This volume, designed with the student reader in mind, is an indispensable blend of key essays in the field with specially commissioned new material by feminist scholars from the UK and the US. It includes a diversity of texts and feminist approaches, a substantial and very illuminating introduction by the editors, and an annotated list of Further Reading, offering preliminary guidance to the reader approaching the topic of gender and medieval literature for the first time.
Works and writers covered include:
* Chaucer
* Margery Kempe
* Christine de Pisan
* The Katherine group of Saints' Lives
* Langland's Piers Plowman
* Medieval cycle drama
Students of both medieval and feminist literature will find this an essential work for study and reference.

The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope has remained the standard edition for more than a generation. Offering the complete poems this work is the single most authoritative collection available. Set in a descriptive background of eighteenth-century life, the poetry is placed in its historical context, providing th reader not only with the masterpieces of one of England's most famous poets but also with an insight into eighteenth-century life. An exhaustive index allows easy access to the individual poems and people and places of the period, making this an essential source for anyone studying eighteenth-century literature or eighteenth-century studies.

This major work brings together, for the first time in a single volume, all the recognized sources of Marlowe's dramatic work. Many of the forty-two texts presented here are of outstanding interest in their own right. Together they illuminate the cultural milieu which fostered Marlowe's talent, and deepen our appreciation of his dramatic methods.
* Each of the texts is accessibly presented for the modern reader and is fully annotated.
* Works in Latin or foreign vernaculars are translated, many for the first time, and modern spelling and punctuation are used throughout.
* The sources for each play are examined individually and are thoroughly edited.
Few libraries provide the range of sources contained in this one volume. The editors include texts of works such as the English Faust-Book from which Marlowe borrowed heavily, and provide substantial extracts from other books with which he was no doubt familiar.
This book is an invaluable resource for all those interested in Marlowe and the development of Elizabethan theatre.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203379837

Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.

In a bold and brilliantly persuasive series of moves, Lorna Hutson draws upon new historicist and feminist theories to examine closely Renaissance literature and the cultural impact of the humanist project.
The Usurer's Daughter:
* provides startling new readings of Shakespeare
* takes an entirely new approach to classical scholarship
* focuses attention on the central importance of the history of the representation of women
* illuminates how social relations between men were textualised during the early modern period.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203215605

New edition of a collection of songs and ballads from sixteenth-century Scotland, shedding important new light on the English and Scottish Reformation. The Gude and Godlie Ballatis is a collection of religious lyrics from the early years of the Scottish Reformation. It was a highly popular, if controversial, volume, was often reprinted, and is considered one of the most important literary works of vernacular Scots from the period. It contains translations of a number of Psalms, but most of the contents consist of shorter songs and ballads, many of which have been adapted from a secular to a spiritual use. The previous edition of the collection dates from 1897. The new edition not only revises the information given there, but presents the text of the earliest print (1565), which was unknown to the previous editor. The textual development of the collection through the various printings is studied, and is related to the changing historical, political, literary, cultural and theological contexts of Reformation Scotland. The editor addresses questions of authorship, transmission, source material, and the use and significance of these lyrics. Drawing on recent work in book history and English psalmody, as well as a deep knowledge of Older Scots lyric, he demonstrates the close connections between the collection and Continental hymnody, as well as interactions with English and Scots lyric, both sacred and profane. Alasdair A. MacDonald is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literatureof the Middle Ages, University of Groningen.

Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.

Digital Storytelling and Ethics: Collaborative Creation and Facilitation provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative story-making space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, Amanda Hill situates the digital storytelling genre and writing practice as a co-creative media process created between writers, storytellers, educators/facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the collaborative writing workshop as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. Digital Storytelling and Ethics provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling writing spaces and makes use of diverse international case studies as examples. Hill shows that writing educators/facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process. This will ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in witnessing guide the storytelling process and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world. This innovative book is an essential read for collaborative digital writers and facilitators.

This book opens a novel perspective on comics and literature interactions. It claims that the two artistic media have always maintained a mutual emulation, for as long as they have coexisted in media culture. To demonstrate this, the present research does not focus on literary adaptations in comics form, but rather on a literary corpus that remains virtually unexplored: comics-related novels. The purpose of this volume is to inventory French comics-related novels and to study them. Within the limits of the French-speaking world, this book pieces together a literary history of bande dessinee through its novels, from the 19th to 21th centuries. Whereas the comic strip - including the aptly named "graphic novel" - has sometimes been regarded as the disciple of an unsurpassable literary model, do these under-studied adaptations in novel form not rather indicate a mutual relationship, or even an emulation, between the two media?

Cervantes' now mythical character of Don Quixote began far differently from the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. France and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual group linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote's virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell'Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero's fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight's quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes' novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The Sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

This text offers a sustained account of an area that is usually hastily dismissed. Using the resources of contemporary philosophy - notably Deleuze and Lyotard - Lecercle manages to bring out the importance of nonsense. Why are we - and in particular, philosophers and linguists - so fascinated with nonsense? Why do Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic books? Lecercle attempts to show how the genre of nonsense was constructed and why it has proved so enduring and enlightening for linguistics and philosophy.

Socrates (469-399 BC) is one of history's most enigmatic figures. Our knowledge of him comes to us second-hand, primarily from the philosopher Plato, who was Socrates' most gifted student, and from the historian and sometime-philosopher Xenophon, who counted himself as a member of Socrates' inner circle of friends. We also hear of Socrates in one comic play produced during his lifetime (Aristophanes' Clouds) and in passing from the philosopher Aristotle, a student of Plato.

Socrates is a figure of enduring interest. He is often considered the father of Western Philosophy, yet the four most famous accounts we have of him present a contradictory, confusing picture. Just who was Socrates? A brilliant philosopher, at times confounding and infuriating, morally serious and yet ironic; the ever-worldly man, sometime mystic, and uncommon martyr depicted by Plato? Or did Plato conflate Socrates' views with his own startling genius, as Aristotle suggests? Was So rates instead the less impressive, more mundane man whose commonsense impressed the laconic Xenophon? Or was Socrates the charlatan, the long-winded phony of Aristophanes' play?

The Socratic works of Diogenes Laertius (3rd century AD), Libanius (AD 314 -- c. 393), Maximus of 'Tyre (2nd century AD), and Apuleius (born c. AD 125) add important dimensions to the portrait of Socrates: Diogenes Laertius' Life of Socrates emphasizes Socrates' deep ethical nature and his extraordinary personality; Libanius' Apology of Socrates is based on sources now lost to us; Maximus of Tyre's Whether Socrates Did the Right Thing When He Did Not Defend Himself makes the star ling claim (against testimony of Plato and Xenophon) that Socrates never spoke athis own trial; from Apuleius' On the God of Socrates we hear at length of Socrates' infamous daimonion: the "divine sign" only mentioned elsewhere, the sign that warned Socrates against certain courses of action. In short, from these four texts we are reintroduced to Socrates, and new wrinkles are added to an already intriguing historical figure.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:0415077788

This 15 volume boxed set is a reprint of the 1908 collected works, together with the first trade edition of The Picture of Dorian Grey. With a new critical introduction, and including Stuart Mason's Bibliography of Oscar Wilde.

With contributions from a distinguished group of world-builders, including academics, writers, and designers, this anthology of essays describes the process and discusses the nature of subcreation and the construction of worlds. From Oz to MUD, Walden to Rockall, all the worlds featured in this volume share one thing in common: they began in someone's imagination, grew from there, and became worlds built with the assistance of multiple authors and a variety of different ideas and media, including designs, imagery, sound, music, stories, and more. The book examines this development, with examples and discussions pertaining to the process and the final product of the building of imaginary worlds, including some transmedial worlds. World-Builders on World-Building is a fascinating deep dive into the practical problems of world-building as well as its theoretical aspects. It is ideal for students, scholars, and even practitioners interested in media studies, game studies, subcreation studies, franchise studies, transmedia studies, and pop culture.

Ancient prophecy was not confined to Israel, yet the phenomenon of prophetic poetry as it developed there was unique. The impact of this poetry on civilization is incalculable, though its origins and motives largely remain mysterious. This book shows that this poetry is inseparable from the empires which determined the history of the ancient Near East and the fate of Israel and Judah from the late-8th century to the end of the 6th century BC - first Assyria, then Babylonia, and finally Persia. Each empire had its own characters and motives, and stimulated a distinct wave of prophecy, led in turn by Isaiah Ben Amos, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the second Isaiah. The book is an historical interpretation and an anthology of prophetic poetry which uses recent research on imperialism and creativity to produce a radically new interpretation of the biblical prophets. More than three dozen outstanding poems and fragments in new translation from the Hebrew Bible are arranged in a running narrative, from the late-8th century BC until the late-6th century BC.

In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics. In this sequence of essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taken as a whole, this short but immensely wise book offers an illuminating and provocative insight into a great director's relationship with our greatest playwright. 'An invaluable gift from the greatest Shakespeare director of our time... Brook's genius, modesty, and brilliance shine through on every page' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre and a popular poet. This is the second volume in a set of seven which comprises a complete edition of all her works.

During his lifetime, Benjamin Constant was known as a political theorist, a courageous defender of liberal causes and a notable historian of the religious experience of mankind. Through his journals, autobiographical works and correspondence--documents mostly unknown by his contemporaries--subsequent generations have discoverd in Constant a fascinating and highly complex personality. In recent decades, a number of private archives have become accessible to scholars for the first time, and this has brought to light important documents by and about Constant.
Drawing on these sources, many unpublished, Dennis Wood offers a fresh assessment of the writer and the man. He closely relates the development of Constant's political thought and passionate interest in the history of religion to his work as a novelist and self-analyst. "Benjamin Constant" draws together the considerable findings of modern scholarship, presenting a lively and sympathetic portrait of the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' (Sir Isaiah Berlin).

The Roman Empire at its height encompassed the majority of the world known to the Romans. This important synthesis of recent findings and scholarship demonstrates how the Romans acquired, kept and controlled their Empire. Lintott goes beyond the preconceptions formed in the period of British Imperial rule and provides a contemporary post-imperial approach to the Roman exercise of power.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Merce Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.

Robert Burns's songs were, in their author's eyes, the crown to his achievement as a poet. After years of study and investigation, many hours spent listening to old airs, as he recalled the living, daily song-life of the people of Scotland, and through the creation of some of the finest lyric poetry of the British Isles, Burns's success is beyond doubt. Yet, until this volume, there has been no complete edition of his songs.
Donald Low, the leading expert on Burns's songs, brings together in chronological sequence, the words and tunes of all the known songs, providing a full critical introduction and detailed notes. An appendix by Peter Davidson discusses musical arrangements.
The book contains more than 300 songs and their music, from Burns's first known composition to the songs supplied for James Johnson's "Scots Musical Museum," and George Thompson's "Select Collection," to Burns's bawdy songs secretly published as "The Merry Muses of Caledonia,"
This comprehensive critical edition can only enhance Burns's reputation as a supreme lyric poet. It will be important reading for those interested in Robert Burns and his age, lovers of the traditional music of Scotland, and students of song, lyric, and early European Romanticism.