It is a critical commonplace to note sharp cultural differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean England. But how and why did this transition take place? What kinds of decisions and assumptions were involved as writers responded to the new king? How did residual Elizabethan expectations and habits of mind shape the English response to James I, and what were the consequences? How much control did James have over his reception? This study examines these questions in detail by exploring a wide range of texts written during the first decade of his reign in England, from 1603 to 1613. At stake in these questions are some larger issues which have been central to much recent historically orientated work on English Renaissance literature, concerning the relationships between king and culture, literature and authority. Curtis Perry's study provokes a fresh examination of the contingencies shaping long-familiar notions of what constitutes the Jacobean as a literary period.
Robert South (1634–1716) was one of the great Anglican writers and preachers of his age. A contemporary of Dryden and Locke, he faced the profound political and philosophical changes taking place at the beginning of the Enlightenment in England. With the interdependence of Church and State forcing a conjunction of religious and political issues, South's life and work as a preacher show him reacting to changes in civil and ecclesiastical polity over the course of his active public life. Gerard Reedy's book, the first major study of South, makes a strong case for the importance of his sermons, their complexity, beauty and wit, and their place in the history of post-Restoration English literature. Discussing sermons of South which deal with his theory of politics, language, the sacrament and mystery, Reedy reintroduces us to a lively and seminal master of prose, politics and theology in the late Stuart era.
In The Ethics of Romanticism Laurence Lockridge vigorously revives ethical criticism and at the same time brings to light the Romantics' profound engagement with ethical questions. He argues that a will to value is the pervasive motive of Romantic writers from Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey to Shelley, Hazlitt, Keats and Byron. They articulate a compelling ethics that has had a significant influence on modern thought. Yet its character has never before been systematically explored within the larger contexts of European thought. Lockridge argues that a focus on the ethical dimension of literature is the single most powerful strategy for structuring a writer's work as a whole, and that it can even prove congenial. He gives original, interrelated readings of the eight major British Romantic writers. In discussing the place of ethical criticism in modern letters, he qualifies or refutes opposing views - conservative, Marxist, and deconstructive. His book gives strong evidence
This book is the first detailed history of the Russian Symbolist movement, from its initial hostile reception as a symptom of European decadence to its absorption into the mainstream of Russian literature, and eventual disintegration. It focuses on the two generations of writers whose work served as the seedbed of Existentialism in thought and of Modernism in prose and the performing arts, and reassesses their achievements in the light of modern research. At the centre of the study are the texts themselves, with prose quoted in English translation and poetry given in the original Russian with prose translations. There is a valuable bibliography of primary sources and an extensive chronological appendix. This book will fill a long-felt gap, and will be invaluable to students and teachers of Russian and comparative literature, Symbolism, Modernism, and pre-revolutionary Russian culture.
Hurwitz theory, the study of analytic functions among Riemann surfaces, is a classical field and active research area in algebraic geometry. The subject's interplay between algebra, geometry, topology and analysis is a beautiful example of the interconnectedness of mathematics. This book introduces students to this increasingly important field, covering key topics such as manifolds, monodromy representations and the Hurwitz potential. Designed for undergraduate study, this classroom-tested text includes over 100 exercises to provide motivation for the reader. Also included are short essays by guest writers on how they use Hurwitz theory in their work, which ranges from string theory to non-Archimedean geometry. Whether used in a course or as a self-contained reference for graduate students, this book will provide an exciting glimpse at mathematics beyond the standard university classes.
Waking Up American includes original work by women who are either American-born of at least one foreign-born parent or who immigrated to the United States during childhood. The writers explore what i
The Model of Poesy is one of the most exciting literary discoveries of recent years. A manuscript treatise on poetics written by William Scott in 1599, at the end of the most revolutionary decade in English literary history, it includes rich discussions of the works of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. Scott's work presents a powerful and coherent theoretical account of all aspects of poetics, from the nature of representation to the rules of versification, with a commitment to relating theory to contemporary practice. For Scott, any theory of literature must make sense not of the classics but of what English writers are doing now: Scott is at the same time the most scholarly and the most relevant of English Renaissance critics. In this groundbreaking edition, Gavin Alexander presents a text of The Model of Poesy framed by a detailed introduction and an extensive commentary, which together demonstrate the range and value of Scott's thought.
How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that these different fields had in common, while also showing how individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian a
This collection of essays looks at the body of work of Quebec writer Dany Laferrire, including his notorious first novel, Comment faire l?mour avec un Ngre sans se fatiguer, through a variety of criti
How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that these different fields had in common, while also showing how individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian a
Jeffrey N. Cox reconsiders the history of British Romanticism, seeing the work of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats responding not only to the 'first generation' Romantics led by Wordsworth, but more directly to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years. Recreating in depth three moments of political crisis and cultural creativity - the Peace of Amiens, the Regency Crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication - Cox shows how 'second generation' Romanticism drew on cultural 'border raids', seeking a global culture at a time of global war. This book explores how the introduction on the London stage of melodrama in 1803 shaped Romantic drama, how Barbauld's prophetic satire Eighteen Hundred and Eleven prepares for the work of the Shelleys, and how Hunt's controversial Story of Rimini showed younger writers how to draw on the Italian cultural archive. Responding to world war, these writers sought to embrace a radically new vision of the world.
This Element looks at contemporary authorship via three key authorial roles: indie publisher, hybrid author, and fanfiction writer. The twenty-first century's digital and networked media allows writers to disintermediate the established structures of royalty publishing, and to distribute their work directly to - and often in collaboration with - their readers. This demotic author, one who is 'of the people', often works in genres considered 'popular' or 'derivative'. The demotic author eschews the top-down communication flow of author > text > reader, in favor of publishing platforms that generate attention capital, such as blogs, fanfiction communities, and social media.
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a pioneer in demography, economics and social science more generally whose ideas prompted a new 'Malthusian' way of thinking about population and the poor. On the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, New Perspectives on Malthus offers an up-to-date collection of interdisciplinary essays from leading Malthus experts who reassess his work. Part one looks at Malthus's achievements in historical context, addressing not only perennial questions such as his attitude to the Poor Laws, but also new topics including his response to environmental themes and his use of information about the New World. Part two then looks at the complex reception of his ideas by writers, scientists, politicians and philanthropists from the period of his own lifetime to the present day, from Charles Darwin and H. G. Wells to David Attenborough, Al Gore and Amartya Sen.
Hailed as “one of the most thrilling writers at work today” (Huffington Post), Diana Evans reaches new heights with her searing depiction of two couples struggling through a year of marital crisis. In
Majumdar (English, Whitman College) examines the work of three very different postcolonial artists: writers James Joyce and Salmon Rushdie and filmmaker Satyajit Ray. He looks at them in terms of an a
This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940s - writings composed by authors self-consciously entering middle to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry from 1938, as '1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit'. This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing is at times horrifying and objectionable and at others deeply moving, different from the earlier works which first won these writers their fame.
Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system-building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics and science. Poorly received at its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of non-scholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously and to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume of new essays showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship on this monumental text, as well as its enduring relevance.
In this groundbreaking work of revisionary literary history, Marilyn Butler traces the imagining of alternative versions of the nation in eighteenth-century Britain, both in the works of a series of well-known poets (Akenside, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, Blake) and in the differing accounts of the national culture offered by eighteenth-century antiquarians and literary historians. She charts the beginnings in eighteenth-century Britain of what is now called cultural history, exploring how and why it developed, and the issues at stake. Her interest is not simply in a succession of great writers, but in the politics of a wider culture, in which writers, scholars, publishers, editors, booksellers, readers all play their parts. For more than thirty years, Marilyn Butler was a towering presence in eighteenth-century and romantic studies, and this major work is published for the first time.
Hurwitz theory, the study of analytic functions among Riemann surfaces, is a classical field and active research area in algebraic geometry. The subject's interplay between algebra, geometry, topology and analysis is a beautiful example of the interconnectedness of mathematics. This book introduces students to this increasingly important field, covering key topics such as manifolds, monodromy representations and the Hurwitz potential. Designed for undergraduate study, this classroom-tested text includes over 100 exercises to provide motivation for the reader. Also included are short essays by guest writers on how they use Hurwitz theory in their work, which ranges from string theory to non-Archimedean geometry. Whether used in a course or as a self-contained reference for graduate students, this book will provide an exciting glimpse at mathematics beyond the standard university classes.
Edward Bullough, best known for his work on physical distance in art and aesthetics, became Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge in 1933. In this 1920 work, Bullough gives a rich and varied account of Italian thought in the long nineteenth century. In order to give the reader an overview of Italian authors and their works, Bullough engages with the work of lesser-known writers to produce a wide-ranging account of a country in its literary and political 'reawakening'. At a time when British readers of Italian knew relatively little of Italy, Bullough's text came as a welcome exploration of the relationship between Italian authors, their writings, and their country. It will continue to be enjoyed by readers of nineteenth-century Italian literature today, particularly those with an interest in those writing outside the literary spotlight.
