death of St. Augustine, and tackles both theological and non-theological interests of Christian authors. This book will be of interest to students of history and literature.

First published in 1959, Outlines of Classical Literature is a guide for students of English literature who too often come to this difficult and complex subject with little or no knowledge of one of its principal sources. It therefore does not attempt to give a complete account of the Greek and Roman writers, but tries instead to deal with those whose influences, direct or indirect, can be clearly traced in medieval and later authors. The ancients are taken in their chronological order, though this is not necessarily the order in which they became known to, or influenced the Christian World; but to follow the latter would be too confusing. The book should be of interest to the undergraduate, the general reader and to the literary critic desirous of displaying classical erudition.

First published in 1925, Primitive Culture in Greece dispassionately reviews the claim that the Greeks were 'heathen' and asks how much of the savage ancestry was left in the classical Greek. In doing so it traces a historical continuity from the barbaric invasions of Greece to its later emergence of a classical culture. It is not written merely for the specialist, and assumes no technical knowledge, but simply an interest in one of the most remarkable civilizations of the world.

Between 1880 and 1914, England saw the emergence of an unprecedented range of new literary forms from Modernism to the popular thriller. Not coincidentally, this period also marked the first overt references to an art/market divide through which books took on new significance as markers of taste and class. Though this division has received considerable attention relative to the narrative structures of the period's texts, little attention has been paid to the institutions and ideologies that largely determined a text's accessibility and circulated format and thus its mode of address to specific readerships. Hammond addresses this gap in scholarship, asking the following key questions: How did publishing and distribution practices influence reader choice? Who decided whether or not a book was a 'classic'? In a patriarchal, class-bound literary field, how were the symbolic positions of 'author' and 'reader' affected by the increasing numbers of women who not only bought and borrowed, but also wrote novels? Using hitherto unexamined archive material and focussing in detail on the working practices of publishers and distributors such as Oxford University Press and W.H. Smith and Sons, Hammond combines the methodologies of sociology, literary studies and book history to make an original and important contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics and rhetorics of the fin-de-siecle literary field in England.

James Loeb (1867-1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), psychology and medicine (2021), and music (2023). The subject of the inaugural conference was the legacy for which Loeb is best known and the only one to which he attached his name-the Loeb Classical Library, and the three series it has inspired: the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, and the Murty Classical Library of India. Including discussions by the four General Editors of each Library's unique history, mission, operations, and challenges, the papers collected in The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny also take stock of these series in light of more general themes and questions bearing on translations of "classical" texts and their audiences in a variety of societies past, present, and future.

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. Volume 6 addresses the literature of the 'Victorian twilight' (1870-1921), including the novels of Hardy, poetry of Swinburne, drama by Yeats and Shaw, and views from abroad by Kipling and Conrad.

New Aphorisms & Reflections: Second Series, the fifth volume of a major work in progress, features more than 400 entries, some of which are autobiographical. Like its predecessors, New Aphorisms & Reflections includes a sampling of 'meetings of the minds'-dialogues between the author and aphorists and thinkers of the past.

This book traces the development of a Left feminist consciousness as women became more actively involved in the American Left during and immediately following World War II. McDonald argues that women writers on the Left drew on the rhetoric of antifascism to critique the cultural and ideological aspects of women's oppression. In Left journals during World War II, women writers outlined the dangers of fascist control for women and argued that the fight against fascism must also be about ending women's oppression. After World War II, women writers continued to use this antifascist framework to call attention to the ways in which the emerging domestic ideology in the United States bore a frightening resemblance to the fascist repression of women in Nazi Germany.

This critique of American domestic ideology emphasized the ways in which black and working-class women were particularly affected and extended to an examination of women's roles in personal and romantic relationships. Underlying this critique was the belief that representations of women in American culture were part of the problem. To counter these dominant cultural images, women writers on the Left depicted female activists in contemporary antifascist and anticolonial struggles or turned to the past, for historical role models in the labor, abolitionist, and antisuffrage movements. This depiction of women as models of agency and liberation challenged some of the conventions about femininity in the postwar era.

The book provides a historical overview of women writers who anticipated issues about women's oppression and the intersections of gender, race, and class that would become central tenants of feminist literary criticism and black feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. It closely considers works by writers both well-known and obscure, including Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Martha Dodd, Sanora Babb, and Beth McHenry.

Play Up and Play the Game (1973) examines the type of fictional hero most embodied in the work and character, poetry and philosophy of Sir Henry Newbolt. 'Newbolt Man', imbued with the spirit of fairplay, loyalty, fearlessness, conformity (while remaining slightly philistine and sexless), can be traced in the work of Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Anthony Hope and P.C. Wren. The book traces his development from the Victorian schoolboy (Tom Brown's School Days and Kipling) to the twentieth-century secret agent (Buchan's Richard Hannay), and on to his demise in Sheriff's Journey's End and Aldington's Death of a Hero.

Known as ""Captain Fiction,"" Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential--and controversial--figures in modern American letters. As an editor at Esquire (1969-1977), Alfred A. Knopf (1977-1995), and The Quarterly (1987-1995) and as a teacher both in and outside the university system, he has worked closely with many of the most pioneering writers of recent times, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus. A prolific author of stories and novels, Lish has also won a cult following for his own fiction, earning comparisons with Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments: the impact of the Californian counterculture, the rise and decline of so-called literary ""minimalism,"" dramatic transformations in book and magazine publishing, and the ongoing growth of creative writing instruction. Over time, Lish--a self-described ""dynamic conversationalist""-- forges an evolving conversation not only with his interviewers, but with the central trends of twentieth-century literary history. This book will be essential reading not only for students and fans of contemporary fiction, but for writers too: included are several interviews in which Lish discusses his legendary writing classes. Indeed, these pieces themselves amount to a masterclass in Lishian literary language--each is a work of art in its own right.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols, a review quiz and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

New Aphorisms & Reflections, the fourth volume of a major work in progress, features nearly 500 entries, some of which are autobiographical. Like its predecessors, New Aphorisms & Reflections includes a sampling of "meetings of the minds"-dialogues between the author and aphorists and thinkers of the past.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz, and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

When creating her post-apocalyptic world of The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins drew from various real-world history and geography, particularly from Appalachia, which is reflected in the culture and location of District 12. With the release of her 2019 prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins brought readers deeper into Appalachia's extraordinary cultural diversity and its storied musical traditions. This book provides a tour of human geography, history and culture that establishes the foundation for the saga's novels and films. Told from the expertise of a geographer, it explores how place can shape culture, how social and geographical concepts intersect and how these ideas apply to The Hunger Games. Specifically, the work explores the idea of "home," and how attachment to a place is strengthened through landscape, geography and song.