Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conceptions of time. Aetia pervade ancient literature at all its stages, and connect the past with the present by telling us which aspects of the past survive "even now" or "ever since then". Yet, while the standard aetiological formulae remain surprisingly stable over time, the understanding of time that lies behind stories of origin undergoes profound changes. By studying a broad range of texts and by closely examining select stories of origin from archaic Greece, Hellenistic Greece, Augustan Rome, and early Christian literature, Time in Ancient Stories of Origin traces the changing forms of stories of origin and the underlying changing attitudes to time: to the interaction of the time of gods and men, to historical time, to change and continuity, as well as to a time beyond the present one. Walter provides a model of how to analyse the temporal construction of aetia, by combining close attention to detail with a view towards the larger temporal agenda of each work. In the process, new insights are provided both into some of the best-known aetiological works of antiquity (e.g. by Hesiod, Callimachus, Vergil, Ovid) and lesser-known works (e.g. Ephorus, Prudentius, Orosius). This volume shows that aetia do not merely convey factual information about the continuity of the past, but implicate the present in ever new complex messages about time.

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, 'York Notes Advanced' introduce students to sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives-addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women's entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage-we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

In the late seventeenth century, a team of scientists managed to free, for the first time, the soft tissues of the brain and nerves from the hard casing of the skull. In doing so, they not only engendered modern neuroscience, and with it the promise of knowing the mind through empirical study of the brain; they also unleashed a host of questions, problems, paradoxes, and--strangest of all--literary forms that are still with us today. Nervous Fictions is the first account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts: the nervous fiction. Apparent not just in scientific work, but also in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne, Smollett, ""it-narratives""), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville, Boswell), nervous fictions dissect the brain through metaphor, personification, and other figurative language. Nervous fictions stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific study of our brains as simply complex physical systems.

In the wake of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett wrote some of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. This is the first full-length historical study to examine the far-reaching impact of the war on Beckett's creative and intellectual sensibilities. Drawing on a substantial body of archival material, including letters, manuscripts, diaries and interviews, as well as a wealth of historical sources, this book explores Beckett's writing in a range of political contexts, from the racist dogma of Nazism and aggressive traditionalism of the Vichy regime to Irish neutrality censorship and the politics of recovery in the French Fourth Republic. Along the way, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War casts new light on Beckett's political commitments and his concepts of history as they were formed during Europe's darkest hour.

Contributions by Danielle Christmas, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Garrett Bridger Gilmore, Spencer R. Herrera, Cassandra Jackson, Stacie McCormick, Maria Seger, Randi Lynn Tanglen, Brook Thomas, Michael C. Weisenburg, and Lisa Woolfork Reading Confederate Monuments addresses the urgent and vital need for scholars, educators, and the general public to be able to read and interpret the literal and cultural Confederate monuments pervading life in the contemporary United States. The literary and cultural studies scholars featured in this collection engage many different archives and methods, demonstrating how to read literal Confederate monuments as texts and in the context of the assortment of literatures that produced and celebrated them. They further explore how to read the literary texts advancing and contesting Confederate ideology in the US cultural imaginary-then and now-as monuments in and of themselves. On top of that, the essays published here lay bare the cultural and pedagogical work of Confederate monuments and counter-monuments-divulging how and what they teach their readers as communal and yet contested narratives-thereby showing why the persistence of Confederate monuments matters greatly to local and national notions of racial justice and belonging. In doing so, this collection illustrates what critics of US literature and culture can offer to ongoing scholarly and public discussions about Confederate monuments and memory. Even as we remove, relocate, and recontextualize the physical symbols of the Confederacy dotting the US landscape, the complicated histories, cultural products, and pedagogies of Confederate ideology remain embedded in the national consciousness. To disrupt and potentially dismantle these enduring narratives alongside the statues themselves, we must be able to recognize, analyze, and resist them in US life. The pieces in this collection position us to think deeply about how and why we should continue that work.

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, and her career is distinguished by strong contributions to both literature and social justice. Di Prima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) edited The Floating Bear (1962-69), one of the most significant underground publications of the sixties. Di Prima's poetry and prose chronicle her opposition to the Vietnam War; her advocacy of the rights of Blacks, Native Americans, and the LGBTQ community; her concern about environmental issues; and her commitment to creating a world free of exploitation and poverty. In addition, di Prima is significant due to her challenges to the roles that American women were expected to play in society. Her Memoirs of a Beatnik was a sensation, and she talks about its lasting impact as well. Conversations with Diane di Prima presents twenty interviews ranging from 1972 to 2010 that chart di Prima's intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution. From her adolescence, di Prima was fascinated by occult, esoteric, and magical philosophies. In these interviews readers can see the ways these concepts influenced both her personal life and her poetry and prose. We are able to view di Prima's life course from her year at Swarthmore College; her move back to New York and then to San Francisco; her studies of Zen Buddhism; her fascination with the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah; and her later engagement with Tibetan Buddhism and work with Chogyam Trungpa. Another particularly interesting aspect of the book is the inclusion of interviews that explore di Prima's career as an independent publisher-she founded Poets Press in New York and Eidolon Editions in California-and her commitment to promoting writers such as Audre Lorde. Taken together, these interviews reveal di Prima as both a writer of genius and an intensely honest, direct, passionate, and committed advocate of a revolution in consciousness.

Born into a wealthy and privileged family in Philadelphia, Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) showed a clear interest in the supernatural and occult literature during his youth. Legend has it that, soon after his birth, an old Dutch nurse carried him up to the garret of the house and performed a ritual to guarantee that Leland would be fortunate in his life and eventually become a scholar and a wizard. Whether or not this incident ever occurred, we do know that his interest in fairy tales, folklore, and the supernatural would eventually lead him to a life of travel and documentation of the stories of numerous groups across the United States and Europe. Jack Zipes selected the tales in Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Talesfrom five different books- The Algonquin Legends (1884), Legends of Florence (1895-96), The Unpublished Letters of Virgil (1901), The English Gypsies (1882), and Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling (1891)-and has arranged them thematically. Though these tales cannot be considered authentic folk tales-not written verbatim from the lips of Romani, Native Americans, or other sources of the tales-they are highly significant because of their historical and cultural value. Like most of the aspiring American folklorists of his time, who were mainly all white, male, and from the middle classes, Leland recorded these tales in personal encounters with his informants or collected them from friends and acquaintances, before grooming them for publication so that they became translations of the original narratives. What distinguishes Leland from the major folklorists of the nineteenth century is his literary embellishment to represent his particular regard for their poetry, purity, and history. Readers with an interest in folklore, oral tradition, and nineteenth-century literature will value this curated and annotated glimpse into a breadth of work.

In Miserere Mei, Clare Costley King'oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. Miserere Mei explores these numerous transformations in materiality and genre. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the book, it reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance, but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that are often said to separate late medieval from early modern culture. Miserere Mei features twenty-five illustrations and provides new analyses of works based on the Penitential Psalms by several key writers of the time, including Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, John Fisher, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. It will be of value to anyone interested in the interpretation, adaptation, and appropriation of biblical literature; the development of religious plurality in the West; the emergence of modernity; and the periodization of Western culture. Students and scholars in the fields of literature, religion, history, art history, and the history of material texts will find Miserere Mei particularly instructive and compelling.

Oscar Wilde had one of literary history's most explosive love affairs with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. In 1895, Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, delivered a note to the Albemarle Club addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as sodomite." With Bosie's encouragement, Wilde sued the Marquess for libel. He not only lost but he was tried twice for "gross indecency" and sent to prison with two years' hard labor. With this publication of the uncensored trial transcripts, readers can for the first time in more than a century hear Wilde at his most articulate and brilliant. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde documents an alarmingly swift fall from grace; it is also a supremely moving testament to the right to live, work, and love as one's heart dictates.

Howard Cruse is the first biography to tell the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher's kid from Alabama who became "the godfather of queer comics," Cruse (1944-2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists. His comic strip Wendel, published in The Advocate throughout the 1980s, is considered a revolutionary moment in the development of LGBTQ+ comics, as is his inaugurating the editorship of Gay Comix with Kitchen Sink Press in 1979, which furthered the careers of important artists like Jennifer Camper and Alison Bechdel. Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, fictionalizes his own coming out in the context of the civil rights movement in 1960s Birmingham and was a significant forerunner to contemporary graphic novels and memoirs. Howard Cruse draws on extensive archival research and interviews and covers Cruse's entire body of work: the cute and zany Barefootz, the unexpected innovations of the Gay Comix stories, the domestic intimacies of Wendel, and the complexity and power of Stuck Rubber Baby. The book places Cruse's art in the context of his life and his times, including the historic movements for gay rights and against the AIDS crisis, and it celebrates this extraordinary and essential figure of LGBTQ+ comics and American comics art more broadly.

Now available in paper, "The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter" is the first book-length analysis of J. K. Rowling's work from a broad range of perspectives within literature, folklore, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. A significant portion of the book explores the Harry Potter series' literary ancestors, including magic and fantasy works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Monica Furlong, Jill Murphy, and others, as well as previous works about the British boarding school experience. Other chapters explore the moral and ethical dimensions of Harry's world, including objections to the series raised within some religious circles. In her new epilogue, Lana A. Whited brings this volume up to date by covering Rowling's latest book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

Timescapes of Waiting explores the intersections of temporality and space by examining various manifestations of spatial (im-)mobility. The individual articles approach these spaces from a variety of academic perspectives - including the realms of history, architecture, law and literary and cultural studies - in order to probe the fluid relationships between power, time and space. The contributors offer discussion and analysis of waiting spaces like ante-chambers, prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps, and also of more elusive spaces such as communities and nation-states. Contributors: Olaf Berwald, Elise Brault-Dreux, Richard Hardack, Kerstin Howaldt, Robin Kellermann, Amanda Lagji, Margaret Olin, Helmut Puff, Katrin Roeder, Christoph Singer, Cornelia Wachter, Robert Wirth.