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'I long to study the purely national, natural character of an Irishwoman' When Horatio, the son of an English lord, is banished to his father's Irish estate as punishment for gambling debts and dissipated living, he adopts the persona of knight errant and goes off in search of adventure. On the wild west coast of Connaught he finds remnants of a romantic Gaelic past a dilapidated castle, a Catholic priest, a deposed king and the king's lovely and learned daughter, Glorvina. In this setting and a...

Reveals the secrets and stories that lie beneath the surface of Watson's narratives The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told, or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson's narratives and Holmes's often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle's...

For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This ‛religious turn’ has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects ‑ from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. The issue of religious pluralisation has been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. But confessio...

Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept tran...

This is a celebrated biography of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), prehaps the greatest lyric poet of this century. Rilke was born in Prague, but his nomadic existence led him through Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, and France, until his death in Switzerland from leukaemia. Uniquely, he dedicated himself exclusively to his art while remaining receptive to the most varied influences of European culture. He visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, acted for a time as secretary to Rodin, and was a frien...

This highly original book imitates the protagonist, Agnes, of Kundera's novel Immortality. Like all readers of fiction, when Agnes steps out of the car, she steps out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self, and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. Francois Ricard's beautiful essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores in Agnes's Final Afternoon includes a chain o...

This translation brings the complete works of three minor but important Italian poets - Dante's contemporaries at the turn of the 14th century - to English speakers for the very first time. Taken together, the three authors sketch an idealized portrait of courtly life juxtaposed to the gritty, politically fractured world of northern Italy's mercantile urban centers in which they lived. One poet, Folgore di San Gimignano, idealizes court life during the period; the second, Cenne da la Chitarra, l...

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts - particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeki...

Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life. In her ground-breaking essay, Todd contextualizes Austen’s life and work, Sanditon’s connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austen’s insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family’s financial speculations. She examines the work’s discussion of the moral and social problems of...

I have always loved painting and scenery. The connection between the British landscape seen by all of us with the naked eye and the same landscape seen through the eyes of artists, musicians and writers is fascinating. In A Picture of Britain I will be exploring these links and looking at their impact on our national character, seeking out the countryside we admire and the reasons we cherish it.? David Dimbleby Accompanying a major new BBC One series presented by David Dimbleby and an important...