The Vita Christi, written by the abbess Isabel de Villena, is the only literary work in Catalan to bear the signature of a woman during the Middle Ages. It represents a fascinating re-evaluation of the role women played inthe life of Jesus Christ. The Life of Christ (Vita Christi), written by the abbess Isabel de Villena, is the only literary work to have been preserved in Catalan and to bear the signature of a woman during the Middle Ages. It was composed to provide spiritual direction for the nuns within the community of Poor Clares which Sor (i.e. Sister) Isabel oversaw at the Convent of the Holy Trinity in Valencia. The work was only able to emerge from obscurity by accident. In 1497 Queen Isabel of Castile, the wife of Ferdinand of Catalonia-Aragon, who had heard news of the book's existence, asked Sor Isabel's successor for a copy. The new Abbess, Sor Aldonca, responded by bringing the work to press. Queen Isabel's interest in Sor Isabel's book was understandable. The former abbess had been the daughter of the refined and restless Marquess of Villena, and was herself educated at Court, a milieu with which she maintained very positive relations throughout her life. As an abbess, what's more, she carried out important reforms at the convent and became a valued and respected figure within the dynamic cultural world of the Valencia of her day. Isabelde Villena's Vita Christi has often been interpreted as a response, delivered from the serenity of the cloister, to the misogyny and satire against the female gender emanating from certain books written at that time. Sor Isabel's work is a re-evaluation of the role women played in the life of Jesus Christ, a role at variance with the subsidiary one ascribed to them by the majority of commentators. Published in association with Editorial Barcino, Barcelona.

This volume is perhaps the most in-depth exploration ever undertaken of Tolkien's world. Accessible but authoritative, and fully illustrated, it is now being reissued with a stunning new cover treatment and updated commentary on new books, films, games, and shows. This book, originally published in 2013 and richly illustrated with photographs and artwork, was the first to connect all the threads of influence on Tolkien that infused his creation of Middle-earth--from the languages, poetry, and mythology of medieval Europe and ancient Greece and Rome to the halls of Oxford and the battlefields of World War I. Snyder examines the impact of these works on our modern culture, from 1960s counterculture to fantasy publishing, gaming, music, and beyond. The reissue has a gorgeous, updated cover design with a custom illustration on foil-stamped faux cloth and additional pages of material covering new developments.

In this groundbreaking book, the editors have assembled a group of distinguished practitioners to reveal the breadth and scope of adult art therapy. Drawing from work with physically disabled adults, the chapters cover philosophies for clinical art therapy; suicide as an abortive life stage of development; treatment approaches to borderline adults; treatment of women with eating disorders; mothers of incestuously abused children, and termination with clients.

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These essays, by experts in the field from five countries, examine Plutarch's interpretative and artistic reshaping of his historical sources in representative lives. Diverse essays treat literary elements such as the parallelism which renders a pair of lives a unit or the themes which unify the lives. Others consider the selecting, combining, simplifying, and enlarging employed in composition. The construction of a Plutarchian life, the essays demonstrate, required careful selection and creative reworking of the historical material available.

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This book interrogates the significance of the revival and reformulation of the romance genre in the postmillennial period. Emma Roche examines how six popular novels, published between 2005 and 2015 (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects and The Girl on the Train), reanimate and modify recognisable tropes from the romance genre to reflect a neoliberal and postfeminist cultural climate. As such, Roche argues, these novels function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging those contemporary gender ideologies. Throughout the book, Roche addresses and critiques several key attributes of neoliberal postfeminism, including: a pervasive emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility; an insistent requirement for self-monitoring, self-surveillance, and bodywork; the celebration of consumerism and its associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one's 'negative' emotions; and the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women's empowerment. While much critical attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, Roche argues that one crucial repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how these ideologies function together to effectively sanction gender-based violence. Thus, Roche exploits textual analysis to demonstrate the subtle ways in which neoliberal postfeminism can augment women's vulnerability to male violence.

1) This book presents a comprehensive account of the eminent Bengali writer and activist, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre in its full range and versatility. 2) It draws attention to Devi's role as a woman writer with a difference and her image outside Bengal. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.

John Donne's Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge -- a rapidly changing field in early modern England -- on Donne's thinking and writing. This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience, and that can illuminate his ideas for readers today.

"Oppositional Voices" is a study of women writers in the late Elizabethan period. Until the early 1980s it was generally assumed that women did not write any books during the Renaissance. Virginia Woolf wondered why no woman wrote a word of extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet'. The women discussed in this book "did" write some of that extraordinary literature'. Ignoring Renaissance society's injunction that women should confine themselves to religious compositions, they wrote poetry, drama and romantic fiction. They even voiced opposition to certain oppressive ideas and stereotypes. Yet, as this study suggests, what these authors finally say depended greatly on the fact that they were women writing in a culture inimical to female creative activity. "Oppositional Voices" powerfully shows how gender ideology intertwined with economics and social class, as well as with literary and linguistic conventions, to shape women's writing of the period. This book should be of interest to postgraduates, undergraduates and academics in Renaissance literature and women's studies.

The English Revolution of 1642-60 produced an explosion of stylistically and ideologically diverse pamphlet literature. The essays collected here focus on the prose of this new revolutionary era, and the new public sphere it helped to create. They cover a wide range of topics including the Royalist attack on the Sectarian Babel and the street theatre of the Ranters.

Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's intellectual mentor, is widely considered among the greatest Italian lyric poets; his famous and notoriously difficult philosophical canzone Donna me prega is often characterized as the most studied lyric poem in Italian literature. This book situates Cavalcanti's poetry in the context of the Arabic Aristotelian rationalism that entered the Latin West in the 12th century-a tradition marked by questions concerning whether humans can ever transcend their animality. Cavalcanti's poetry is a focal point where one can view, circa 1300 AD, Arabo-Islamic philosophy in the process of being assimilated and naturalized in Western Europe, eventually leading to values (associated with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) that we now call modern and secular-in particular, to a notion of human reason as bound up with imagination and with ethical praxis rather than as a means for the attainment of knowledge concerning God and the cosmos. The book features a radically unprecedented interpretation of Donna me prega, starkly opposed to all previous accounts: far from treating love as a threat to reason that would best be eliminated, the canzone praises loving as the essential operation of rational human flourishing. This study of Cavalcanti serves as a prelude to the formulation of a new paradigm for understanding Dante's Comedy.

This is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, the book illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity's relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.

The facts and fictions that continue to shape our understanding of Chaucer and his place in literary tradition Is Chaucer the father of English literature? The first English poet? Was he a feminist? A political opportunist? A spy? Is Chaucer's language too difficult for modern readers? 30 Great Myths about Chaucer explores the widely held ideas and opinions about the medieval poet, discussing how 'myths' have influenced Chaucer's reception history and interpretations of his poetry through the centuries. This unique text offers original insights on the character of Chaucer, the nature of his works, the myths that inform our conceptions of Chaucer, and the underlying causes of these myths. Each accessible and engaging chapter focuses on a specific myth, including those surrounding Chaucer's romantic life, political leanings, religious views, personal struggles, financial challenges, ideas about chivalry, representations of social class, and many others. More than simply correcting inaccurate facts or clarifying common misconceptions about Chaucer, the text delves deeper to address how the myths have shaped the critical interpretation and enduring literary legacy of Chaucer. This innovative volume: Explores how generations of readers continue to shape understanding of Chaucer Highlights the intersection of medievalism and Chaucer studies Helps readers detach myths about Chaucer from critical readings of his works Examines whether myths about Chaucer are based on historical fact or literary interpretation Discusses the history of reading Chaucer in contexts of biography, criticism, and popular culture 30 Great Myths about Chaucer is an indispensable resource for academics, researchers, graduate students, upper-level undergraduates, and general readers with interest in Chaucer and early English and Middle Ages literature.

Pablo Oyarzun is one of the foremost Benjamin scholars in Latin America. His writings have shaped the reception of Benjamin's work in Latin America and have been central to the effort to identify the tasks and responsibilities of the kind of critical theory that would interrupt social violence. In this book Oyarzun examines some of the key concepts in Benjamin's work - including his concepts of translation, experience, history and storytelling - and relates them to his own systematic reflection on the nature and implications of 'doing justice'. What is meant by the words 'justice was done'? The passive voice is important here. On the one hand, justice does nothing: it is not an agent, it can only prevail or fail, and if it fails, it does so without limit. On the other hand, the passive voice alludes to the agents of an action while covering them up; the allusion is the masking of the identity and traces of the person who accomplishes the action. And this cover-up can be dangerous: it can cover-up the executioners, who are subjects that everyone can confirm anonymously, without their being recognized and without their wanting to be recognized. Justice, argues Oyarzun, can only be done in the active effort to do justice - or, as Benjamin would say, in the striving to turn the world into the highest good. This book by one of Chile's most distinguished philosophers will be of value to anyone interested in Benjamin's work and in the development of critical theory in Latin America.

This set of volumes on Henry James is the third in the "Critical Assessments of Writers in English" series, the aim of which is to provide complete collections of previously published, formative critical assessments covering the whole work of individual writers. They should be useful to serious readers of literature, researchers and advanced students. Many of the pieces included were originally published in journals or books which are now out of print or very difficult to obtain. Each set has an authoritative introductory survey, as well as a full bibliography and biographical details. The choice of material in this set attempts both to gauge the changing response to James and also to establish how consistent has been his stature as a writer. It also attempts to reflect his image - as novelist, critic, dramatist, short-story writer, cultural commentator, travel writer and as a personality as equivocal as his texts. The first volume offers a series of memories of James: friends and critics who help to place the personality in context, followed by responses from 14 writers, poets and novelists. The second volume offers in chronological progression a series of contemporary reviews and views of James's work from both America and Britain together with a series of general essays written between 1879 and 1919. The third volume offers a 20th-century overview from 1919 to the 1980s reflecting the range of the response to James both in terms of subject matter and critical variety. The final volume offers a series of 20th-century interpretations of the major works. This collection provides the student of James with a range of writing on James' work from the 19th century to the 1980s. The bibliography offers a selective listing of the major critical texts and bibliographies as well as details of the publication and serialization of James' works.

Routledge A Level "English Guides" equip AS and A2 Level students with the skills they need to explore, evaluate and enjoy English. Books in the series are built around the various skills specified in the assessment objectives (AOs) for all AS and A2 level English courses. Focusing on the AOs most relevant to their topic, the books help students to develop their knowledge and abilities through analysis of lively texts and contemporary data. Each book in the series covers a different area of language and literary study, and offers accessible explanations, examples, exercises, a glossary of key terms and suggested answers. This series has been written by senior examiners in the light of how the new specifications have actually worked out in practice. "Transforming Texts" considers why language changes, and how we transform it; covers the key factors we need to take into account when transforming texts, including audience, register, mode, historical period, source and genre; explores a wide variety of texts from a range of genres and periods, from "Macbeth" and "Sense and Sensibility" to "Fever Pitch" and "The Bill"; offers a step-by-step guide to re-writing text; and can be used as b

This book explores Wordsworth's extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth's response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth's patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage - a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth's vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.

Responding to the reassertion of orality in the twentieth century in the form of electronic media such as the telegraph, film, video, computers, and television, this unique volume traces the roots of classical rhetoric in the modern world. Welch begins by changing the current view of classical rhetoric by reinterpreting the existing texts into fluid language contexts -- a change that requires relinquishing the formulaic tradition, acquiring an awareness of translation issues, and constructing a classical rhetoric beginning with the Fifth Century B.C. She continues with a discussion of the adaptability of this material to new language situations, including political, cultural, and linguistic change, providing it with much of its power as well as its longevity. The book concludes that classical rhetoric can readily address any situation since it focuses not only on critical stances toward discourse that already exists, but also presents elaborate theories for the production of new discourse.

While much has been written of the importance of Agrippa in Augustus' rise to power as the first emperor of Rome, Maecenas remains a shadowy figure despite being a vital part in the success of Augustus. After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Maecenas was a vital negotiator between Octavian and Mark Antony in the years leading up to the battle of Actium, and a wise political advisor to Augustus during the early years of the new regime. This is the first biography of Maecenas in English and gives due credit to the stature of Maecenas both as a confidant of the emperor and as patron of the poets Virgil, Horace and Propertius. The book devotes a chapter to each poet's relationship with Maecenas and the Augustan regime: the chapter on Virgil, while considering his relationship to Maecenas and Augustus, argues that the origins of his choice of Aeneas may lie in Etruria rather than elsewhere, while the chapter on Horace assesses one of the closest documented relationships of Roman history. The chapter on Propertius wrestles with the disparate views of scholars on the question of his relationship with the Augustan regime and argues that, at heart, he remains an Umbrian/Etruscan rather than a Roman. A crucial feature of the book is the provision of 161 texts from ancient Roman and Greek authors which mention Maecenas. Based on sustainable evidence this study of the importance of Maecenas takes scholarship in new and important directions.

Between c.250 and c.650, the way the past was seen, recorded and interpreted for a contemporary audience changed fundamentally. Only since the 1970s have the key elements of this historiographical revolution become clear, with the recasting of the period, across both east and west, as 'late antiquity'. Historiography, however, has struggled to find its place in this new scholarly world. No longer is decline and fall the natural explanatory model for cultural and literary developments, but continuity and transformation. In addition, the emergence of 'late antiquity' coincided with a methodological challenge arising from the 'linguistic turn' which impacted on history writing in all eras. This book is focussed on the development of modern understanding of how the ways of seeing and recording the past changed in the course of adjusting to emerging social, religious and cultural developments over the period from c.250 to c.650. Its overriding theme is how modern historiography has adapted over the past half century to engaging with the past between c.250 and c.650. Now, as explained in this book, the newly dominant historiographical genres (chronicles, epitomes, church histories) are seen as the preferred modes of telling the story of the past, rather than being considered rudimentary and naive.

This second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience. Issues that are covered include: historical perspectives, centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism. the elements of stylistic analysis, including foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech and thought presentation and point of view. current areas of influential research such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics, critical stylistics, multimodality, creative writing and reader response. four newly commissioned chapters in the emerging fields of cognitive grammar, forensic linguistics, the stylistics of children's literature and a corpus stylistic study of mental health issues. All of these new chapters are written by leading researchers in their respective fields. Each of the thirty-three chapters in this volume is written by a specialist. Each chapter provides an introduction to the subject, an overview of its history, an instructive example of how to conduct a stylistic analysis, a section with recommendations for practice and, a discussion of possible future developments in the area for readers to follow up on. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics Second Edition is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.

This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; postcolonial criticism, and ecocriticism. This new edition features: * A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical, Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice * Considerable updates to the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory, postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including the terminology and theoretical concepts * An extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety of literary texts * A list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts * An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory * A list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works * Updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

This essay collection proposes that G.W.M. Reynolds's contribution to Victorian print culture reveals the interrelations between authorship, genre, and radicalism in popular print culture of the nineteenth century. As a best-selling author of popular fiction marketed to the lower classes, and a passionate champion of radical politics and "the industrious classes," Reynolds and his work demonstrate the relevance of Victorian Studies to topics of pressing contemporary concern including populism, working-class fiction, the concept of 'originality', and the collective scholarly endeavour to 'widen' and 'undiscipline' Victorian Studies. Bringing together well-known and newly-emerging scholars from across different disciplinary perspectives, the volume explores the importance of Reynolds Studies to scholarship on the nineteenth-century. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the nineteenth-century press, popular culture, and of authorship, as well as to Victorian Studies scholars interested in the translation of Victorian texts into new and indigenous markets.

This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise epics, it reveals Milton to have made creative use of the tensions between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier ways in which love emerges in practice. Love, so central to Milton's view of Edenic joy and obedience to God, unsettles earthly and heavenly communities, and is the origin of Miltonic transgression. Milton's Loves sheds new light on some of the most prominent concerns of Milton scholarship, including: why Milton's God is so difficult for readers to connect to; Satan's apparent heroism; Milton's radical theology; and the nature of Milton's muse. It is a book that will appeal to students and scholars of Milton and early modern studies more broadly, and is structured in a way that will aid easy reference.

The House of the Prophet is Louis Auchincloss's searching novel of Felix Leitner, one of the most influential men of his time. Political philosopher, columnist, adviser to American presidents, Leitner will doubtless bring to many readers' minds the late Walter Lippmann, portrayed in the fine biography by Ronald Steel. Indeed, in his new introduction, Auchincloss makes plain that "the idea of writing a novel inspired by, though by no means based upon, the life of Walter Lippmann was unlike any fictional idea that I have had before or since." He candidly adds, "I was always perfectly aware the Felix Leitner, the protagonist of The House of the Prophet, would be instantly related to Walter Lippmann, and I had no objection to this." Whether considered on its own merits or as a major statement on Lippmann, this volume deserves close scrutiny.

Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel's account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.