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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.

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...

The reputation of Janet Frame, modern New Zealand writer, languishes. [Janet Frame] will bring more recognition to Frame. Among its well-known contributors are Patricia Moran, Suzette A. Henke and Claire Bazin. The collection truly has a global reach, with professors in the U.S., England, France, and Australia, and all of the essays are written by women. Given Frame's opposition to patriarchy and preoccupation with "Womanly" language and feminist themes, women bring a unique point of view to ana...

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women's writing through the twentieth century-a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women's writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Ita...

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...

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...

Distinguished theologians and literary scholars explore the workings of the sacred and the sacramental in language and literature. What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? This volume develops the theory of "sacramental poetics" advanced by Regina Schwartz in her 2008 book on English Reformation writers, taking the theory in new directions while de...

This book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary poetry. The author characterizes the works of modern Russian, French, and Anglo-American poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics. The author compares the work of major Russian innovative poets Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Joseph Brodsky with that of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, in spite...

This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the ""big wave"" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constit...

Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed f...

In this slim, poetically powerful volume, Piero Boitani develops his earlier work in The Bible and Its Rewritings, focusing on Shakespeare's "rescripturing" of the Gospels. Boitani persuasively urges that Shakespeare read the New Testament with great care and an overall sense of affirmation and participation, and that many of his plays constitute their own original testament, insofar as they translate the good news into human terms. In Hamlet and King Lear, he suggests, Shakespeare's "New Testam...

Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esme Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are rep...

In The News and Other Poems, David Citino confronts and attempts to make sense of the news. He explores the good and bad ways the world has of careening into a life and sending it off course. Citino tries to understand how we come to know what we know, driven as we are by haughty assumptions about the world we’re making and the control we think we exert over our own lives and loves. While still holding romantic notions of ivory towers and ivy-covered garrets, Citino welcomes the latest informati...

The most popular hero of Russian nineteenth-century historical literature was the False Dimitrii, Ivan the Terrible's "son," who had miraculously escaped murder and who with Polish help ascended the throne in 1605. He was the problematic protagonist of Pushkin's famous Boris Godunov (1825, opera by Mussorgskii 1869- 1872), but also of a host of lesser known plays and novels. This book's thesis is that Russian literature chose the impostor figure for a critical self-reflection on the elite being...

From the gothic fantasies of Walpole's Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to examine how authors' personal experiences helped to shape the homes that have become icons of English literature. We encounter Jane Austen drinking 'too much wine' in the lavish ballroom of a Hampshire manor, discover how Virginia Woolf's love of Talland House at St Ives is palpable in To the Ligh...

This new book situates Beckett in a philosophical and literary tradition that has argued for the creative value of stupidity, a key concept in the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein. It investigates the relationship between verbal cliche, revealing the strategies he used to challenge intellectual and social authority in his works.

In this volume, the author attempts to apply developments in critical theory and practice to the entire canon of Conrad's works. Using a broadly structuralist approach, the book aims to further the reader's understanding of Conrad's fiction by analyzing his narrative method and focusing on its devices, functions, variations and thematic effects or implications. The text is concerned with the relationship between Conrad's narrative method and the thematics which this method served to engender and...

In the course of compiling his highly acclaimed three-volume biography of Kafka, while foraying to libraries and archives from Prague to Israel, Reiner Stach made one astounding discovery after another: unexpected photographs, inconsistencies in handwritten texts, excerpts from letters, and testimonies from Kafka's contemporaries that shed surprising light on his personality and his writing. Is That Kafka? presents the crystal granules of the real Kafka: he couldn't lie, but he tried to cheat on...

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Ro...

On the night of November 4th 1605, the English authorities uncovered an alleged plot by a group of discontented Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the lords, princes, queen and king in attendance. The failure of the plot is celebrated to this day and is known as Guy Fawkes Day. In Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary r...

In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts. Literature in the Making examines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis...