Far from teleological historiography, the pan-European perspective on Early Modern drama offered in this volume provides answers to why, how, where and when the given phenomena of theatre appear in history. Using theories of circulation and other concepts of exchange, transfer and movement, the authors analyze the development and differentiation of European secular and religious drama, within t…
"The term “interest” lacks a precise antonym. In English, we have “disinterested” and “uninteresting,” but we want for a term that denotes robust opposition to interest. The same appears to hold true in every other language (as far as we know). Interest’s missing antonym reflects not merely a widespread lexical oversight, but a misrecognition of interest’s complete and exact mea…
Memories of My Town is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way. As people in urban milieus relate themselves to the environment, this takes place on many levels, where especially the time level becomes problematic. The urban buildings and settings can be looked upon as a kind of collective history, as carriers or witnesses of times past. But it is…
Through the prism of criticism, the modalities of thinking form a spectrum: on one end, systematic exposition, on the other, the fragment. It is the latter, fragmentary approach that distinguishes Matches—an investigation that does not focus on a single theme developed in all its aspects but, rather, on a constellation of themes in art, literature, philosophy, science, social and political th…
For more than 40 years, Jesper Hoffmeyer has been committed to the idea of developing “a semiotics of nature, or biosemiotics as he chose to call this effort, that could intelligibly explain how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature – from the lowest level of sign processes in unicellular organisms to the cognitive and social behavior of animals – can em…
Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, L…
From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of pri…
"Anglo-Saxon ‘things’ could talk. Nonhuman voices leap out from the Exeter Book Riddles, telling us how they were made or how they behave. The Franks Casket is a box of bone that alludes to its former fate as a whale that swam aground onto the shingle, and the Ruthwell monument is a stone column that speaks as if it were living wood, or a wounded body. In this book, James Paz uncovers the v…
Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affor…
What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Comb…