Middlebrow is a derogatory word that connotes blandness, mediocrity and a failed aspiration to ‘high' culture. However, when appropriated as a positive term to denote that wide swathe of literature between the challenging experimentalism of the high and the formulaic drive of the popular, it enables a rethinking of the literary canon from the point of view of what most readers actually re…
Scholars have long studied the impact of Charles Darwin's writings on nineteenth-century culture. However, few have ventured to examine the precursors to the ideas of Darwin and others in the Romantic period. Marking Time, edited by Joel Faflak, analyses prevailing notions of evolution by tracing its origins to the literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the long nineteenth centur…
" 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. These songs represent the apogee of Mongghul oral literature…
From the 19th century onwards, famous literary trials have caught the attention of readers, academics and the public at large. Indeed it is striking that more often than not, it was the texts of renowned writers that were dealt with by the courts, as for example Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in France, James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic…
This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the field of translation for students of other disciplines and readers who are not translators. It provides students outside the translation profession with a greater awareness of, and appreciation for, what goes into translation. Providing readers with tools for their own personal translation-related needs, this book encourages an ethical ap…
Whose History? aims to illustrate how historical novels and their related genres may be used as an engaging teacher/learning strategy for student teachers in pre-service teacher education courses. It does not argue all teaching of History curriculum in pre-service units should be based on the use of historical novels as a stimulus, nor does it argue for a particular percentage of the use of his…
In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet. Despite their…
Twelve visions of living in a climate-changed world. We are living in the Anthropocene—an era of dramatic and violent climate change featuring warming oceans, melting icecaps, extreme weather events, habitat loss, species extinction, and more. What will life be like in a climate-changed world? In Tomorrow's Parties, science fiction authors speculate how we might be able to live and even th…
An early novel by Rose Macaulay about a government program of compulsory selective breeding in a dystopian future England. In a near-future England, a new government entity—the Ministry of Brains—attempts to stave off idiocracy through a program of compulsory selective breeding. Kitty Grammont, who shares the author's own ambivalent attitude to life, gets involved in the Ministry's propa…
In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the rela…