The Art of Distances identifies a preoccupation with interpersonal distance in a strand of 20th-century literature that includes the work of Orwell, Morand, Canetti, Murdoch, Benjamin, Ernaux, Grass, and Galgut. Specifically, Stan shows that these authors engage in philosophical meditations on the ethical question of how to live with others and how to find an ideal interpersonal distance at his…
Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture presents an overview of the digital turn in Ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts visualisation, data mining and communication. Edited by David Hamidović, Claire Clivaz and Sarah Bowen Savant, it gathers together the contributions of seventeen scholars involved in Biblical, Early Jewish and Christian studies. The volume attests to the spreading of digi…
Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people's actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems, such as Beowulf and Judith, as well as descriptions of natural eve…
Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to cla…
mperial Latin epic has seen a renaissance of scholarly interest. This book illuminates the work of the poet Lucan, a contemporary of the emperor Nero who as nephew of the imperial adviser Seneca moved in the upper echelons of Neronian society. This young and maverick poet, whom Nero commanded to commit suicide at the age of 26, left an epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey that e…
The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters …
The American Short Story Cycle shows the roots of modernism and postmodernism winds through the short story cycle. Reviewers ranging from the The New York Times to Amazon do not know what to call books like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad or Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Why do such popular and acclaimed books spark debates about what they are and how they should be read? The …
Felice D. Blake's Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature highlights the pervasive representations of intraracial deceptions, cruelties, and contempt in Black literature. Literary criticism has tended to focus on Black solidarity and the ways that a racially linked fate has compelled Black people to counter notions of Black inferiority with unified notions of…
Second-person storytelling is a continually present and diverse technique in the history of literature that appears only once in the oeuvre of an author. Based on key narratives of the post-war period, Evgenia Iliopoulou approaches the phenomenon in an inductive way, starting out from the essentials of grammar and rhetoric, and aims to improve the general understanding of second-person narrativ…
The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume:the role of ritual speech acts the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category finally, phenomena…