"This book presents current discussions on the concept of genre. It introduces innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to contemporary and historical genres, their roles in cultural discourse, how they change, and their relations to each other. The reader is guided into the discussion surrounding this key concept and its history through a general introduction, followed by eighteen chapters tha…
In this study, Orr attributes to George Eliot an ‘incarnational aesthetic' and reads her work in the light of it. Writing, she argues, might be said to have become the novelist's religion and ‘its most recognizable tenet was the living out of incarnation'. Here, Orr examines Eliot's works more or less chronologically because of the deeply evolutionary quality to Eliot's career. In a…
Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing…
The text Miq?at Ma?a?e Ha-Torah, Some of the Works of the Torah (4QMMT), is one of the most interesting texts among the famous Dead Sea Scrolls discovered near the settlement of Khirbet Qumran and its vicinity in the middle of the twentieth century and by now published in full. It is a writing in the form of a letter by an unknown author to an equally unknown addressee, written in second person…
This volume is a study in the Romantic reshaping of space and time to evoke the fantastic interior landscape and the temporal dynamics of subjective experience. Close textual analysis is coupled with frequent reference to literary and intellectual history in the reassessment of the narrative art of Novalis and Tieck. The author examines Novalis' "Hyazinth und Rosenblüte", "Atlantis", "Arion" a…
The Altering Eye covers a "golden age" of international cinema from the end of WWII through to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Combining historical, political, and textual analysis, Kolker develops a pattern of cinematic invention and experimentation from neorealism through the modernist interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Maria Fassbinder, focusing along the way on such major figur…
"Vertical Readings in Danteâ s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that be…
Our fear of the world ending, like our fear of the dark, is ancient, deep-seated and perennial. It crosses boundaries of space and time, recurs in all human communities and finds expression in every aspect of cultural production—from pre-historic cave paintings to high-tech computer games.
In Fair Rosamond, Virgil B. Heltzel traces the character of Rosamond Clifford, known as Fair Rosamond - which has its origins as a theme in medieval literature -through its use in poetry and plays and novels, from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. Heltzel’s book retains its importance today for scholars tracing certain thematic structures through all periods of literature.
Hostis humani generis, meaning “enemy of humankind,” is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that this legal fiction does more than characterize certain persons as inherently hostile: it provides a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the sta…