Byron and the Forms of Thought is a major new study of Byron as a poet and thinker. While informed by recent work on Byron's philosophical contexts, the book questions attempts to describe Byron as a philosopher of a particular kind. It approaches Byron, rather, as a writer fascinated by the different ways of thinking philosophy and poetry are taken to represent. After an Introduction that expl…
In this book, Jennifer Garrison examines literary representations of the central symbol of later medieval religious culture: the Eucharist. In contrast to scholarship that depicts mainstream believers as enthusiastically and simplistically embracing the Eucharist, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature identifies a pervasive Middle English literary tradition that rej…
The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work t…
Charles Noble’s long poem playfully connects autobiography, narrative, philosophy, history, and satire and experiments with language and structure in a way that pushes the limits of contemporary poetry. Noble leaves no leaf unturned as he touches on issues related to contemporary Western society, including mass media culture, gender politics, postindustrial technology, and the politics of pos…
Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorpora…
This book celebrates the work and career of the internationally renowned art historian, David Bindman, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and is above all a tribute to him from his former students and colleagues. With essays on sculpture, drawings, watercolours and prints, the volume reflects the extraordinary range of Bindman’s knowledge of works of art and his impact through his teaching…
Across the twentieth century war was the central experience of the Russian people, spurring tales of the struggles and advances of the combat hero to become a prevailing Russian literary trope. In this wide spanning text Brintlinger traces the war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladko…
This extract from Ovid's 'Theban History' recounts the confrontation of Pentheus, king of Thebes, with his divine cousin, Bacchus, the god of wine. Notwithstanding the warnings of the seer Tiresias and the cautionary tale of a character Acoetes (perhaps Bacchus in disguise), who tells of how the god once transformed a group of blasphemous sailors into dolphins, Pentheus refuses to acknowledge t…
With a burgeoning academic interest in Latin American science fiction and cyberfiction and in representations of science and technology in Latin American literature and cinema, this book adds new understanding to the growing body of interdisciplinary work on the relationship between literature and science in postmodern culture. Joanna Page examines how contemporary fiction and literary theory i…
Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts rep…