Contains fourteen of Thomas Birrell's articles published between 1950 and 2006 / Chapters examine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English catholic history / Will appeal to all those interested in early modern history and the history of religion

Meets a real need for a comprehensive and unified guide to teaching literature in translation. Presents a variety of pedagogical approaches and examples from a wide variety of world languages and literary traditions, as well as modes of writing (prose, poetry, drama, film, and religious and historical texts) with the aim that many of the pedagogical approaches and strategies can be easily adapted for use with other works and traditions. Provides an invaluable set of resources for lecturers and instructors within translation studies and literature, especially essential for those teaching texts from languages and cultures with which they may have little or no familiarity.

Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx rests on the principles that storytelling is central to medical encounters between caregivers and patients and that narrative competence enhances medical competence. Thus, the book's goal is to develop the narrative competence of its reader. Grounded in the rhetorical theory of narrative that Phelan has been constructing over the course of his career, this volume utilizes a three-step method: Offering a jargon-free explication of core concepts of narrative such as character, progression, perspective, time, and space. Demonstrating how to use those concepts to interpret a diverse group of medical narratives, including two graphic memoirs. Pointing to the relevance of those demonstrations for caregiver-patient interactions. Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx is the ideal volume for undergraduate students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare, students in medical and allied health professional schools, and graduate students in the health humanities and social sciences.

A concise guide to Classical Mythology by a well respected expert in the field which allows students to contextualize primary sources with information about the culture and society in which they were conceived. A new chapter focuses on the use of myth in the modern world, allowing student to examine critically the persuasive power of well-known images from antiquity and how these images can be exploited. Provides an authoritative guide to students in a field which has become distorted by pet theories and reinterpretations, allowing students to engage with with key academic theories without losing sight of the myths themselves. Guides students through Classical Mythology from the earliest myths to modern retellings in computer games, films, art and music allowing the students to see a continuum between work and identify key trends in the reception of mythic stories.

Metafiction explores the great variety and effects of this popular genre and style, variously defined as a type of literature that philosophically questions itself, that repudiates the conventions of literary realism, that questions the relationship between fiction and reality, or that lies at the border between fiction and non-fiction. Yael Schlick surveys a wide range of metafictional writings by diverse authors, with particular focus on the contemporary period. This book asks not only what metafiction is but also what it can do, examining metafictional narratives' usefulness for exploring the role of art in society, its role in conceptualizing the figure of author and the reader of fiction, its investigation and playfulness with respect to language and linguistic conventions, and its troubling of the boundaries between fact and fiction in historiographic metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory. Metafiction is an engaging and accessible introduction to a pervasive and influential form and concept in literary studies, and will be of use to all students of literary studies requiring a depth of knowledge in the subject.

A breathtaking new collection of translations of poems by Rumi, one of the world's most loved mystical teachers and bestselling poets. Beautifully packaged and illustrated with paintings and Persian calligraphy, this is an ideal gift. Jalal-uddin Rumi was born in what is now Afghanistan in 1207. His poetry has inspired generations of spiritual seekers, both from his own Sufi school and well beyond. His poems speak to the seeker and the lover in all of us. He is one of the world's most revered poets and spiritual teachers, and is currently the bestselling poet in America. Rumi is one of the greatest mystic poets of all time. His unique message of love speaks directly to the heart and transcends the boundaries of language and time. These poems, carefully selected from the Divan of Shams (Rumi's collection of 3,000 poems), speak powerfully to the seeker and lover in all of us. These beautiful, new translations from the original Persian, by the authors of Rumi: Whispers of the Beloved, are arranged thematically and lead us through the intricacies of love, longing and the quest for truth. Each section is accompanied by Persian calligraphy of several of the poems, as well as stunning, evocative paintings by Azima Melita Kolin, reproduced in full colour, which are inspired by the poems and have been specially commissioned for the book.

What role did Dante play in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)? His unfinished and fragmented imitation of the Comedia, La Divina Mimesis, is only one outward sign of what was a sustained dialogue with Dante on representation begun in the early 1950s. During this period, the philologists Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990) and Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) played a crucial role in Pasolini's re-thinking of 'represented reality', suggesting Dante as the best literary, authorial and political model for a generation of postwar Italian writers. This emerged first as 'Dantean realism' in Pasolini's prose and poetry, after Contini's interpretation of Dante and of his plurilingualism, and then as 'figural realism' in his cinema, after Auerbach's concepts of Dante's figura and 'mingling of styles'. Following the evolution of Pasolini's mimetic ideal from these formative influences through to La Divina Mimesis, Emanuela Patti explores Pasolini's politics of representation in relation to the 'national-popular', the 'questione della lingua' and the Italian post-war debates on neorealism, while also providing a new interpretation of some of his major literary and cinematic works.

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

Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates offers a comprehensive and critically engaging introduction to the study of Victorian literature and addresses the most popular and vibrant topics in the field today. Separated into twelve sections, this anthology investigates issues as diverse as neo-formalism, sensationalism, religion, evolution, psychology, gender and sexuality, colonialism, imperialism, and economics. Each section contains at least three classic essays from leading scholars which offer a variety of approaches and theories from the liveliest areas of current criticism and debate in the field. Each section concludes with a newly written essay from a subject expert that reflects on this work and looks forward to new directions. A sign-posted introduction to the key critical contributions in Victorian studies from the past twenty-five years sets the reader on their path. Providing both the essential criticism along with clear introductions and analysis, this book is the perfect guide for students and scholars of Victorian literature.

This set reissues 10 books on T. S. Eliot originally published between 1952 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Eliot's most respected works, including his Four Quartets and The Waste Land. As well as exploring Eliot's work, this collection also provides a comprehensive analysis of the man behind the poetry, particularly in Frederick Tomlin's T. S. Eliot: A Friendship. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

First published in 1990. The book surveys of the development of German theatre from a market sideshow into an important element of cultural life and political expression. It examines Schiller as 'theatre poet' at Mannheim, Goethe's work as director of the court theatre at Weimar, and then traces the rapid commercial decline that made it difficult for Kleist and impossible for Buchner to see their plays staged in their own lifetime. Four representative texts are analysed: Schiller's The Robbers, Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris, Kleist's The Prince of Homburg, and Buchner's Woyzeck. This title will be of interest to students of theatre and German literature.

This book examines adaptations sparked by the two seminal novels, Voyage au bout de la nuit and Zazie dans le metro, to understand what 'voice' means in each medium, and its importance in the process of adaptation.

'The Dedalus Book of the Occult' celebrates the influence of occult thought on some of the central poets and writers of the last two centuries, beginning with the Enlightenment obsession with occult politics and leading through to the deep occult roots of the modernist movement.

The comic grotesque is a powerful element in a great deal of Elizabethan literature, but one which has attracted scant critical attention. In this study, first published in 1980, Neil Rhodes examines the nature of the grotesque in late sixteenth-century culture, and shows the part it played in the development of new styles of comic prose and drama in Elizabethan England. In defining 'grotesque', the author considers the stylistic techniques of Rabelais and Aretino, as well as the graphic arts. He discusses the use of the grotesque in Elizabethan pamphlet literature and the early satirical journalists such as Nashe, and argues that their work in turn stimulated the growth of satirical drama at the end of the century. The second part of the book explains the importance of Nashe's achievement for Shakespeare and Jonson, concluding that the linguistic resources of English Renaissance comedy are peculiarly - and perhaps uniquely - physical.

In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

In The Ideology of Conduct, first published in 1987, scholars from various fields, from the medieval period to the present day, discuss literature in which the sole purpose is to instruct women in how to make themselves desirable. This collection investigates how middle-class writers who had long emulated the behaviour of the aristocracy began to criticise that behaviour by formulating an alternative object of desire. They did so without appearing to breed political controversy because it seemed to concern only the female. But writing for and about women in fact became a powerful instrument of hegemony as it introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, induced certain forms of economic behaviour as desirable in men and women respectively, and insured the reproduction of the nuclear family. It is argued, therefore, that the literature of conduct not only recorded but also assisted the production of our contemporary gender-based culture.

Here lies entombed the renowned King Arthur in the island of Avalon. - Inscription found at Glastonbury in the late 12th century King Arthur most probably never existed and - even if he did - we know precious little about him, and yet he is one of the most famous Britons, while Excalibur and Camelot are perhaps the world's best known sword and castle. So, what's the truth behind King Arthur? How did the legends take hold? And why have they endured for so long? Long before the Marvel Universe there was the universe of Arthurian romance, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table examines the fact and the fiction behind Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, Guinevere, Galahad, among others, as well as the quest for the Holy Grail. Beginning in the 12th century, the book explores what factual basis there is for the tales and how the characters, stories and motifs developed through histories, epic poems and prose tellings. The book also charts the revived interest in Arthurian romance in the 19th century and considers how the tales still hold the popular imagination today. Illustrated with more than 180 colour and black-and-white artworks and photographs and maps, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is an expertly written account of where literature, mythology and history meet.

This book provides an analytical understanding of some of Tagore's most contested and celebrated works and ideas. It reflects on his critique of nationalism, aesthetic worldview, and the idea of 'surplus in man' underlying his life and works. It discusses the creative notion of surplus that stands not for 'profit' or 'value', but for celebrating human beings' continuous quest for reaching out beyond one's limits. It highlights, among other themes, how the idea of being 'Indian' involves stages of evolution through a complex matrix of ideals, values and actions-cultural, historical, literary and ideological. Examining the notion of the 'universal', contemporary scholars come together in this volume to show how 'surplus in man' is generated over the life of concrete particulars through creativity. The work brings forth a social scientific account of Tagore's thoughts and critically reconstructs many of his epochal ideas. Lucid in analysis and bolstered with historical reflection, this book will be a major intervention in understanding Tagore's works and its relevance for the contemporary human and social sciences. It will interest scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature and cultural studies.

This volume, offering an insight into the literary world of Rome in the fourth century AD, reflects an increased interest in the writers of the 150 years before the collapse of the Western Empire, who have long been over-shadowed by the pre-eminence accorded since the eighteenth century to the Golden and Silver ages. Among the writers examined are Ausonius, the poet, Imperial official and tutor to Gratian; Claudian, the last major 'classical' poet; Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola, two of the founders of Christian Latin poetry; Symmachus, the letter writer and supporter of die-hard paganism; and St. Augustine, whose influence on Christian thought and the Middle Ages is incalculable. These essays consider how such writers responded to a world where vitality was ebbing from the old forms of political life, religion and literature, giving way to new institutions, modes of life and horizons of reflection.

A number of ancient novelists were skilful storytellers and resourceful literary artists, and their works are often carefully individualised presentations of an ancient and distinguished heritage. Ancient Fiction, first published in 1984, examines the tales retold by these novelists in light of more recently discovered Near Eastern texts, and in this way offers a tentative solution to Rohde's celebrated problem about the origins of the Greek novel. Among the surprises that emerge are an ancient stratum of the Arabian Nights and a possible Tristan-Romance, as well as an animal Satyricon and a human Golden Ass. This new framework is, however, incidental to an examination of the achievements of ancient novelists in their own right. In presenting character, structuring narrative, imposing a veneer of sophistication or contriving a religious ethos, these writers demonstrate that their work is worthy of sympathetic study, rather dismissal as the pulp fiction of the ancient world.

First published in 1990, this is the first book-length study of Susan Sontag: essayist and analyst of culture, author of Notes on Camp and "Illness as Metaphor," novelist, reviewer, and filmmaker. It was modernism, and the excitement it created in her, that "rescued" Sontag from childhood in Southern California and sent her abroad in the 1950s. Sohnya Sayres looks into the foundations and directions of Sontag s imposing work and in doing so discovers a unity of design and subject that Sontag has only recently acknowledged to have been an ambition all along. Sayres s Sontag is the "elegiac modernist," committed to a modernism whose high noon has long since passed. And yet Sayres finds in Sontag s lifelong indebtedness to modernism s aesthetic an inherent conservatism. While guiding us through the work of a brilliant critic, Sayres questions whether Sontag is not herself caught in the paradoxes of the modernism she herself so much admires. A comprehensive analysis of the work of a remarkable intellectual, this title will be of value to any student of American modernism and literary life."

Feminist writing has emerged in recent years as a major influence of twentieth-century European literature. Textual Liberation, first published in 1991, provides a timely and wide-ranging survey of twentieth-century feminist writing in Europe, presenting texts from a number of countries and highlighting some of the transnational parallels and contrasts. The contributors emphasize the wider contexts- political, social, economic- in which the texts were produced. They cover feminist literature in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, and consider a range of genres, including the novel, poetry, drama, essays, and journalism. Each chapter contains an extensive bibliography with special emphasis on material available in English. A stimulating introduction to the development of European feminist writing, Textual Liberation will be an invaluable resource for students of women's literature, women's studies, and feminism.

Reissuing works originally published between 1960 and 1995, this varied set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship. It includes topics that touch on psychology, feminist criticism, philosophy and literary history as well as examinations of autobiography as genre.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the 'poetess', and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.