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A study of numerology in Elizabethan poetry, with some background studies which base the subject in classical learning, the works of Dante and Petrarch, and the esoteric traditions of the humanists. The central assumption of numerological criticism is that there exist works written in this tradition which show a correspondence between structure and meaning on a numerical plane; that is, one in which the number of the constituent parts (lines, stanzas, sonnets in a sequence) expresses a major asp...

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...

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of Clare Pollard's childhood reading and her re-discovery of the classic tales as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used...

The Yeats -Tagore friendship and the eventual curious fallout between the two remain a mystery; the focus of this volume is a postcolonial reading of the two writers’ friendship, the critical reception of Tagore in 1912 England, and Tagore’s erasure from Western literary discourse. The essays in this volume take a decolonial turn to critically analyze the two writers in the discourse of power that is a part of their larger story. The nuances that appear in the pages of this illuminating book...

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

Die Autorin beschaftigt sich mit den einschneidenden - traumatisierenden wie faszinierenden - Stationen der Kulturbegegnung von Ost und West. Sie untersucht die vielschichtigen Facetten des Orients als einerseits rein diskursiven, andererseits geografisch und historisch realen, wenngleich imaginar uberfrachteten Topos. Die Analyse des mythischen und modernen Orientbildes in der deutschsprachigen Reiseliteratur ist eine Ruckbesinnung auf die Fahigkeit der westlichen wie der oestlichen Kultur, Off...

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is undoubtedly one of the defining voices of our age. Since the Second World War, his work has had an enormous impact on generations of writers, philosophers and literary theorists. This clear and accessibly written guide offers a close reading of ten of Borges' greatest short stories, seeking to bring out the logic that has made his work so influential. The main section of the guide offers an analysis of such key terms in Borges' work as "labyrinth" and th...

Die an die moderne Feindbildtheorie anknupfende Arbeit befasst sich mit der Darstellung muslimischer Kontrahenten in der Kreuzzugslyrik des 10. bis 12. Jahrhunderts. Da das Phanomen Kreuzzug nicht nur ein Land oder Sprachgebiet, sondern das gesamte christliche Europa erfasst hat, wurde ein Korpus aus 40 Kreuzliedern der vier vorherrschenden Literaturen der damaligen Zeit (mittellateinisch, provenzalisch, mittelhochdeutsch und altfranzoesisch) erstellt, anhand dessen das komplexe Gefuge aus Stere...

One way and another, nearly all of Shakespeare's countrymen and women (including the playwright himself) spent at least parts of their lives as servants of someone else. But until now that fact has gone largely unregarded. This book remedies the oversight, by showing how the ideals and practices of early modern service affect dozens of characters in almost all the plays, in ways that enrich our understanding of familiar figures like Iago and Falstaff and enhance the significance of lesser-known...

Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon intimately examines Caribbean writers who engage canonical Western texts and forms, while using humor to challenge Western representations of people of African descent.

Drawing upon a range of disciplines including anthropology, classical studies, archaeology and psychology, Jane Ellen Harrison's seminal 1912 work Themis pieces together the origins of early Greek religion. Known as one of the founders of modern studies in Greek mythology, Harrison has been described by her biographer, Mary Beard, as 'Britain's first female professional 'career academic'. She is renowned as being one of the most intellectual women of her time, and the ideas espoused on Greek rit...

Forgiveness was a preoccupation of writers in the Victorian period, bridging literatures highbrow and low, sacred and secular. Yet if forgiveness represented a common value and language, literary scholarship has often ignored the diverse meanings and practices behind this apparently uncomplicated value in the Victorian period. Forgiveness in Victorian Literature examines how eminent writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde wrestled with the religious and socia...

Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s. Through close readings of canonical speeches by Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, Peter Szondi, and Peter Weiss, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West...

In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benitez-Rojo redefines th...

From the shootings at Columbine High School to the JonBenet Ramsey murder to the sentencing of "killer kids," today's media cannot decide if children are objects of fear or in need of protection. Our culture's deep-seated ambivalence toward its young is reflected in a fascinating array of recent fiction that exposes society's collective fantasies and fears.Demon or Doll investigates the ambiguous, contradictory ways childhood has been formulated in the twentieth century and the resulting ambival...

Why do people tell dirty jokes? And what is it about a joke's dirtiness that makes it funny? G. Legman was perhaps the foremost scholar of the dirty joke, and as legions of humor writers and comedians know, his Rationale of the Dirty Joke remains the most exhaustive and authoritative study of the subject. More than two thousand jokes and folktales are presented, covering such topics as The Female Fool, The Fortunate Fart, Mutual Mismatching, and The Sex Machine. These folk texts are a...

Le sujet poetique est une notion paradoxale qui nous renseigne de facon paradigmatique sur le devenir de la poesie moderne. Ses eclatements et ses scissions a la fin du Symbolisme definissent un champ semiotique que les avant-gardes historiques ont adapte ou transforme. L'etude de l'oeuvre d'Apollinaire et de celle de Huidobro montre a quel point une description stable du sujet est pertinente pour comprendre les raisons profondes de la poesie, de la crise a la celebration lyrique et jusqu'a la...