In Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, first published in 2000, Pericles Lewis shows how political debates over the sources and nature of 'national character' prompted radical experiments in narrative form amongst modernist writers. Though critics have accused the modern novel of shunning the external world, Lewis suggests that, far from abandoning nineteenth-century realists' concern with politics, the modernists used this emphasis on individual consciousness to address the distinctively political ways in which the modern nation-state shapes the psyche of its subjects. Tracing this theme through Joyce, Proust and Conrad, amongst others, Lewis claims that modern novelists gave life to a whole generation of narrators who forged new social realities in their own images. Their literary techniques - multiple narrators, transcriptions of consciousness, involuntary memory, and arcane symbolism - focused attention on the shaping of the individual by the nation and on the potential of the i
There are forty-one problematic play texts, variously classified as 'bad quartos' or 'memorial reconstructions', from Shakespeare's time. Textual criticism of these quartos has been fraught with assumption and contradiction. Laurie Maguire examines all the texts in detail. She deconstructs the theories of W. W. Greg and his followers, scrutinizing the methods by which critics diagnose texts as 'bad', and examines the historical evidence for the concept of memorial reconstruction (compilation from the recollection of actors or spectators). The valuable contextual material includes fresh analysis of the New Bibliographers, the rise of English studies, Renaissance oral culture and textual problems in non-suspect texts. The assembly of textual information about all the suspect texts in tabular form makes the book an essential reference work. The result is a study which covers a vast textual subject without sacrificing detail.
In the course of this book Professor Cross presents the discovery of the actual manuscript source for the Old English versions of two biblical apocrypha, The Gospel of Nichodemus and The Avenging of the Saviour. In collaboration with four other scholars, Professor Cross explores the implications of this discovery. Here, parallel editions of the relevant Latin and Old English texts are given, together with modern English translations, and detailed discussion outlines the background to the Latin texts, and to the manuscript which contains them. The assembled material provides an insight not simply into the transmission of two apocryphal texts, but also into the mind of the single Anglo-Saxon translator who, it is argued, struggled in his own idiosyncratic fashion to make two badly spelt and incomplete Latin originals his own.
Walter Scott was acutely conscious of the fictionality of his historical novels. In this 1989 book, James Kerr reads the Waverley novels as a grand fictional project constructed around the relationship between the language of fiction and historical reality. We can see throughout Scott's novels a tension between the romancer, recasting the events of the past in accordance with recognizably literary logics, and the historian, presenting an accurate account of the past. This contradiction, reflected in Scott's generic mixture of romance and realism, remains unresolved, even in the most self-conscious of his works. It is in this interplay of fiction and history that Professor Kerr identifies the rich complexity of the Waverley novels.
Celebrating the 400th anniversary of John Marston's debut as a professional playwright, this collection of critical essays on his work by leading scholars in the early modern field discovers, in the de-centred, hilarious, but unsettling work of this idiosyncratic Renaissance dramatist, an uncannily post-modern voice. Always at odds with his contemporaries, the censor and sometimes his own audience, Marston is shown to be a deeply conflicted figure but the qualities which estranged him from previous critical eras are precisely those that are now instantly accessible. This volume's essays, the themes of which coincide both in contemporary currents in literary theory and criticism and in the plays of John Marston, reveal at every turn the full extent of his ambiguity towards politics, gender and the very medium he wrote for and in.
In Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, Emily Dalgarno examines Woolf's engagement with notions of the subject and codes of the visible. Dalgarno examines how Woolf's writing engages with visible and non-visible realms of experience, and draws on ideas from the diverse fields of psychoanalytic theory, classical Greek tragedy, astronomy, photography and photojournalism. The solar eclipse of 1927 marks a dividing line in Woolf's career, after which she portrayed the visible world in terms of light, and shifted her interest from painting to photography. Dalgarno offers textual analyses of Woolf's individual works, including To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Three Guineas, arguing for the importance of her ongoing interest in Greek translation. In later chapters, she explores the theory of the subject that emerges from Woolf's representation of the visible in her autobiography.
Jean Rhys has long been central to debates in feminist, modernist, Caribbean, British and postcolonial writing. Elaine Savory's study, first published in 1999, incorporates and modifies previous critical approaches and is a critical reading of Rhys's entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, and is informed by Rhys's own manuscripts. Designed both for the serious scholar on Rhys and those unfamiliar with her writing, Savory's book insists on the importance of a Caribbean-centred approach to Rhys, and shows how this context profoundly affects her literary style. Informed by contemporary arguments on race, gender, class and nationality, Savory explores Rhys's stylistic innovations - her use of colours, her exploitation of the trope of performance, her experiments with creative non-fiction and her incorporation of the metaphysical into her texts. This study offers a comprehensive account of the life and work of this most complex and enigmatic of writers.
Heather James examines the ways in which Shakespeare handles the inheritance and transmission of the Troy legend. She argues that Shakespeare's use of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources demonstrates the appropriation of classical authority in the interests of developing a national myth, and goes on to distinguish Shakespeare's deployment of the myth from 'official' Tudor and Stuart ideology. James traces Shakespeare's reworking of the myth in Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and shows how the legend of Troy in Queen Elizabeth's day differed from that in the time of King James. The larger issue the book confronts is the directly political one of the way in which Shakespeare's textual appropriations participate in the larger cultural project of finding historical legitimation for a realm that was asserting its status as an empire.
This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment. It brings together essays by American, British and European scholars which consider the one hundred and twenty years following the Revolution and examine the preconceptions, ideologies, rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North American continent. While ranging widely, the essayists focus on such figures as Jefferson, Crevecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis. Amongst the places featured in the discussions are the Niagara Falls, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Virginia's Natural Bridge, Mount Ktaadn and a Broadway omnibus. The book contains numerous illustrations, including early photographs of the western United States, and will be of interest to specialists and students of American literature, history and cult
The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and R
Runner-up, Violet Crown Award, Writer's League of Texas, 2008Renowned for Goodbye to a River, his now-classic meditation on the natural and human history of Texas, as well as for his masterful ability
For decades, Elisabeth Ladenson says, critics have misread or ignored a crucial element in Marcel Proust's fiction—his representation of lesbians. Her challenging new book definitively establishes the
Initially known for her short stories and articles, Kate Chopin was considered to be little more than a regional writer. Published in 1899, her second novel, The Awakening, received little attention
Frye's theory of myth, argues Gill (English, Troy U.), is both more powerful and more tenable than the theories of the giants in the field: C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. Though all fo
Can black males offer useful insights on black women and patriarchy? Many black feminists are doubtful. Their skepticism derives in part from a history of explosive encounters with black men who blame
William Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels—The Recognitions, JR, Carpenter’s Gothic, and A Frolic o
Celebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America’s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelists.In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis’s
This latest volume in the celebrated Cambridge History of Literary Criticism addresses literary criticism of the Romantic period, chiefly in Europe. Its seventeen chapters are by internationally respe
During the four centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could be carried across time and distance, everyone engaged in politics, education, religion, and literature believed that reading helped to shape the minds, opinions, attitudes, and ultimately the actions, of readers. In this 2004 book, William St Clair investigates how the national culture can be understood through a quantitative study of the books that were actually read. Centred on the Romantic period in the English-speaking world, but ranging across the whole print era, it reaches startling conclusions about the forces that determined how ideas were carried, through print, into wider society. St Clair provides an in-depth investigation of information, made available here for the first time, on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives. He offers a picture of the past very different from those presented by traditional approaches.
W. J. Keith has chosen to ignore utterly both the `popular' at the one extreme (Robert Service, Lucy Maud Montgomery) as well as the `avant-garde' at the other (bpnichol, Anne Carson) in favour of tho
