If there's a God, which at the moment I DOUBT, I want you to curse him. If there's any justice, I want them - both of them - in a car crash. Her husband's gone and her future isn't bright. Imprisoned in her marital home, Medea can't work, can't sleep and increasingly can't cope. While her child plays, she plots her revenge. This startlingly modern version of Euripides' classic tragedy explores the private fury bubbling under public behaviour and how in today's world a mother, fuelled by anger at her husband's infidelity, might be driven to commit the worst possible crime. The production is written and directed by one of the UK's most exciting and in-demand writers, Mike Bartlett, who has received critical acclaim for his plays including Earthquakes in London; Cock (Olivier Award), a new stage version of Chariots of Fire, and Love Love Love. This programme text coincides with a run at the Headlong Theatre in London from the 27th of September to the 1st of December 2012.

Foreign Accents examines the various transpacific signifying strategies by which poets of Chinese descent in the U.S. have sought to represent cultural tradition in their articulations of an ethnic subjectivity, in Chinese as well as in English. In assessing both the dynamics and the politics of poetic expression by writers engaging with a specific cultural heritage, the study develops a general theory of ethnic literary production that clarifies the significance of "Asian American" literature in relation to both other forms of U.S. "minority discourse," as well as canonical "American" literature more generally. At the same time, it maps an expanded textual arena and a new methodology for Asian American literary studies that can be further explored by scholars of other traditions.
Yao discusses a range of works, including Ezra Pound's Cathay and the Angel Island poems. He examines the careers of four contemporary Chinese/American poets: Ha Jin, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the linguistic and cultural tradition he or she seeks to represent. Specifically, Yao investigates the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and, especially, language in their works. Combining such analysis with extensive social contextualization, Foreign Accents delineates an historical poetics of Chinese American verse from the early twentieth century to the present.

This volume reflects one of the new areas of English Studies as it broadens to take in non-western literatures, and places more emphasis on the contexts and broader notions of `writing'. In discussing writing from and about Africa, this collection touches on studies in black writing, colonialism and imperialism and cultural development in the third world. It begins by providing a historical introduction to the main regional traditions, and then builds on this to discuss major issues, such as oral tradition, the significance of `literature' as a western import, representations of Africa in western writing, African writing against colonialism and its themes and politics in a post-colonial world, popular writing and the representation of women.

This study focuses on Laches, Protagoras, and the conversation between Socrates and Agathon in the Symposium. For these dialogues the author "proposes a strategy of interpretation that insists on the dialogues' essentially interrogatory character. . . . Stokes argues that we are not entitled to ascribea thesis to Socrates (far less to Plato) unless he unambiguously asserts it as his own belief. . . . For the most part, Stokes argues, Socrates is doing what he claims to be doing: cross-examining his interlocutor. He draws the materials of his own argument from the respondent's explicit admissions and from his own knowledge of the respondent's character, commitments and ways of life.What is shown by such a procedure is not, . . . according to Stokes], that acertain thesis is true or false, but, rather, that a certain sort of person, with certain commitments, can be led, on pain of inconsistency, to assent to theses that at first seem alien to him. Sometimes, as it turns out, these are theses that Socrates also endorses in his own person." "Times Literary Supplement"

The Face of Mammon studies the gold and silver coins of sixteenth-century England as they are articulated in literary writing. Landreth argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know-- not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics. The writers central to this study--among them Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne--use the coin to demonstrate the interdependence of these competing discourses as they converge upon a single, ubiquitous object. For these authors, an understanding of the world that humans make for themselves relies upon understanding how the material world is made. The small circumference of the coin brings these contending worlds into contact.

Utilizing recent trends in literary and language theory, "Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context" makes new theoretical insights available to its audience. Contributors to this volume employ analytical and interpretive strategies which are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation.
The collection's essays, which are arranged into three groups focusing on the textual level, narrative and context, explore a number of 20th century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this user-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading.
Designed not only for native English speakers, but also for those who read English as a foreign or second language, "Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context" provides an indispensable introduction which is both sensitive and enabling.

By applying recent trends in literary and language theory to a range of 20th Century fiction, the contributors to this text make new theoretical insights available to student readers. The analytical and interpretive strategies examined in this book are not intended to be prescriptive, rather they are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation.
The essays, which are arranged into three groups and which focus on the textual level, narrative and context, look at a wide range of Twentieth Century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this student-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading.
Aimed at beginning students of English Language and Literature and Applied Linguistics, and advanced students of English as a Foreign or Second Language, 20th Century Fiction provides an essential introduction to the subject which is both sensitive and enabling.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Damascius was head of the Neoplatonist academy in Athens when the Emperor Justinian shut its doors forever in 529. His work, Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, is the last surviving independent philosophical treatise from the Late Academy. Its survey of Neoplatonist metaphysics, discussion of transcendence, and compendium of late antique theologies, make it unique among all extant works of late antique philosophy. It has never before been translated into English.
The Problems and Solutions exhibits a thorough?going critique of Proclean metaphysics, starting with the principle that all that exists proceeds from a single cause, proceeding to critique the Proclean triadic view of procession and reversion, and severely undermining the status of intellectual reversion in establishing being as the intelligible object. Damascius investigates the internal contradictions lurking within the theory of descent as a whole, showing that similarity of cause and effect is vitiated in the case of processions where one order (e.g. intellect) gives rise to an entirely different order (e.g. soul).
Neoplatonism as a speculative metaphysics posits the One as the exotic or extopic explanans for plurality, conceived as immediate, present to hand, and therefore requiring explanation. Damascius shifts the perspective of his metaphysics: he struggles to create a metaphysical discourse that accommodates, insofar as language is sufficient, the ultimate principle of reality. After all, how coherent is a metaphysical system that bases itself on the Ineffable as a first principle? Instead of creating an objective ontology, Damascius writes ever mindful of the limitations of dialectic, and of the pitfalls and snares inherent in the very structure of metaphysical discourse.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

The ancient world served as an unconventional source of inspiration for a generation of modernists. Drawing on examples from literature, dance, photography, and film, Modernism's Mythic Pose argues that a strain of antimodern-classicism permeates modernist celebrations of novelty, shock, and technology.
The touchstone of Preston's study is Delsartism--the popular transnational movement which promoted mythic statue--posing, poetic recitation, and other hybrid solo performances for health and spiritual development. Derived from nineteenth-century acting theorist Francois Delsarte and largely organized by women, Delsartism shaped modernist performances, genres, and ideas of gender. Even Ezra Pound, a famous promoter of the "new," made ancient figures speak in the "old" genre of the dramatic monologue and performed public recitations. Recovering precedents in nineteenth-century popular entertainments and Delsartism's hybrid performances, this book considers the canonical modernists Pound and T. S. Eliot, lesser-known poets like Charlotte Mew, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, Isadora Duncan the international dance star, and H.D. as poet and film actor.
Preston's interdisciplinary engagement with performance, poetics, modern dance, and silent film demonstrates that studies of modernism often overemphasize breaks with the past. Modernism also posed myth in an ambivalent relationship to modernity, a halt in the march of progress that could function as escapism, skeptical critique, or a figure for the death of gods and civilizations."

This volume, to which European, American, and Israeli scholars have contributed, is designed to inform students of the Old Testament of the impact of archaeological discovery upon Old Testament study, with particular reference to specific sites. Twenty-five sites are included, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, and there are three regional studies, of Philistia, the Negeb, and Transjordan. Brief histories of the excavations are given, and the archaeological material is related to the Old Testament in such a way as to bring out points of interest concerning history, geography, chronology, religion, literature, language, law, industry, and the arts. The volumes include bibliographies, illustrations, maps, and a chronological chart.

A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Bronte, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions--the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence--show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings, The Novelty of Newspapers breaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel."

St. Brigitta of Sweden (1303-73, canonized 1391) was one of the most charismatic and influential visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Altogether, she received some 700 revelations dealing with a variety of subjects, from meditations on the human condition, domestic affairs in Sweden, and ecclesiastical matters in Rome, to revelations in praise of the Incarnation and devotion to the Virgin. Her Revelationes, collected and ordered by her confessors, circulated widely throughout Europe both during her lifetime and long after her death. Many eminent individuals, including Cardinal Juan Torqemada and Martin Luther, read and commented on her writings, which influenced the spiritual lives of countless individuals. Birgitta was also the founder of a new contemplative order, which still exists. She is the patron saint of Sweden, and in 2000 was declared (with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein) the first co-patroness of Europe. Interest in Birgitta's Revelationes has grown over the past decade. Historians and theologians draw on them for insights into late medieval spirituality, artistic imagery, political struggles, and social life. Scholars of literature study them to gain knowledge of rhetorical strategies employed in late medieval texts by women. Philologists analyze them to enhance understanding of the historical development of Latin and medieval Swedish. Increasingly, Birgitta is also admired and studied as a powerful female voice and prophet of reform. Collectively, the Revelationes encapsulate the workings of an extraordinary mind, alternating between a tender lyricism and a grim intensity and hallucinatory imagination, mixing stereotypical commonplaces with startling and sensational imagery, providing enlightenment on contemporary issues and practical advice about imminent and future events, and showing a constant devotion to the passion of Christ and a close identification with the Virgin. This is the second of four volumes and it contains Book IV and Book V. Book IV includes some of Birgitta's most influential visions, with topics ranging from the Avignon papacy and purgatory, to the Hundred Years War. Book V, the Liber Quaestionum (Book of Questions), takes the form of a learned dialogue between Christ and a monk standing on a ladder fixed between heaven and earth. The argument centers on the way in which God's providence is constantly misunderstood and rejected by self-centered human beings. The translation is based on the recently completed critical edition of the Latin text and promises to be the standard English translation of the Revelationes for years to come. It makes this important text available to a wider audience and provides the basis for new research on one of the foremost medieval women visionaries.

Demosthenes' Philippic I, delivered between 351 B.C. - 350 B.C., was the first speech by a prominent politician against the growing power of Philip II of Macedon. Along with the other Philippics of Demosthenes', it is arguably one of the finest deliberative speeches from antiquity. The present volume provides the first commentary in English on the Philippics since 1907 and promises to encourage more study of this essential Greek orator. Aiming his commentary at advanced undergraduates and first-year graduate students, Cecil Wooten addresses rhetorical and stylistic matters, historical background, and grammatical problems. In addition to a full commentary on Philippic I, this volume includes essays that outline Philippics II and III, set them in their historical context, and emphasize the differences between these later speeches and the first.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester. However, there is great kindness and warmth in this epic love story, which is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Ultimately the grand passion of Jane and Rochester is called upon to survive cruel revelation, loss and reunion, only to be confronted with tragedy.

Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory--two salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves -- to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable? -- while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.

As a young man, Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century, translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo, a tome by a Portuguese missionary about the country now known as Ethiopia. Far from being a potboiler, this translation left an indelible imprint on Johnson. Demonstrating its importance through a range of research and attentive close readings, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson highlights the lasting influence of an African people on Johnson's oeuvre.
Wendy Laura Belcher uncovers traces of African discourse in Johnson's only work conceived for the stage, Irene; several of his short stories; and, of course, his most famous fiction, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Throughout, Belcher provides a much needed perspective on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. Most pointedly, she illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced, developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to suggest that some texts in the European canon are best understood as energumens--texts that are spoken through. Her model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe's others have co-constituted European representations. Drawing on sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Ge'ez, this study challenges the conventional wisdom on Johnson's work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson's religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.
A rich monograph that fuses eighteenth-century studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial theory, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson adds a fresh perspective on and a wealth of insights into the great, enigmatic man of letters.

From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book printing and new literary and cultural dynamics. Latin also entered into a complex interplay with the rising vernacular languages. This Handbook gives an accessible survey of the main genres, contexts, and regions of Neo-Latin, as we have come to call Latin writing composed in the wake of Petrarch (1304-74). Its emphasis is on the period of Neo-Latin's greatest cultural relevance, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its chapters, written by specialists in the field, present individual methodologies and focuses while retaining an introductory character. The Handbook will be valuable to all readers wanting to orientate themselves in the immense ocean of Neo-Latin literature and culture. It will be particularly helpful for those working on early modern languages and literatures as well as to classicists working on the culture of ancient Rome, its early modern reception and the shifting characteristics of post-classical Latin language and literature. Political, social, cultural and intellectual historians will find much relevant material in the Handbook, and it will provide a rich range of material to scholars researching the history of their respective geographical areas of interest.

The poetry of Michelangelo offers an insight into one of the greatest artists of all time, and is a notable literary achievement in its own right. This text lays out the broad chronological evolution of the poems and clarifies both their meaning and the verbal artistry that shaped their construction. The poetry is always quoted in Italian and in translation.

This study reconstructs the history of a significant crisis in Christian-Jewish relations: the attempt to confiscate and destroy all Jewish books in Renaissance Germany. This unprecedented effort to end the practice of Judaism throughout the empire was challenged by Jewish communities and also, in an unexpected move, by Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), the founder of Christian Hebrew studies. Reuchlin had revolutionized the Christian study of the Bible with his Hebrew grammar. In 1510 he published an extensive, impassioned, and successful defense of Jewish writings and Jewish legal rights against the book pogrom, later acknowledged by Josel of Rosheim, the leader of German Jewry, as a ''miracle within a miracle.'' The fury that greeted Reuchlin's defense of Judaism resulted in a protracted heresy trial that polarized Europe, ultimately fostering a receptive environment for the nascent Reformation movement. The legal and theological battle over charges that Reuchlin's opinions were "impermissibly favorable to Jews," a conflict that elicited intervention on both sides from the most powerful political and intellectual leaders throughout Renaissance Europe, formed a new context for Christian reflection on the status of Judaism. David Price offers insight into important new Christian discourses on Judaism and anti-Semitism that emerged from the clash of Renaissance humanism with this potent anti-Jewish campaign, as well as an innovative analysis of Luther's virulent anti-Semitism in the context and aftermath of the Reuchlin Affair. His book is a valuable contribution to study of an important and complex development in European history: Christians acquiring accurate knowledge of Judaism and its history.

This book is an introduction to and interpretation of the world of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), one of the most fascinating and complex figures in European literary modernism and the avant-garde. Raised in South Africa and writing much of his literary work in English, Pessoa nevertheless almost never left the city of Lisbon after returning in 1905. Pessoa is known for abolishing the authorial self and for dividing his writings among a large number of other personalities - the heteronyms - who wrote through him, each in a completely different style. The theory of 'adverse genres' introduced in this book aids understanding of his paradoxical and contradictory use of genres. Through the invented 'coterie of authors,' Pessoa explored mixed writing by changing the relationship between form and content, authorship and text. Adverse Genres describes how Pessoa selected genres from the European tradition (Ricardo Reis' 'Horatian' odes, Alvaro de Campos' worship of Whitman, Alberto Caeiro's pastoral and metaphysical, Bernardo Soares' philosophical diary), into which he put a different and incongruent content taken from modernist, contemporary themes. By creating anomalies between form and content, or authors and texts, Pessoa gives new life and definition to traditional historical genres for a modernist age. In doing so, he enhances the normal expressive potential of each genre by incorporating uncharacteristic content and questioning authorship. Pessoa uses this procedure in his 1907 short story, 'A Very Original Dinner' in the 'Cancioneiro' or collected poems written under the name Fernando Pessoa; in his love letters to Ophelia Queiros; in his 1922 story 'The Adventure of the Anarchist Banker;' in his collection of quatrains derived from Portuguese popular verse; and, finally, in his problematic non-existence as 'the man who never was,' in Jorge de Sena's expression, who exchanged a normal life for an entirely literary world of the imagination. This book addresses Pessoa's desire to be an entire literature, a new literary history, as it were, full of diverse authors and styles, as if they were characters or roles in a dramatic theater of the self in literary modernism.