Ecocriticism can be described in very general terms as the investigation of the many ways in which culture and the environment are interrelated and conceptualized. Ecocriticism aspires to understand and often to celebrate the natural world, yet it does so indirectly by focusing primarily on written texts. Hailed as one of the most timely and provocative developments in literary and cultural stu…
The Gothic Novel in Ireland, 1760-1830 reveals how the Irish contribution to the rise of the gothic novel is all too frequently overlooked. Irish writers were actively engaged in shaping the form now conventionally understood as beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Obviously an important text in the evolution of the gothic mode, the ostensibly pioneering Castle of Otran…
The Rubáiyát by the Persian poet ‘Umar Khayyæm (1048-1131) is used in contemporary Iran as a resistance literature, symbolizing the secularist voice in cultural debates. While Islamic fundamentalists criticize Khayyæm as an atheist and materialist philosopher who questions God’s creation and the promise of reward or punishment in the hereafter, secularist intellectuals see in him an exa…
The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture. Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonst…
"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…
This is the first full-length study of Shelley’s plays in performance. It offers a rich, meticulously researched history of Shelley’s role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his "closet dramas" as performable pieces of theatre. With chapters on each of Shelley’s dramatic works, the book provides a thorough discussion of the poet’s stagecraft, and analyses performances o…
The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain contests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of Spain’s most famous romance of chivalry has guaranteed it a long afterlife. Amadís de Gaula had a …
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The challenge of rapid climate change is forcing us to rethink traditional attitudes to nature. This book is the first study to chart these changing attitudes in 21st-century British fiction. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel examines twelve works…
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.