From the tentative beginnings of European settlement to today’s flourishing writing scene, Adelaide has always been a literary city. Novelists, poets and playwrights have lived here; readers have pored over books, sharing them and discussing them; literary celebrities have visited and sometimes stayed; writers have encouraged each other and fought with each other. Adelaide is literary, too, i…
Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) began his career as an apprentice to the engraver and businessman Ralph Beilby (1743–1817). Having entered into a partnership and illustrated more than eighty small books for children, they decided to work together on this natural history, with Beilby drafting the descriptions and Bewick providing wood engravings and textual revisions. It was first published in 179…
A Gallery to Play to is an intimate account of the lives and careers of the poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. With unparalleled access to the three writers, Phil Bowen has written an indispensable book for anyone interested in poetry, popular culture and society over the last forty years.
Benjamin Leigh Smith discovered and named dozens of islands in the Arctic but published no account of his pioneering explorations. He refused public accolades and sent stand-ins to deliver the results of his work to scientific societies. Yet, the Royal Geographic Society's Sir Clements R. Markham referred to him as a polar explorer of the first rank. Traveling to the Arctic islands that Leigh S…
Recently, literary critics and some historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to "mistake fiction for reality." However, the tendency in this criticism is to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of the public and private consistently work to mask gender inequalities. In Keeping Up Her Geography, Tanya Ann Kenedy argues…
These seven essays by the most recent English translator of The Tale of Genji emphasize three major interpretive issues. What is the place of the hero (Hikaru Genji) in the work? What story gives the narrative underlying continuity and form? And how does the closing section of the tale (especially the ten “Uji chapters”) relate to what precedes it? Written over a period of nine years, the e…
During the 19th century, throughout the Anglophone world, most fiction was first published in periodicals. In Australia, newspapers were not only the main source of periodical fiction, but the main source of fiction in general. Because of their importance as fiction publishers, and because they provided Australian readers with access to stories from around the world—from Britain, America and …
The book presents a series of interpretive readings of the "Römische Elegien", "Sonette", "Chinesisch-deutsche Jarhes- und Tageszeiten", several trilogies, and the shorter cycles of 1821, taking into account the variety of literary devices Goethe employs to link poems together into a cycle. The author examines Goethe's role in the history of the lyric cycle and, in stressing structural design,…
'Thinking Literature across Continents' finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate…