A Cosmography of Man (Hallesche Beitrage Zur Europaischen Aufklarung, #61)
by Theresa Schoen
Designed to reform contemporary British society, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714) rely heavily on the representation of contemporary manners. In shaping such behavioural images, the authors made use of the satirical character sketch. Their character sketches (re)create social interactions between fictionalised representatives of moral types of men and women located in contemporary London. This study examines how Addison and Steele emp...
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...
Lectures On the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. by William Hazlitt.
by William Hazlitt
These essays focus primarily on the theme of selfhood and subjective experience in the poetry of the British Romantic period, and in the later poetry and novels that were its legacy. There are chapters on Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hardy and George Eliot - writers who, though often having a strong interest in public affairs, all turned inwards to make trial of imagination and the individual life as sources of order and value against a background of cultural unset...
Indian Partition in Literature and Films (Routledge Contemporary South Asia)
by Mehta Bhattacharya, Rini
This book presents an examination of fictional representations, in books and films, of the 1947 Partition that led to the creation of the sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan. While the process of representing the Partition experience through words and images began in the late 1940s, it is only in the last few decades that literary critics and film scholars have begun to analyse the work. The emerging critical scholarship on the Partition and its aftermath has deepened our understandin...
One of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is among the greatest poets to have written in the English language. He was a multi-talented writer, fascinated by the occult, an important dramatist, critic and autobiographer, with a career extending over more than fifty years. Professor Jeffares investigates the relationship between Yeats's life and his work. He considers the crucial moments as well as the famous relationships that changed Yeats's d...
This book offers the intelligent new reader a critically evaluative guide to Keats's major poems and letters, from a perspective which aims to counter the historical emphasis of recent critical work
Forgiveness in Victorian Literature (New Directions in Religion and Literature)
by Richard Hughes Gibson
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...
An Introduction to the Study of English Fiction
by William Edwards Simonds
A Welsh Childhood (Mermaid Books) (Cascades S.)
by Alice Thomas Ellis
A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500 challenges readers to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. A ground-breaking collection of newly-commissioned essays on medieval literature and culture. Encourages students to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. Reflects the erosion of the traditional, rigid boundary between medieval and early modern literature. Stresses the importance of...
The affirmative bible for the modern woman, this book celebrates all the reasons why it's great to be a girl!
Shawcross proposes that the many ambiguities surrounding Milton's dramatic poem Samson Agonistes are intentional: the actual words, the dates of composition, the genre, and the characters - particularly Samson and Dalila but including Manoa, Harapha, and the Chorus. Ambiguity also lies in Milton's presentation of political issues both philosophical and practical, his treatment of gender concepts, the constant questioning of the reader, and the poem's effect. Discussing all these elements, Shawcr...
Reiko Oya explores theatrical expressions of Shakespearean tragedy in Georgian London and the relations between the representative players of the time - David Garrick, John Philip Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons, and Edmund Kean - and their close circle of friends. The book begins by analysing the tragic emotion that Garrick conveyed through his performance of King Lear, and the responses to it from such critics as Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu. The second chapter examines the concept...
Between the Iceberg and the Ship (Poetry on Poetry S.) (Poetry on Poetry)
by Anne Stevenson
Never affiliated with any group or school, Anne Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was educated at the University of Michigan where, in 1954, she won a Major Hopwood Prize for poetry. Since 1964 she has lived in the United Kingdom where a restless career as a mother, teacher, bookseller, and skep-tical enthusiast for some poetry has produced many volumes of verse, a highly controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, and two critical introductions to the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Feminist...
Though individual prologues and epilogues have been treated in depth, very little scholarship has been published on early modern framing texts as a whole. The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama fills a gap in the literature by examining the origins of these texts, and investigating their growing importance and influence in the theatre of the period. This topic-led discussion of prologues and epilogues deals with the origins of these texts, the difficulty of definition, and the way in whi...
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...
Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar (Contemporary World Writers)
by Abigail Ward
Slavery is a recurring subject in works by the contemporary black writers in Britain Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar, yet their return to this past arises from an urgent need to understand the racial anxieties of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. This book examines the ways in which their literary explorations of slavery may shed light on current issues in Britain today, or what might be thought of as the continuing legacies of the UK's largely forgotten slave past.In...
Thomas Hahn's work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies - careful attention to texts and their co...
Williams analyses and compares the ways in which African Americans and the Welsh have defined themselves as minorities within larger nation states (the UK and US). The study is grounded in examples of actual friendships and cultural exchanges between African Americans and the Welsh, such as Paul Robeson's connections with the socialists of the Welsh mining communities, and novelist Ralph Ellison's stories about his experiences as a GI stationed in wartime Swansea. This wide ranging book draws o...