Provides a new account of the emergence of Irish gothic fiction in mid-eighteenth century. This book provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the "beginnings" of Irish gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland. The main argument the book makes is that the Irish gothic…
Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age is a critical examination of three novels by writers from different regions of the British Empire: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (South Africa), Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today (Canada) and Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (Australia). All three novels commence as conventional Bildungsromane, yet t…
On the unstable boundaries between “interior” and “exterior,” “private” and “public,” and always in some way relating to a “beyond,” the imagery of interior space in literature reveals itself as an often disruptive code of subjectivity and of modernity. The wide variety of interior spaces elicited in literature — from the odd room over the womb, secluded parks, and train c…
"In this ingenious study, Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and discusses its significance as a text at the forefront of fifteenth-century book production, when the invention of mechanically-produced …
In a brief essay called Des espaces autres (1984) Michel Foucault announced that after the nineteenth century, which was dominated by a historical outlook, the current century might rather be the century of space. His prophecy has been fulfilled: the end of the twentieth century witnessed a ‘spatial turn’ in humanities which was perhaps partly due to the globalisation of our modern world. I…
The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very active online presen…
The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands …
The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a “high-informationâ€_x009d_ genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, “the right wordâ€_x009d_, preferring le mot imprévisible, “the unp…
Greenwor(l)ds rewrites the literary history of Canada from a feminist ecological perspective through a series of essays that examine the lives and work of nine women poets. Using insights from fields of knowledge as disparate as history and biology, physics and philosophy, psychoanalysis and communications studies, these essays reflect the transdisciplinary character of women’s studies genera…
Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present is the first comprehensive examination of how the literary production of Benito Pérez Galdós, widely considered Spain’s greatest nineteenth-century novelist, addresses the impact of imperial loss on the citizens of Spain. Well before the events that would lead inexorably toward 1898, Galdós’s texts question the nature of Spanish imperialism and the eff…