Dobbs-Allsopp, Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, explicitly approaches Whitman from the perspective of a biblical scholar. Utilising his wealth of expertise in this field, he constructs a compelling, erudite and methodical argument for the King James Bible’s importance in the evolution of Whitman’s style – from his signature long lines to the prevalence of parallelism and tendency towards parataxis in his works.
The book is a chronological reading of Alexander Pope’s poems, from the Pastorals (1709) to the four-book Dunciad (1743). Each of the 26 chapters forming the volume selects examples for detailed scrutiny, demonstrating how close reading can generate understanding of a whole poem and how critical appraisal can build into a creative survey of an entire poetic career.
Textual practices in pre-modern societies cover a great range of representations, from the literary to the pictorial. Among the most intriguing are synopses and lists. While lists provide a complete enumeration of ideas, people, events, or terms, synopses juxtapose one against the other. To understand how they were planned, produced, and consumed, is to gain insight into the practices of what one can call management of knowledge in a time before our own.
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than five hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.
Transparent Minds explores the intersection between neuroscience and science fiction stories. Paul Matthews expertly analyses the narratives of humans and nonhumans from Mary Shelley to Kazuo Ishiguro across 200 years of the genre. In doing so he gives lucid insight into the meaning of existence and self-awareness. Rigorously researched and highly accessible, Matthews argues that psycho-emotional science fiction writers both imitate and inform alien and post-human consciousnesses through exploratory narratives and metaphor.
This book contains a unique collection of Tibetan oral narrations and songs known as Shépa, as these have been performed, recorded and shared between generations of Choné Tibetans from Amdo living in the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Presented in trilingual format — in Tibetan, Chinese and English — the book reflects a sustained collaboration with and between members of the local community, including narrators, monks, and scholars, calling attention to the diversity inherent in all oral traditions, and the mutability of Shépa in particular.
This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature.
Destins de femmes is the first comprehensive overview of French women writers during the turbulent period of 1750-1850. John Isbell provides an essential collection that illuminates the impact women writers had on French literature and politics during a time marked by three revolutions, the influx of Romantic art, and rapid technological change.
The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.
This book is an edition and translation of one of the most important and celebrated sources of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and heroic legend, namely the medieval poems now known collectively as the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda.
This volume explores an underappreciated feature of the standard Tiberian Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew, namely its composite nature. Focusing on cases of dissonance between the tradition’s written (consonantal) and reading (vocalic) components, the study shows that the Tiberian spelling and pronunciation traditions, though related, interdependent, and largely in harmony, at numerous points reflect distinct oral realisations of the biblical text.
In this monograph, Roberta Morano re-examines one of the foundational works of the Omani Arabic dialectology field, Carl Reinhardt’s Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in ‘Oman und Zanzibar (1894). This German-authored work was prolific in shaping our knowledge of Omani Arabic during the twentieth century, until the 1980s when more recent linguistic studies on the Arabic varieties spoken in Oman began to appear.
This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination.
Navigating the landscape of Romantic literature and art across Europe and the Americas, An Outline of Romanticism in the West invites readers to embark upon a literary journey. Showcasing a breadth of theoretical and contextual approaches to the study of Romanticism, John Isbell provides an insightful contemporary overview of the field, paired with wide-ranging comparative reflections on the art and literature that helped shape it.
This groundbreaking new work is the first full critical edition and English translation of the Hebrew book *Sefer ha-Pardes* [The Book of the Orchard], written at the end of the thirteenth century by the Provençal Jewish author Jedaiah ha-Penini.
In this two-part anthology, Jan M. Ziolkowski builds on themes uncovered in his earlier The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Here he focuses particularly on the performing arts.
This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews.
This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews.
Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties.
This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.
Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death.
In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to become so significant for such a wide range of individuals and communities around the world.
From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years.
This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives.
This elegant collection of essays ranges across eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, covering philosophy, science, literature and religion in the ‘Age of Goethe.’ A recognised authority in the field, Nisbet grapples with the major voices of the Enlightenment and gives pride of place to the figures of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller.
In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that.
‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making.
A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture.
This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction.
This volume presents the original text, accompanied by an English translation and commentary, of a hitherto unpublished Syriac composition, entitled the Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands.
This masterful and highly accessible translation of Les Philosophes opens up this polemical text to a non-specialist audience. It will be a valuable resource to non-Francophone scholars and students working on the philosophical exchanges of the Enlightenment.
Mendl Mann’s autobiographical novel The Fall of Berlin tells the painful yet compelling story of life as a Jewish soldier in the Red Army. Menakhem Isaacovich is a Polish Jew who, after fleeing the Nazis, finds refuge in the USSR. Translated into English from the original Yiddish by Maurice Wolfthal, the narrative follows Menakhem as he fights on the front line in Stalin’s Red Army against Hitler and the Nazis who are destroying his homeland of Poland and exterminating the Jews.
Flora Kimmich’s new translation carefully preserves the spirit of the original: the pathos and passion of Mary in captivity, the high seriousness of Elizabeth’s ministers in council, and the robust comedy of that queen’s untidy private life. Notes to the text identify the many historical figures who appear in the text, describe the political setting of the action, and draw attention to the structure of the play.
Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".
With an introduction and detailed notes by William F. Halloran, this richly rewarding collection offers a wonderful insight into the literary landscape of the time, while also investigating a strange and underappreciated phenomenon of late-nineteenth-century English literature. It is essential for scholars of the period, and it is an illuminating read for anyone interested in authorship and identity.
The image of a giant sword melting stands at the structural and thematic heart of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf. This meticulously researched book investigates the nature and significance of this golden-hilted weapon and its likely relatives within Beowulf and beyond, drawing on the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, liturgy, archaeology, astronomy, folklore and comparative mythology.
This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory – concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them.
In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego’s work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and the family that run through Rego’s art.
This anthology offers a fruitful exploration of the boundary between literary and popular culture, and showcases an impressive breadth of literature, including songs, drama, and ballads. Familiar texts such as the visions of Margery Kempe and the Paston family letters are featured alongside lesser-known works, often oral. This striking diversity extends to the language: the anthology includes Scottish literature and original translations of Latin and French texts.
Originally written in Yiddish and here skillfully translated and introduced by Maurice Wolfthal, The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19 brings to light a terrible and historically neglected series of persecutions that foreshadowed the Holocaust by twenty years. It is essential reading for academics and students in the fields of human rights, Jewish studies, Russian and Soviet studies, and Ukraine studies.
Love and Intrigue, the third of Schiller’s canonical plays (after The Robbers and Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa), belongs to the genre of domestic tragedy, with a small cast and an action indoors. It takes place as the highly conventional world of the late eighteenth century stands poised to erupt, and these tensions pervade its setting and emerge in its action. This lively play brims with comedy and tragedy expressed in a colorful, highly colloquial, sometimes scandalous prose well captured in Flora Kimmich’s skilled and informed translation. An authoritative essay by Roger Paulin introduces the reader to the play.
In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published.
Friedrich Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion (1797–99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. In this skilful translation, Gaskill conveys the beautiful music and rhythms of Hölderlin’s language to an English-speaking reader.
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.
Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.
This new, expanded edition contains: Zur Mühlen’s autobiographical memoir, The End and the Beginning; The editor’s detailed notes on the persons and events mentioned in the autobiography; A selection of Zur Mühlen’s short stories and two fairy tales; A synopsis of Zur Mühlen’s untranslated novel Our Daughters the Nazi Girls; An essay by the Editor on Zur Mühlen’s life and work; A bibliography of Zur Mühlen’s novels in English translation; A portfolio of selected illustrations of her work by George Grosz and Heinrich Vogeler; A free online supplement with additional original material
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.
Schiller described Don Carlos as "a family portrait in a princely house.” It interweaves political machinations with powerful personal relationships to create a complex and resonant tragedy. The conflict between absolutism and liberty appealed not only to audiences but also to other artists and gave rise to several operas, not least to Verdi’s great Don Carlos of 1867. The play, which the playwright never finished to his satisfaction, lives on nonetheless among his best-loved works and is translated here with flair and skill by Flora Kimmich.
In this fascinating collection of essays Harvard Emeritus Professor Karl S. Guthke examines the ways in which, for European scholars and writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, world-wide geographical exploration led to an exploration of the self.
Poet of landscape, myth and memory, Soso Tham paid rich and poignant tribute to his tribe in his masterpiece The Old Days of the Khasis. Janet Hujon’s vibrant new translation presents the English reader with Tham’s long poem, which keeps a rich cultural tradition of the Khasi people alive through its retelling of old narratives and acts as a cultural signpost for their literary identity.
The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme.
This collection of essays from world-renowned scholar Hans Walter Gabler contains writings from a decade and a half of retirement spent in exploration of textual criticism, genetic criticism, and literary criticism. In these sixteen stimulating contributions, he develops theories of textual criticism and editing that are inflected by our advance into the digital era; structurally analyses arts of composition in literature as well as music; and traces the cultural implications discernible in book design, and in the societal processes of the canonisation of works of literature and their authors.
This book is an anthology with a difference. It presents a distinctive variety of Anglo-Norman works, beginning in the twelfth century and ending in the nineteenth, covering a broad range of genres and writers, introduced in a lively and thought-provoking way. Facing-page translations, into accessible and engaging modern English, are provided throughout, bringing these texts to life for a contemporary audience.
This collection in three volumes offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the Dante's Comedy. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante.
Containing ballads of martial heroism, tales of tragic lovers and visions of the nature of the world, Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English is a rich repository of songs collected amongst the Mongghul of the Seven Valleys, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in western China.
This critical edition of the working notes for Dombey and Son (1848) is ideal for readers who wish to know more about Dickens’s craft and creativity. Drawing on the author’s manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London—and containing hyperlinked facsimiles—Dickens’s Working Notes for Dombey and Son offers a new digital transcription with a fresh commentary by Tony Laing. Unique and innovative, this is the only edition to make Dickens’s working methods visible.
This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge.
Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture.
The canon of Russian poetry has been reshaped since the fall of the Soviet Union. A multi-authored study of changing cultural memory and identity, this revisionary work charts Russia’s shifting relationship to its own literature in the face of social upheaval.
The Wallenstein trilogy, formally innovative and modern beyond its time, is a brilliant study of power, ambition and betrayal. In this new translation—the latest in a long line of distinguished English translations of the play, starting with Coleridge's in Schiller's lifetime—Flora Kimmich succeeds in rendering what is often a difficult source text into language that is at once accessible and enjoyable.
This collection offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante.
This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series.
These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot.
This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waiver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century.
This is the first attempt to combine an account of Schlegel’s life and times with a critical evaluation of his work and its influence. Through the study of one man's rich life, incorporating the most recent scholarship, theoretical approaches, and archival resources, while remaining easily accessible to all readers, Paulin has recovered the intellectual climate of Romanticism in Germany and traced its development into a still-potent international movement.
This volume traces the life, thought and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a giant of American intellectual history, whose transforming ideas greatly strengthened the two leading reform issues of his day: abolition and women’s rights. A broad and deep, yet cautious revolutionary, he spoke about a spectrum of inner and outer realities—personal, philosophical, theological and cultural—all of which gave his mid-career turn to political and social issues their immediate and lasting power.
Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem.
Within two years of the success of his first play Die Räuber on the German stage in 1781, Schiller wrote a drama based on a rebellion in sixteenth century Italy, its title: The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa. A Republican Tragedy. With Fiesco as tragic hero Schiller examines the complex entanglement of morality and politics in his own times that was to preoccupy him throughout his career. There have been some noteworthy productions on the German stage and television, even if it has remained somewhat in the shadow of Schiller’ other works. In the English-speaking world it is all but unknown and very seldom performed. This translation aims to remedy that oversight.
This book makes a long-awaited contribution to the oral literature and mythology of the American Southwest, and its format and organization are of special interest. Narratives are presented in the original language and in the storytellers’ own words. Facing-page English translation provides a key to the original Quechan for the benefit of language learners. In presenting not just stories but story complexes, this volume captures the art of storytelling and illuminates the complexity and interconnectedness of an important body of oral literature.
The first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship, The Anglo-Scottish Ballad addresses topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades.
This biography examines the long life of the traveller and author Stephen Graham. Graham walked across much of the Tsarist Empire in the years before 1917, and his writings about his adventures helped to shape attitudes towards Russia in Britain and the US. In later years he travelled widely in Europe and America, meeting some of the best known writers of his day. Tracing Graham’s career as a world traveller, this book explores Graham’s heterodox and convoluted spiritual quest, while also providing a rich portrait of English, Russian and American literary life in the first half of the twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the short story – sometimes seen as the ultimate test of an author’s creativity – was at its most popular. This book is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing. Goyet shows that authors managed to create brilliant short stories using the very simple ‘tools of brevity’ of that period. Demonstrating that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of the readers, this book forces us to rethink our preconceptions about this ‘forgotten’ genre.
A special issue in this renowned research-level series, Yeats Annual 19 explores the concept of the Mask in Yeats’s plays and poems. The volume also includes studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, and the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. As well as ten new reviews focusing on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS series and his correspondence with George Yeats, this volume republishes the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper from the elusive Yeats Annual 1 (1982).
This book offers an English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Recorded when the Malagasy people were first experiencing European contact, Ibonia proclaims the power of the ancestors against the foreigner. Its fairytale elements link it with European folktales, but the story is nonetheless very much a product of Madagascar. Inflating the folktale form to epic proportions, it combines African-style praise poetry with Indonesian-style riddles and poems. Through Ibonia, Lee Haring expertly helps readers to understand the very nature of folktales, connecting this exotic narrative with fundamental questions not only of anthropology but also of literary criticism.
A collection and analysis of the oral narrative traditions of northern Zambia, this innovative book integrates audio and video recordings into the text. Robert Cancel’s critical interpretation, meanwhile, makes his work a much-needed addition to the slender corpus of African folklore studies dealing with storytelling performance. Cancel threads his way between the complex demands of African fieldwork studies, folklore theory, narrative modes, reflexive description and documentation, and brings to the reader a vivid, varied and instructive array of performances. His study tells us not only about storytelling but sheds light on the study of oral literatures throughout Africa and beyond.
Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. This book explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilized as a consequence of being archived. This book is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities to document and preserve oral traditions.
This special issue of the renowned research-level Yeats Annual offers a tribute to the pioneering Yeats scholar, A. Norman Jeffares. Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, while other scholars offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Raferty’s work of Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, and The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume also includes reviews of recent editions and studies.
Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan’s ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, ‘drum language’ and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa.
Russian women of the nineteenth century are often thought of in their literary incarnations, but their real counterparts are now becoming much better understood as active contributors to Russia’s varied cultural landscape. This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia – from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia – discussing their interaction with the church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic but often overlooked presence in nineteenth-century Russia’s culture and society.
This collection brings together for the first time select works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. It was Printz-Påhlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American and continental modernist traditions. In addition to Letters of Blood, the collection also includes The Words of the Tribe, Printz-Påhlson’s major statement on modern poetics, as well as essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction. Printz-Påhlson’s poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.
One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics and sociology, but his long-standing interest in literature has often been overlooked. The first full-length study of Bourdieu’s work on literature in English, this book is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu’s work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works.
Our fear of the world ending, like our fear of the dark, is ancient, deep-seated and perennial, crossing boundaries of space and time, and finding expression in every aspect of cultural production. This book examines historical and imaginary scenarios of Apocalypse, the depiction of its likely triggers, and imagined landscapes in the aftermath of global destruction. Moving effortlessly from classic novels to blockbuster films, the author also takes into account religious doctrine, scientific research and the visual arts to create a penetrating, multi-disciplinary study that provides profound insight into one of Western culture’s darkest and most enduring preoccupations.
As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequently wrote about cultural differences between the Old and New Worlds. The plight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophistication became a regular theme in his fiction. Written by some of the world’s leading James scholars, this collection offers a comprehensive picture of James’s cross-cultural aesthetics. Building upon detailed analyses of his perception of Europe – of its people and places, its history and culture, its artists and thinkers, its aesthetics and ethics – it offers a profound re-evaluation of James’s writing.
In the first full-length study of Shelley’s plays in performance, Mulhallen provides a meticulously researched history of Shelley’s role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his ‘closet dramas’ as performable pieces of theatre. As well as discussing Shelley’s stagecraft and analysing performances of his plays from the 1800s to today, the book also offers a detailed account of the theatrical scene of Shelley’s time, including details of the productions Shelley himself saw. Mulhallen reveals Shelley as an extraordinarily talented playwright, whose fascination with contemporary theatrical theory and practice challenges the notion that he was a reluctant dramatist.
Offering a significant contribution to the growing debate on how digitization is shaping our collective identity, this far-reaching, multidisciplinary collection investigates how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, leading scholars explore topics including how computers have affected our relationship to language, whether the book has become an obsolete object, the nature of online journalism, and the psychology of authorship.
The Book of Judith has fascinated artists and authors for centuries, and is becoming a major field of research in its own right. This book is the first multidisciplinary collection to discuss representations of Judith through the centuries. Bringing together scholars from around the world, it transforms our understanding of Judith’s enduring story across a wide range of disciplines. The book includes sections on Judith in Christian, Jewish and secular textual traditions, and representations of Judith in art, music and theatre. It also includes new archival source studies, and translations of unpublished manuscripts and texts previously unavailable in English.
Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), caused a literary sensation in 2006. Described as ‘deliberately repellent’ by the New York Times, Jonathan Littell’s novel tells the story of World War II through the eyes of former SS officer Maximilien Aue. In the first academic study of this controversial best-seller, twenty-one leading scholars discuss the aesthetics, themes and characters of the novel, as well as formal aspects of Littell’s writing. Offering a highly varied range of approaches, they tackle ideas around parricide, genocide, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, as well as Littell’s portrayal of historical and fictional characters.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one quite short period of his life he held real political power – acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. Meticulously researched, this book provides detailed analysis of the laws drafted by Coleridge, together with the first published translations of them. Drawing upon newly discovered archival materials, the authors shed new light on Coleridge’s sense of political and legal morality, showing how Coleridge’s actions whilst in a position of power differed markedly from the idealism he advocated before taking office.
Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. While some works, such as the Grimm fairytales, quickly became classics, as this book demonstrates, many other, lesser-known works have been fundamental in the development of English children’s stories during the 19th century and beyond. In the first comprehensive study of the impact of Germany on English children’s books, David Blamires explores a wealth of translated and adapted material from 1780 to the First World War.
When in 1821, the Greeks rose in violent revolution against Ottoman rule, waves of sympathy spread across western Europe and the USA. Inspired by a belief that Greece had a unique claim on the sympathy of the world, more than a thousand Philhellenes set out to fight for the cause. This meticulously researched and highly readable account of their aspirations and experiences has long been the standard account of the Philhellenic movement and essential reading for students of the Greek War of Independence, Byron and European Romanticism. Its relevance to more modern conflicts is also becoming increasingly appreciated.