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For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change? This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansi...

This book examines intersections of poetry and performance during the British Poetry Revival. Its investigations are centered on four specific performance events: The First International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965; Denise Riley's first public reading at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1977; Eric Mottram's Pollock Record; and Allen Fisher's Blood Bone Brain. Drawing upon a range of archival resources, recordings, and interviews, Juha Virtanen offers engaging and detailed...

Drawing from a broad range of contemporary British poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Kathleen Jamie, and Alice Oswald, this study examines the inherently spatial and affective nature of our engagement with poetry. Adding to the expanding field of geocritical studies, Yeung specifically discusses ideas of space and constructions of voice in poetry.

An Introduction to Contemporary Irish Literature provides a thorough initiation into the works of a broad selection of living Irish writers. The collection treats the writings of a range of individuals, from such well-established artists as Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel, to those whose reputations demand to be extended beyond their Irish audience. With a comprehensive introduction which provides a continuum from the Celtic Twilight to the present day, and with helpful literary and historical chr...

Since the 9/11 attacks terror has established its permeating hold on society's psyche. Creative writing, a popular and visible cultural witness to the strain, has taken up this destabilization with remarkable regularity. Troubled Testimonies focuses on the Indian novel in English, deriving inspiration from these disturbances, to essay a unique grasp of the cultural make-up of the times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to the nation. This first full-length study of terror...

This is a biography of James Baldwin, author, one-time preacher and civil rights activist. He chose David Leeming, a close friend and colleague, to write his biography and granted him access to his correspondence. Leeming traces his life from his birth in Harlem in 1924, his self-imposed exile in Europe, his later years as political activist to his public funeral in 1987.

Coleridge has been perceived as the youthful author of a few brilliant poems. This study argues that his poetry is actually a continuous process of experimentation and provides a new perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar poems, as well as the relation between Coleridge's poetry and philosophical thinking.

The Algerian War Retold: Of Camus’s Revolt and Postwar Reconciliation focuses on specific aspects of Albert Camus’s ethical thought through a study of his writings in conjunction with late 20th- and early 21st-century works written by Franco-Maghrebi authors on the topic of the Algerian War (1954-1962). It combines historical inquiry with literary analysis in order to examine the ways in which Camus’s concept of revolt -- in his novels, journalistic writing, and philosophical essays -- reverbera...

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism through reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and...

In this first definitive study of Friedrich Schiller's relationship to music, R. M. Longyear discusses Schiller's personal, literary, and philosophical utilization of music as well as the influence of Schiller's works on composers from 1782 through the 1960s.

Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 consists of eight original essays by literary, historical, and multicultural critics on the subject of working women in late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century American literature. The volume examines how the American working woman has been presented, misrepresented, and underrepresented in American realistic and naturalistic literature (1865–1930), and by later authors influenced by realism and naturalism. Points explored include: the historical...

While the dehumanizing effects of technology, modernity, and industrialization have been widely recognized in D. H. Lawrence’s works, no book-length study has been dedicated to this topic. This collection of newly commissioned essays by a cast of international scholars fills a genuine void and investigates Lawrence’s peculiar relationship with modern technology and modernity in its many and varied aspects. Addressing themes such as pastoral vs. industrial, mining, war, robots, ecocriticism,...

In Austrian economic thought, "human action" guides all social and cultural experience. For both the real world and for fictional texts, this starting point can illuminate literature in new ways and offer valuable insight for literary critics who have previously been beholden to Marxism and other anti-capitalist perspectives. In Re-Reading Economics in Literature: A Capitalist Critical Perspective, Matt Spivey posits that in its relationship to literature, Austrian economic criticism entails a...

Richard Wright and Transnationalism sees Dr. Mamoun Alzoubi argue that renowned American Author, Richard Wright, transformed the way that we approach comparative literature by beginning to look at matters of American racism and Civil Rights in transnational contexts, formed by the new nations surfacing from colonial rule. Richard Wright and Transnationalism demonstrates how Wright, beginning with his work in the 1950s, began to hypothesize the shared history of suffering that linked the experien...

Ulysses has been read obsessively for a century. What if instead of focusing on the words to understand the structure, design, and history of Joyce’s masterpiece, we pay attention to the numbers? Taking a computational approach, Ulysses by Numbers lets us see the novel’s basic building blocks in a significantly new light—words, paragraphs, pages, and characters, as well as the original print run and the dates marking the beginning and end of its composition. Numbers provide access into Joyce’s...

Alex Engebretson offers the first comprehensive study of Marilynne Robinson's fiction and essays to date, providing an overview of the author's life, themes, and literary and religious influences. Understanding Marilynne Robinson examines this author of three highly acclaimed novels and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Orange Prize for fiction, and the National Humanities Medal. Through close readings of the novels and essay col...

Otto Ludwig, nineteenth-century German novelist and critic, originated the term poetic realism. In this excellent study, Ludwig's prose is sympathetically and thoroughly examined and a clear account of the evolution of German fiction after Romanticism is presented. Taking Ludwig's narrative works together with his literary criticism, McClain shows how the author attempted to blend the real and the ideal to reach the goal of poetic realism as he envisioned it.

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a Set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, Contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subseque...