This is the first monograph of its kind to introduce and theorise empowerment as a new critical concept within contemporary literary studies. This book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in David Mitchell’s fictional universe as it offers fresh perspectives on his composition of an "Über-book", his narrative strategies and agenda, and ways of engaging the reader. This study is the first to situate David Mitchell’s novels within the context of eudaimonic reading and provide a comprehensive framework for reading fiction through the lens of empowerment. This book argues for a stronger interdisciplinary orientation of literary studies to understand how practices of storytelling are enmeshed in discourses of power. It may thus be relevant to academics and practitioners from fields such as history, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology, pedagogy or economics.

1.This is the first book-length study of male homosexuality in children’s literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 2.This book re-examines the central role of children and childhood to sexology and the articulation of homosexuality and gay identity. 3.This book reconsiders the history of gay literature by examining works for children by gay writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the first works for children known to have been described by their author as homosexual children’s literature. 4.This book calls for the reconsideration of the history of gay children’s and young adult literature and finds that important milestones occurred far earlier than the 1960s.

This book examines the representation of child sexual abuse in five American novels written from 1850 to the present. The historical range of the novels shows that child sexual abuse is not a new problem, although it has been called by other names in other eras. The introduction explains what literature and literary criticism bring to persistent questions that arise when children are sexually abused. Psychoanalytic concepts developed by Freud, Ferenczi, Kohut, and Lacan inform readings of the novels. Theories of trauma, shame, psychosis, and perversion provide insights into the characters represented in the stories. Each chapter is guided by a difficult question that has arisen from real-life situations of child sexual abuse. Legal and therapeutic interventions respond with their disciplinary resources to these questions as they concern victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Literary criticism offers another analytic framework that can significantly inform those responses.

Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

Since the publication of Gender in Trouble in 1990, Judith Butler has revolutionised our understanding of identities and the ways in which they are constructed. This volume examines her critical thought through key texts, touching upon such issues as:
*the subject
*gender
*sex
*language
*the psyche.
With clear discussions of the context and impact of Butler's work and an extensive guide to further reading, this book offers an excellent introduction to one of the most influential critical thinkers writing today.

Related link: http://www.literature.routledge.com/liter ature/rct/default.html
eBook available with sample pages: 0203118642

Translating Tagore's 'Stray Birds' into Chinese explores the choices in poetry translation in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and illustrates the ways in which readers can achieve a deeper understanding of translated works in English and Chinese. Focusing on Rabindranath Tagore's 'Stray Birds', a collection of elegant and philosophical poems, as a source text, Ma and Wang analyse four Chinese target texts by Zheng Zhenduo, Yao Hua, Lu Jinde and Feng Tang and consider their linguistic complexities through SFL. This book analyses the source text and the target texts from the perspectives of the four strata of language, including graphology, phonology, lexicogrammar and context. Ideal for researchers and academics of SFL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis, Translating Tagore's 'Stray Birds' into Chinese provides an in-depth exploration of SFL and its emerging prominence in the field of Translation Studies.

Valerius Maximus was an indefatigable collector of historical anecdotes illustrating vice and virtue. His Memorable Deeds and Sayings are unparalleled as a source for the opinions of Romans in the early empire on a vast range of subjects.
Mueller focuses on what Valerius can tell us about contemporary Roman attitudes to religion, attacking several orthodoxies along the way. He argues that Roman religion could be deeply emotional. That it was possible to believe passionately in the divinity of the emperor - even when, like Tiberius, he was still alive - and that Rome's gods and religious rituals had an important role in fostering conventional morality.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203463269

This book is a response to a call from prominent scholars in the field for further studies of men and masculinities in popular romance. Rather than discussing the romance genre as a whole, the book adds to the growing interest and broadens the scholarly conversation in popular romance studies by focusing on a specific subgenre. It could be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Literature/English; Cultural Studies; Women's, Gender, and/or Sexuality Studies. Suitable for the avid romance reader who is interested in the construction of the male character of popular romance novels.

The history of European drama began at the festivals of Dionysus in ancient Athens, where tragedy, satyr-drama and comedy were performed. Understanding this background is vital for students of classical, literary and theatrical subjects, and Alan H. Sommerstein's accessible study is the ideal introduction.
The book begins by looking at the social and theatrical contexts and different characteristics of the three genres of ancient Greek drama. It then examines the five main dramatists whose works survive - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander - discussing their styles, techniques and ideas, and giving short synopses of all their extant plays.

The author's grasp of the vast, often obscure, but highly interesting body of literature which emerged in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries commands the attention of a wide readership outside purely academic boundaries. Stagl weaves together a series of separate studies, emphasizing links between the figures, the philosophies and the literature of early modern times; links which have previously only been suspected.
In focusing on the "ars apodemica," or "art of travelling," a body of formal instruction on how to travel, observe and record the information gathered, Stagl demonstrates the origins of the characteristic inquisitive and systematizing spirit of the modern West.
"A History of Curiosity" examines the early methodology of anthropological and social research from a critical-historical perspective. The two principal methods of research, travel and the questionnaire, are studied in the context of the social conditions and intellectual trends of early modern times.

With the "Tangentopoli" corruption scandals of the early 1990s, Italy is purported recently to have experienced a period of political change comparable to the period immediately following World War II. This latter being the socio-political environment in which the concept of "impegno" - political commitment - in literature became current, this work asks whether an equivalent moment of constitutional crisis in the 1990s has had a comparable impact on perceptions of the role of the writer and of literature in Italian society. This volume traces the development of "impegno" (political commitment) in post-war Italian prose literature using the metaphor of fragmentation: the monolithic notion of commitment to an overarching political agenda has splintered, facilitating a fragmentary attention to specific issues.Part One examines the early "impegno" debate through the critical works of Vittorini, Calvino and Pasolini, tracing it forward into the 1960s and 1970s. The remaining three parts study in detail the "fragments of impegno" offered by contemporary authors - Tabucchi, Ramondino, De Carlo, Tondelli, Ballestra, and African immigrant writers, including Fazel, Melliti and Methnani. This range of authors and texts illustrates the ways in which socio-political issues are explicitly or implicitly addressed, represented, or embedded in contemporary Italian literature.

A far-sighted Victorian, William Morris was a pioneering socialist, book designer and decorative artist, founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and author of intense short lyrics, long poetic narratives, and utopian-socialist prose romances. This annotated critical edition is the first attempt to make Morris's 42,000-word verse sequence accessible to a modern audience. The edition's scholarly apparatus also records the location of extant manuscripts and provides full scholarly collations of changes made in Morris's text during his lifetime.
Extensive reader aids for enhanced comprehension and a wealth of references relating the work to art, history, and politics are two of this book's most important features. In addition, sample illustrations and original initials provide a sense of The Earthly Paradise's original appearance and design.

Literature and Understanding investigates the cognitive gain from literature by focussing on a reader's close analysis of a literary text. It examines the meaning of 'literature', outlines the most prominent positions in the literary cognitivism debate, explores the practice of close reading from a philosophical perspective, provides a fresh account of what we mean by 'understanding' and in so doing opens up a new area of research in the philosophy of literature. This book provides a different reply to the challenge that we can't learn anything worthwhile from reading literary fiction. It makes the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature rather than as fiction stimulates five relevant senses of understanding. The book uses examples of irony, metaphor, play with perspective and ambiguity to illustrate this contention. Before arguing that these five senses of understanding bridge the gap between our understanding of a literary text and our understanding of the world beyond that text. The book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory, literature in education and pedagogy.

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama-one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as "Shakespeare's late plays," "tragicomedy," or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

Four hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, his works continue to not only fill playhouses around the world, but also be adapted in various forms for consumption in popular culture, including in film, television, comics and graphic novels, and digital media. Drawing on theories of play and adaptation, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations demonstrates how the practices of Shakespearean adaptations are frequently products of playful, and sometimes irreverent, engagements that allow new 'Shakespeares' to emerge, revealing Shakespeare's ongoing impact in popular culture. Significantly, this collection explores the role of play in the construction of meaning in Shakespearean adaptations-adaptations of both the works of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare the man-and contributes to the growing scholarly interest in playfulness both past and present. The chapters in Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations engage with the diverse ways that play is used in Shakespearean adaptations on stage, screen, and page, examining how these adaptations draw out existing humour in Shakespeare's works, the ways that play is used as a pedagogical aid to help explain complex language, themes, and emotions found in Shakespeare's works, and more generally how play and playfulness can make Shakespeare 'relatable,' 'relevant,' and entertaining for successive generations of audiences and readers.

This book addresses the concept of 'disaster' through a variety of literary texts dating back to the early modern period. While Shakespeare's age, which was an era of colonisation, certainly marked a turning point in men and women's relations with nature, the present times seem to announce the advent of environmental justice in spite of the massive ecological destructions that have contributed to reshape our planet. Between then and now, a whole history of climatic disasters and of their artistic depictions needs to be traced. The literary representations of eco-catastrophes, in particular, have consistently fashioned the English identity and led to the progress of science and the 'advancement of learning'. They have also obliged us to adapt, recycle and innovate. How could the destructive process entailed by ecological disasters be represented on the page and thereby transformed into a creative process encouraging meditation, preservation and resilience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? To this question, this book offers nuanced, contextualised and perceptive answers. Divided into three main sections 'Extreme Conditions', 'Tempestuous Skies', and 'Biblical Calamities,' it deals with the major environmental issues of our time through the prism of early modern culture and literature.

The Critical Heritage series collects together criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a particular writer, showing students the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition. Selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included to demonstrate posthumous fluctuations in the writer's reputation.
This new volume includes criticism the work of William Wordsworth between 1793 and 1820. Over 250 diary extracts, letters, reviews, comments, and opinions by and about Wordsworth are gathered together here for the first time. This is an invaluable addition to any literary library.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203169026

Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. It offers an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the era: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project's scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse and afterlife to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity. Every poet featured in the book seeks and finds their uniqueness in their apprehension of eternity. From Blake's assertion of the Eternal Now to Keats's defiance of eternity, Wordsworth's 'two consciousnesses' versus Coleridge's capacious poetry, Byron's swithering between versions of eternity compared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans's superlative account of everlasting female suffering, each poet finds new versions of eternity to explore or reject. This monograph sets out a paradigm-shifting approach to the aesthetic and philosophical power of eternity in Romantic poetry.

This new essay collection brings together some of the top BrontA" scholars working today, as well as new critical voices, to examine the many layers of Anne BrontA"'s fiction and other writings and to restore BrontA" to her rightful place in literary history. Until very recently, BrontA"'s literary fate has been to live in the critical shadow of her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, in spite of the fact that her two published novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were widely read and discussed during her lifetime. From a variety of fields-including psychology, religion, social criticism and literary tradition-the contributors to New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne BrontA" re-assess her works as those of an artist, which demand the rigorous scholarship and attention that they receive here.

This is a study of the noted newspaper proprietor, publisher and editor, George Newnes and his involvement in the so-called New Journalism in Britain from 1880 to 1910. The author examines seven of Newnes's most successful periodicals - Tit-Bits (1881), The Strand Magazine (1891), The Million (1892), The Westminster Gazette (1893), The Wide World Magazine (1898), The Ladies' Field (1898) and The Captain (1899) - from a biographical, journalistic and broader cultural perspective. Newnes assumed a pioneering role in the creation of the penny miscellany paper, the short-story magazine, the true-story magazine and the respectable boys' paper, in the development of colour printing, magazine illustration and photographic reproduction, and in the redefinition of both political and sporting journalism. His publications were shaped by his own distinctive brand of paternalism, his professional progression within the field of journalism, his liberal-democratic and imperialist beliefs, and his particular skill as an entrepreneur. This innovative periodical publisher utilised the techniques of personalised journalism, commercial promotion and audience targeting to establish an interactive relationship and a strong bond of identification with his many readers. Kate Jackson employs an interdisciplinary approach, building on recent scholarship in the field of periodical research, to demonstrate that Newnes balanced and synthesised various potentially conflicting imperatives to create a kind of synergy between business and benevolence, popular and quality journalism, old and new journalism and , ultimately, culture and profit.

The Holy Mountain of Athos is a self governing monastic republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece. Standing on the shores of the Aegean Sea is one of the twenty ruling monasteries that comprise the republic, that of St Panteleimon, known in Greek as the Rossikon. It's building, fully restored in recent years, can accommodate up to 5,000 men, reflecting the scale of the settlement at its apogee in the nineteenth century and prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it has experienced a strong revival and is now one of the most numerous of the twenty. But the vast buildings that can be seen today are really only a reflection of the history of the past two centuries. Much less well known is the fact that the history of a Russian presence on Athos goes back more than one thousand years. This is the first comprehensive account of this in the English language. The author has been able to draw from previously inaccessible archival materials in gathering the wealth of information he shares in this work. The history of the community is not described in geographical isolation but shown as interacting with the much wider worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and the modern nation state of Greece, together with that of the Russian homeland whose political character is constantly evolving. There are shown to be three distinct phases in this history: From the tenth to the twelfth centuries when Russian Athonites inhabited the ancient Russian Lavra of the Mother of God, also known as Xylourgou. Then the six hundred years from the mid-twelth to the mid-eighteenth century when the ancient Monastery of St Panteleimon was the Russian house on Athos, more commonly referred to as Nagorny or Stary Rusik. Finally the most recent 250 years, that are naturally covered in greater depth thanks to the wider availability of sources. Amongst the themes explored in the book are ethnic relations, the Pan-Orthodox ideal, the role of money and political pressure, sanctity and heroism in adversity, and the importance of historical memory and precedent. The author seeks to arbitrate fairly between often strongly opposing ethnic viewpoints. It examines in detail the fluctuating fortunes of the monastic community of St Panteleimon during the past 250 years when its ethnic identity was frequently questioned. It is a history that has been blighted by Greek-Russian quarrels, mass deportation of dissenting brethren, troubles in the Caucasus, and even tangential implication in the present-day dispute between the Ecumenical and Moscow Patriarchates over Ukraine. This text will be invaluable to both academic historians and the general educated reader who does not possess specialist knowledge. It is complimented by a timeline, glossary, comprehensive bibliography, index, full colour illustrations and photographs.

Using a combination of formalist and psychology-based approaches, this work examines the triple knowledge of subjectivity, body and language in medieval imaginative literature. Building on a long tradition of scholarship in areas of linguistics and psychology, the book seeks to explain how subjectivity is formed in medieval texts.

Popular romance fiction constitutes the largest segment of the global book market. Bringing together an international group of scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction offers a ground-breaking exploration of this global genre and its remarkable readership. In recognition of the diversity of the form, the Companion provides a history of the genre, an overview of disciplinary approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of important subgenres, themes, and topics. It also highlights new and understudied avenues of inquiry for future research in this vibrant and still-emerging field. The first systematic, comprehensive resource on romance fiction, this Companion will be invaluable to students and scholars, and accessible to romance readers.

provides an original take on the concept of translation and repetition applied to uncreative or iterative literature. applicable to a range of areas and courses within translation studies and literature and a growing area of research. covers a very wide range of writers, artists and translators from Latin and North America to Europ

This reference treats a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to discrete topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the 20th century. Entries are divided into: poet entries - providing biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career, with critical evaluation of the most salient poems or volumes of verse in her/his development; entries on individual works - offering closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries - offering analyses of a given period of literary production such as the Harlem Renaissance, a formal rubric (Free Verse), a school or a distinctive mode of expression (Black Mountain School, Confessional Poetry), a more thematically constructed category (Gay and Lesbian Poetry), and other verse traditions that historically have been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States (Canadian Poetry, Caribbean Poetry).