At a moment when Google seeks "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", this book tells the story of long-term aspirations, first in ancient epic and then in
This book considers the literary construction of what E. M. Forster calls 'the 1939 State', namely the anticipation of the Second World War between the Munich crisis of 1938 and the end of the Phoney War in the spring of 1940. Steve Ellis investigates not only myriad responses to the imminent war but also various peace aims and plans for post-war reconstruction outlined by such writers as T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, E. M. Forster and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He argues that the work of these writers is illuminated by the anxious tenor of this period. The result is a novel study of the 'long 1939', which transforms readers' understanding of the literary history of the eve-of-war era.
The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they en
McCann focuses on a variety of fiction and nonfiction, including graphic novels and memoirs, published in North Ireland over the past two decades. She analyzes the works from the perspective of French
Investigating a literary imagination of violence after the Reformation, Richter question the popular assumption of an early modern residual "medieval barbarism," and argues for an intrinsic connection
This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postco
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa,Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as
The story of Irish modernism constitutes a remarkable chapter in the movement's history. This volume serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped to create a distinctive nationalist literature but also changed the face of European and anglophone culture. This Companion surveys developments in modernist poetry, drama, fiction and the visual arts. Early innovators, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jack B. Yeats and James Joyce, as well as late modernists, including Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Francis Bacon, all appear here. Significantly, however, this volume ranges beyond such iconic figures to open up new ground with chapters on Irish women modernists, Irish American modernism, Irish language modernism and the critical reception of modernism in Ireland.
The story of Irish modernism constitutes a remarkable chapter in the movement's history. This volume serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped to create a distinctive nationalist literature but also changed the face of European and anglophone culture. This Companion surveys developments in modernist poetry, drama, fiction and the visual arts. Early innovators, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jack B. Yeats and James Joyce, as well as late modernists, including Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Francis Bacon, all appear here. Significantly, however, this volume ranges beyond such iconic figures to open up new ground with chapters on Irish women modernists, Irish American modernism, Irish language modernism and the critical reception of modernism in Ireland.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the zenith of its imperial chauvinism and jingoistic fervour, Britain's empire was bolstered by a surprising new ideal of manliness, one that seemed less English than foreign, less concerned with moral development than perpetual competition, less civilized than savage. This study examines the revision of manly ideals in relation to an ideological upheaval whereby the liberal imperialism of Gladstone was eclipsed by the New Imperialism of Disraeli and his successors. Analyzing such popular genres as lost world novels, school stories, and early science fiction, it charts the decline of mid-century ideals of manly self-control and the rise of new dreams of gamesmanship and frank brutality. It reveals, moreover, the dependence of imperial masculinity on real and imagined exchanges between men of different nations and races, so that visions of hybrid masculinities and honorable rivalries energized Britain's sense of its New Imperialist destiny.
This comparative analysis of modern Italian and Australian literature analyzes texts by Dino Buzzati, Ennio Flaiano, Guido Ceronetti, Patrick White, David Malouf, Randolph Stow, and Barbara Baynton. I
Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period that first articulated questions about sustainability, the limits to growth, and the implications of energy pollution for the entire global environment. With chapters on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, Allen MacDuffie discusses the representation of urban environments in the literary imaginary, and how those texts helped reveal the gap between cultural fantasies of unbounded energy generation, and the material limits imposed by nature.
"Eileen Cleere argues in this interdisciplinary study that mid-century discoveries about hygiene and cleanliness not only influenced public health, civic planning, and medical practice but also powerf
Presenting a broad spectrum of reflections on the subject of female transgression in early modern Britain, this volume proposes a richly productive dialogue between literary and historical approaches
Each of the figures examined in this studya€”John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Leada€”is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced.
"The issue of truth has been one of the most constant, complex, and contentious in the cultural history of travel writing. Whether the travel was undertaken in the name of exploration, pilgrimage, sci
Naszkowska closely and comparatively examines six novels and stories by British and Polish women in the context of psychoanalysis, focusing on the problem of feminine doubling. She uses Charlotte Bron
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa,Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as
This study of Irish writers in London and Europe looks for manifestations of imperialism and evidence of British/English identities in the writing of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and J
