Bob Dylan has helped transform music, literature, pop culture, and even politics. The World of Bob Dylan chronicles a lifetime of creative invention that has made a global impact. Leading rock and pop critics and music scholars address themes and topics central to Dylan's life and work: the Blues, his religious faith, Civil Rights, Gender, Race, and American and World literature. Incorporating a rich array of new archival material from never before accessed archives, The World of Bob Dylan offers a comprehensive, uniquely informed and wholly fresh account of the songwriter, artist, filmmaker, and Nobel Laureate whose unique voice has permanently reshaped our cultural landscape.

Intermittently in and out of fashion, the persistence of the Rococo from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first is clear. From painting, print and photography, to furniture, fashion and film, the Rococo's diverse manifestations appear to defy temporal and geographic definition. In Rococo echo, a team of international contributors adopts a wide lens to explore the relationship of the Rococo with time. Through chapters organised around broad temporal moments - the French Revolution, the First World War and the turn of the twenty-first century - contributors show that the Rococo has been viewed variously as modern, late, ruined, revived, preserved and anticipated. Taking into account the temporality of the Rococo as form, some contributors consider its function as both a visual language and a cultural marker engaged in different ways with the politics of nationalism, gender and race. The Rococo is examined, too, as a mode of expression that encompassed and assimilated styles, and which functioned as a surprisingly effective means of resisting both authority - whether political, religious or artistic - and cultural norms of gender and class. Contributors also show how the Rococo, from its birth in France, reverberated through England, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the South American colonies to become a pan-European, even global movement. The Rococo emerges from these contributions as a discourse defined but not confined by its original historical moment, and whose adaptability to the styles and preoccupations of later periods gives it a value and significance that take it beyond the vagaries of fashion.

"I try to write something every day even though I am not writing poetry, just to get myself in touch with language."-Edwin Morgan Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) is one of the giants of modern literature. Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death, throughout his long life he produced an astonishing variety of work, from the playful to the profound. Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language presents previously uncollected prose - journalism, book and theatre reviews, scholarly essays and lectures, drama and radio scripts, forewords and afterwords - all carefully moulded to the needs of differing audiences. Morgan's writing fizzes with clarity and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the changing face of his home city of Glasgow. Everyone will find surprises and delights in this new collection.

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. Avant-Folk argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.

La presse litteraire joue un role considerable dans le developpement de la sociabilite et des pratiques culturelles au XVIIIe siecle: elle favorise le dialogue avec les lecteurs, leur permet de developper leur esprit critique et contribue a la creation de nouvelles pratiques. Dans quelle mesure agit-elle ainsi sur la societe, la conception du savoir et la constitution d'une culture commune? En se fondant sur cinq titres representatifs - le Mercure de France, le Journal des dames, le Pour et contre de Prevost, le Nouvelliste du Parnasse de Desfontaines et Granet, l'Annee litteraire de Freron -, Suzanne Dumouchel analyse la place centrale des periodiques litteraires, trop souvent negliges par les historiens de la presse, dans la formation de lecteurs-citoyens. Par rapport a ceux du XVIIe siecle, les journaux litteraires du XVIIIe mettent en avant la subjectivite: celle des redacteurs dans leur rapport aux textes, et celle des lecteurs, qui sont invites, par leurs envois et leurs discussions, a l'elaboration du journal. La presse litteraire d'Ancien Regime joue ainsi un role majeur dans la formation des moeurs, de l'opinion, des gouts, des relations sociales, prefigurant la presse plus politique du XVIIIe siecle. En analysant le fonctionnement de cette culture virtuelle, qui organise un nouveau rapport au monde et a soi, Suzanne Dumouchel montre que le journal litteraire du XVIIIe siecle souleve de nombreuses questions toujours presentes dans les medias numeriques aujourd'hui.

In this ground-breaking work, Norman Cantor explains how our current notion of the Middle Ages-with its vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies-was born in the twentieth century. The medieval world was not simply excavated through systematic research. It had to be conceptually created: It had to be invented, and this is the story of that invention.

Norman Cantor focuses on the lives and works of twenty of the great medievalists of this century, demonstrating how the events of their lives, and their spiritual and emotional outlooks, influenced their interpretations of the Middle Ages. Cantor makes their scholarship an intensely personal and passionate exercise, full of color and controversy, displaying the strong personalities and creative minds that brought new insights about the past.

A revolution in academic method, this book is a breakthrough to a new way of teaching the humanities and historiography, to be enjoyed by student and general public alike. It takes an immense body of learning and transmits it so that readers come away fully informed of the essentials of the subject, perceiving the interconnection of medieval civilization with the culture of the twentieth century and having had a good time while doing it! This is a riveting, entertaining, humorous, and learned read, compulsory for anyone concerned about the past and future of Western civilization.

Founded in 1961, Studia Hibernica is devoted to the study of the Irish language and its literature, Irish history and archaeology, Irish folklore and place names, and related subjects. Its aim is to present the research of scholars in these fields of Irish studies and so to bring them within easy reach of each other and the wider public. It endeavours to provide in each issue a proportion of articles, such as surveys of periods or theme in history or literature, which will be of general interest. A long review section is a special feature of the journal and all new publications within its scope are there reviewed by competent authorities.

A E Housmans poetry (especially A Shropshire Lad) remains well-known, widely read and often quoted. However, Housman did not view himself as a professional poet, always making quite clear that his proper job was as a Professor of Latin. Housmans fame as a poet has often obscured the fact that he was the leading British classical scholar of his generation, and a Cambridge Professor. It has also sometimes been suggested that Housmans two areas of activity are the sign of a flawed or divided personality. This book argues that there is no fundamental tension between Housman the poet and Housman the scholar, and his career is presented very much as that of a working academic who also wrote poetry. The book gives a full account of what Housman described as the great and real troubles of my early manhood, and in particular his unrequited and life-long love for his undergraduate friend Moses Jackson. It resists the temptation to classify Housman too exclusively as a melancholic, and is sceptical about Housmans reputed rudeness and misanthropy, pointing out that, though Housman was famously aloof in manner, he was notably loyal and generous, courteous in his daily dealings and generally liked by those who knew him. He also possessed a highly developed sense of the absurd and a ready and often disconcerting wit, features which characterised not only his letters and miscellaneous writings, but also, famously, much of his scholarly work.

Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through his reading. This reading, it is shown, was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. As such, new insights are provided into McGahern's admiration and use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, James Joyce, Albert Camus and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern's published texts as well as unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of the book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.

Histoire des deux Indes, was arguably the first major example of a world history, exploring the ramifications of European colonialism from a global perspective. Frequently reprinted and translated into many languages, its readers included statesmen, historians, philosophers and writers throughout Europe and North America. Underpinning the encyclopedic scope of the work was an extensive transnational network of correspondents and informants assiduously cultivated by Raynal to obtain the latest expert knowledge. How these networks shaped Raynal's writing and what they reveal about eighteenth-century intellectual sociability, trade and global interaction is the driving theme of this current volume. From text-based analyses of the anthropology that structures Raynal's history of human society to articles that examine new archival material relating to his use of written and oral sources, contributors to this book explore among other topics: how the Histoire created a forum for intellectual interaction and collaboration; how Raynal created and manipulated his own image as a friend to humanity as a promotional strategy; Raynal's intellectual debts to contemporary economic theorists; the transnational associations of booksellers involved in marketing the Histoire; the Histoire's reception across Europe and North America and its long-lasting influence on colonial historiography and political debate well into the nineteenth century.

This classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), was first published in 1913 and is written by a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, husband of Virginia Woolf. It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka. It includes a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of "Woolf in Ceylon", and a short story, "Pearls before Swine", which vividly draws on Woolf's experience as a young District Commissioner. This book reeks of first-hand knowledge of the colonial experience, and of its profound, malign disregard for the psychology and culture of its subject peoples.

Commonly referred to as The Exeter Book, this important anthology is the earliest and largest surviving book of vernacular poetry from Anglo-Saxon England. This edition on DVD will be an invaluable historical and literary acquisition for libraries and an indispensable reference work for medievalists and other scholars.The DVD contains the revised second edition of "The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry" linked to a full-colour digital facsimile and images of various other related historical documents. Also included is a new codicological report on the manuscript's current binding. The images used are of an extremely high resolution; they often provide more information than is available from a physical examination of the manuscript itself. The DVD is available as a special package with a copy of the revised two-volume second edition in hardback. This edition includes many newly-discovered alterations to the poetic texts in addition to the four hundred new readings listed in the first edition. The Bibliography and Commentary have also been updated.

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In "Reading Like a Writer," Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers&#8212Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov&#8212and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's "Middlemarch." She looks to John Le Carre for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, "Reading Like a Writer" will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom. Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor. Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. The debate concerned what Russians called "the accursed questions": If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life's essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the "tiny alternations of consciousness"? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the non-alibi-the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one's actions. And, throughout, Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian culture: how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny. What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world's elusive complexity-a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions.

• Covers all the essentials students need when starting out on a literary studies degree – ideal for first year, introductory courses • A comprehensive glossary (with terms in bold) and clear text mean it is accessible to beginners as well as non-native English readers • Sections on researching and writing papers and citation information mean students will refer to the book throughout their studies – it has a long life • New edition is in a larger format and contains 20 new illustrations, making the book more user-friendly for students and helping to enhance their understanding through images

Ever since Ian Watt's The Rise of the novel (1957), many critics have argued that a constitutive element of the early 'novel' is its embrace of realism. Anne F. Widmayer contends, however, that Restoration and early eighteenth-century prose narratives employ techniques that distance the reading audience from an illusion of reality; irony, hypocrisy, and characters who are knowingly acting for an audience are privileged, highlighting the artificial and false in fictional works. Focusing on the works of four celebrated playwright-novelists, Widmayer explores how the increased interiority of their prose characters is ridiculed by the use of techniques drawn from the theatre to throw into doubt the novel's ability to portray an unmediated 'reality'. Aphra Behn's dramatic techniques question the reliability of female narrators, while Delarivier Manley undermines the impact of women's passionate anger by suggesting the self-consciousness of their performances. In his later drama, William Congreve subverts the character of the apparently objective critic that is recurrent in his prose work, whilst Henry Fielding uses the figure of the satirical writer in his rehearsal plays to mock the novelist's aspiration to control the way a reader reads the text. Through analysing how these writers satirize the reading public's desire for clear distinctions between truth and illusion, Anne F. Widmayer also highlights the equally fluid boundaries between prose fiction and drama.

El Blocao, one of the most distinguished examples of avant-garde, anti-colonialist prose produced in Spain, is a collection of seven short stories parodying the highly popular serial fiction on the country's colonial wars in Morocco. Diaz-Fernandez appropriates the populist discourse articulated in the Moroccan War pulp fiction, subverting it in order to denounce the political and economic interests that inform the colonial enterprise, while effectively adopting the rhetorical innovations introduced by the European avant-garde during the 1920s. The advent of the Spanish Civil War and the premature death of its author put an end to what promised to be a brilliant literary and political career. After decades of historical amnesia on the part of Spanish academics and the Spanish public at large, the renewed interest in Spain's Protectorate of Morocco (1912-1956), brought about by the massive waves of Maghrebian immigration to Spain since the 1990s, has informed the recent fascination of scholars and the general public alike for Spain's last colonial enterprise. Spain's highly idiosyncratic colonization of the Maghreb (Morocco and Western Sahara) played a crucial role in the history of the country during the first half of the twentieth century. After the loss of its Latin American colonies in 1898, the Protectorate of Morocco became a poor substitute for the lost empire. Spain, no longer a European superpower, tried to reconcile the rebuilding of its own socio-economic infrastructures with its civilizing mission overseas. As one could expect, the resulting colonial discourse was ripe with contradictions that often betrayed Spain's long struggle.

Hominids have always been obsessed with representing their own bodies. The first "selfies" were prehistoric negative hand images and human stick figures, followed by stone and ceramic representations of the human figure. Thousands of years later, moving via historic art and literature to contemporary social media, the contemporary term "selfie" was self-generated. The book illuminates some "selfies". This collection of critical essays about the fixation on the human self addresses a multi-faceted geographic set of cultures -- the Iberian Peninsula to pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America -- analysing such representations from medical, literal and metaphorical perspectives over centuries. Chapter contributions address the representation of the body itself as subject, in both visual and textual manners, and illuminate attempts at control of the environment, of perception, of behaviour and of actions, by artists and authors. Other chapters address the body as subjected to circumstance, representing the body as affected by factors such as illness, injury, treatment and death. These myriad effects on the body are interpreted through the brushes of painters and the pens of authors for social and/or personal control purposes. The essays reveal critics' insights when "selfies" are examined through a focused "lens" over a breadth of cultures. The result, complex and unique, is that what is viewed -- the visual art and literature under discussion -- becomes a mirror image, indistinguishable from the component viewing apparatus, the "lens".

Primarily celebrated for his dramatic works Minna von Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti and Nathan der Weise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's diverse pursuits extended far beyond the stage. From incisive journalism to innovative reflections on poetry, aesthetics and theology, his wide-ranging intellectual interests place him firmly alongside contemporary polymaths such as Diderot. In this extensive study an international team of experts explores Lessing's contribution to both the German and broader European Enlightenments to reveal: the energy and acuity of his critical writing, which made him an exemplar for subsequent German authors; the originality and lasting significance of Laocoon, his groundbreaking treatise on aesthetics, which distinguished the domains of poetry and the visual arts, and is still a major point of reference; how his reflections on theology and the Bible helped shape a view of Christianity as a historical phenomenon without absolute truth; how his Enlightenment curiosity and open-mindedness were nourished by an interest in natural science, particularly astronomy; how activities such as his adaptation of English domestic tragedy and his translations of Diderot's theatrical writings placed him at the heart of the pan- European Enlightenment.

George's memory is inseparable from Orkney, where he was born the youngest child of a poor family and which he rarely left. His mother was a beautiful woman who spoke only Gaelic and his father was a wit, mimic and singer, who also doubled as postman and tailor. Tuberculosis framed George's early life and kept him in a kind of limbo. He discovered alcohol which gave him insights into the workings of the mind. While attending the University of Edinburgh he came into contact with Goodsir Smith, MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig - and Stella Cartwright with whom perhaps all of them were in love. By the time of his death in 1996 he was recognised as one of the great writers of his time and country.

First published in 1976, this astonishing anthology from two U.S. Poet Laureates, Charles Simic and Mark Strand, compiles a selection of the finest translated literature of the time, showcasing the then-little-known writers who had a profound influence on the current generation of poets.

"Stage Directions" covers half a lifetime and the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a new piece about his latest play, "Afterlife". It is also a reflection on his path into theatre: the 'doubtful beginnings' of his childhood, his subsequent scorn as a young man and, surprisingly late in life, his reluctant conversion. Whatever subjects he tackles, from the exploration of the atomic nucleus to the mechanics of farce, Michael Frayn is never less than fascinating, delightfully funny and charming. This book encapsulates a lifetime's work and is guaranteed to be a firm favourite with his legions of fans around the world.

Fernan Gonzalez lived from about AD 910 to 970. The popular image of him is of a fearsome warrior who gave his people protection from their enemies (both Muslim and Christian), and a wise and respected lord who enabled them to live in security and harmony. He was generally accepted to have played a strategic role in achieving independence for Castile and freeing it from dominance by the kingdom of Leon. The Poema de Fernan Gonzalez was composed (by an unknown author) in the mid-thirteenth century as an enduring celebration of his triumphs and account of his life and deeds. Fact and legend have become intertwined and there is much within its stanzas that is certainly not closely based on historic facts! This new translation is set against a detailed study of the historic context of the Castillian conflicts and a factual account of the life and achievements of Fernan Gonzalez. The political situation of the time in which the poem was composed is also considered, as is the manner in which the'history' it espouses came to be handed down over three centuries, the possibility of a pre-existing rich oral tradition surrounding this iconic figure, and the possible sources employed by the poet in constructing the poem.