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.

First published in 1991, this book is the first annotated bibliography of feminist Shakespeare criticism from 1975 to 1988 - a period that saw a remarkable amount of ground-breaking work. While the primary focus is on feminist studies of Shakespeare, it also includes wide-ranging works on language, desire, role-playing, theatre conventions, marriage, and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture - shedding light on Shakespeare's views on and representation of women, sex and gender. Accompanying the 439 entries are extensive, informative annotations that strive to maintain the original author's perspective, supplying a careful and thorough account of the main points of an article.

The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets collects together writings by all the major poetic figures from Chaucer to Yeats demonstrating their vivid responses to each other, ranging from elegiac eulogy to burlesque and satire. The anthology is arranged in two sections. Part One contains poets' writings on the nature, qualities and purpose of poetry Part Two is a chronological collection of poets' writings on their peers, with an individual entry for each poet. Each extract is presented in modernized spelling and punctuation, and is carefully annotated to provide full explanations of unfamiliar phrases and references. The index has been fully revised for this paperback edition. The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets will be stimulating and enjoyable for anyone interested in the history of English poetry, but will also be an invaluable collection of primary source material for students and their teachers.

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

This book addresses the place of women writers in anthologies and other literary collections in eighteenth-century England. It explores and contextualizes the ways in which two different kinds of printed material-poetic miscellanies and biographical collections-complemented one another in defining expectations about the woman writer. Far more than the single-authored text, it was the collection in one form or another that invested poems and their authors with authority. By attending to this fascinating cultural context, Chantel Lavoie explores how women poets were placed posthumously in the world of eighteenth-century English letters. Investigating the lives and works of four well-known poets-Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Elizabeth Rowe-Lavoie illuminates the ways in which celebrated women were collected alongside their poetry, the effect of collocation on individual reputations, and the intersection between bibliography and biography as female poets themselves became curiosities. In so doing, Collecting Women contributes to the understanding of the intersection of cultural history, canon formation, and literary collecting in eighteenth-century England.

Gothic Terrors brings together two discursive fields that have had very little contact hitherto: gothic studies and Hispanism. Though widely accepted in English studies, Hispanists seldom invoke the concept of a Gothic mode existing beyond its first appearance in the eighteenth century. Highlighting Gothic elements in mainstream Spanish fiction from the nineteenth century until the present day, Lee Six challenges the view that Spanish writers rejected what the Gothic had to offer. Through close study of texts by Benito Perez Galdos, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Miguel de Unamuno, Camilo Jose Cela, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Espido Freire, and Javier Garcia Sanchez, Abigail Lee Six traces the evolution of three staples of the Gothic: the heroine imprisoned on grounds of madness, the doubled or split character, and the use of violent, gory description. Persuasively argued and well researched, Gothic Terrors reflects on the Gothic presence in Spanish mainstream literature and identifies two important ways in which it crosses cultural divides: the traditional gulf between high and low culture within Spain, and the engagement of Spanish creative writers with transnational literary trends. Gothic Terrors will thus appeal to Gothic scholars who are interested in the Spanish dimension of their field, as well as to Hispanists who may have been unaware of how relevant and useful Gothic studies could be for them.

First published in 1968, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric is designed primarily to assist the student of renaissance literature in the science of rhetoric. It gathers together the information provided by the various different authorities who contributed to the education of the renaissance author, particularly the writer in English. These authorities include key classical rhetoricians he would probably have read, well-known and important renaissance rhetoricians, and the writers of vernacular treatises and of major school textbooks. The information is arranged in a schematic and tabular form, so that enquiry can start from the object, the particular rhetorical form as it appears in a given literary text. The core of the book is the central section on elocutio, the art of using the devices of rhetorical ornament.

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.

William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns.

In "Faulkner's Sexualities," contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a Southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

The most significant European poet of the second half of the twentieth century, Paul Celan, viewed poetry as 'the language of an individual that has become form,' an individual that is constructed through the act of observation in the poem. In Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan, Derek Hillard argues that individuality is the crux of poetry for Celan because the Holocaust effectively eviscerated the individual. Hillard investigates the core figures of individuality in Celan's poetry and prose: semblance, madness, and the wound. Celan's enigmatic poetry of a depopulated textual universe has perplexed critics. This book argues that the poetry's figures have a common source--the discourse of observation from the fields of appearance, perception, and the mind.

Offering guidance and inspiration to English literature instructors, this book faces the challenges of real-life teaching and the contemporary higher education classroom head on. Whether you're teaching in a community college, a state school, a liberal arts college, or an Ivy League institution, this book offers valuable advice and insights which will help you to motivate, incentivize and inspire your students. Addressing questions such as: 'how do you articulate the value of literary education to students (and administrators, and parents)?', 'how can a class session with a fatigued and underprepared group of students be made productive?', and 'how do you incentivize overscheduled students to read energetically in preparation for class?', this book answers these universal quandaries and more, providing a usable philosophy of the value of literary education, articulating a set of learning goals for students of literature, and offering plenty of practical advice on pedagogical strategies, day-to-day coping, and more. In its sum, Teaching Literature in the Real World constitutes an experience-based philosophy of teaching literature that is practical and realistic, oriented towards helping students develop intellectual skills, and committed to pedagogy built on explicit, detailed, and observable learning objectives.

The purpose of this collection, which was first published in 1996, is to provide both an overview of the major critical approaches to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a selection of the best essays dealing with them. The essays examine the origins of the Mabinogion, comparative analyses, and structural and thematic interpretations. This book is ideal for students of literature and Medieval studies.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called "epiphanies." Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce's writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce's entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies-silence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity-as a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce's oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce's career. MacDuff compares Joyce's concept of epiphany to Classical, Biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce's epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature, and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce's contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Examining the development of gay American fiction and providing an essential reading list, this literary survey covers 257 works-novels, novellas, a graphic story cycle and a narrative poem-in which gay and bisexual male characters play a major role. Iconic works, such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, are included, along with titles not given attention by earlier surveys, such as Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring, Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Julian Green's Each in His Darkness, Ursula Zilinsky's Middle Ground and David Plante's The Ghost of Henry James. Chronological entries discuss each work's plot, significance for gay identity and publication history, along with a brief biography of the author.

Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"-Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby-Dick and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States' past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Conversations with William Maxwell collects thirty-eight interviews, public speeches, and remarks that span five decades of the esteemed novelist and New Yorker editor's career. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Maxwell's literary work--with in-depth discussion of his short stories, essays, and novels including They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow--as well as his forty-year tenure as a fiction editor working with such luminaries as John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.D. Salinger. Maxwell's words spoken before a crowd, some previously unpublished, pay moving tribute to literary friends and mentors, and offer reflections on the artistic life, the process of writing, and his Midwestern heritage. All retain the reserved poignancy of his fiction. The volume publishes for the first time the full transcript of Maxwell's extensive interviews with his biographer and, in an introduction, correspondence with writers including Updike and Saul Bellow, which enlivens the stories behind his interviews and appearances.

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls' book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls' book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl's essentially good nature neutralize the girl's own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence-a category that continues to engage and perplex us-from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls' book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on best-selling novels in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls reframes our understanding of the history of the girls' book and provides insightful readings of forgotten bestsellers. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl-so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls-remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

It has long been recognised that there is an apparently paradoxical relationship between the revolutionary poetic style developed by Yeats, Eliot and Pound in the period during and after the First World War, and the reactionary politics with which they were associated in the 1920s and 1930s. Concentrating on their writings in the period up to the 1930s, this study, first published in 1982, helps to resolve the paradox and also provides a much needed reappraisal of the factors influencing their poetic and political development. The work of these poets has usually been seen as deriving from the tradition of continental symbolist poetics. Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry will be of interest to students of literature.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader provides a comprehensive selection of contemporary and modern essays on the most important novels of the period. By bringing together a range of material written across two centuries, it offers an insight into the changing reception of realist fiction and a discussion of how complex debates about the meaning and function of realism informed and shaped the kind of fiction that was written in the nineteenth century. The novels discussed are: Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son, Middlemarch, Far From the Madding Crowd, Germinal, Madame Bovary, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awakening, Dracula, Heart of Darkness.

Fascinating and comprehensive in scope, the Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction is a valuable source for both students and teachers of literature, and for those interested in locating the facts behind the fiction they read. In a single, scholarly volume, it provides intriguing insight into the real identity of people and places in the novels of over 300 American and British authors published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.