Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe delves into the early modern history of women’s authorship and literary production in Europe taking a material turn. The case studies included in the volume represent women writers from various European countries and comparatively reflect the nuances of their participation in a burgeoning commercial market for authors while pro…
Hensley and Steer look to join the conceptual tools of contemporary ecocriticism with the rich archive of nineteenth century thinking about imperial and ecological intertwinement. This collection of essays draws on that archive to demonstrate the relevance of Victorian thought for current theory and practice. Ecological Form argues that ecology, the empire, and literary thinking were inseparabl…
Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction offers new arguments about the origins of detective fiction in the United States, tracing the lineage of the genre back to unexpected texts and uncovering how authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher made use of the genre's puzzle-elements to explore the shifting dynami…
This study tries to reconstruct the dispute over rhetoric in Hellenistic thought, by using two main interrelated axes. Firstly, it delineates the exact milieu in which this dispute took place, including locations, dates and persons. Secondly, five main arguments used against rhetoric have been reconstructed, all of which concentrate on rhetoric’s claim to be considered an art.
Explores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm's role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre. This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism's most important, most vested, and …
The impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture, as well as in the post-Soviet era. Mark Lipovetsky interprets this puzzling phenomenon through analysis of the most remarkable and fascinating literary and cinematic images of soviet and post-Soviet tricksters, including such …
How does the US make sense of its elite educational system, given that it seems to be at odds with core American values, such as equality of opportunity or upward mobility? Sophie Spieler explores scholarly and journalistic investigations, self-representational texts, and fictional narratives revolving around the Ivy League and its peers in order to understand elite education and its peculiar p…
Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet is the first book of essays to consider the poetry of one of the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century’s most important literary, affect, and queer theorists. Acclaimed as one of the “truly innovative” poets of her generation by Maud Ellmann, Sedgwick’s work as a poet is, perhaps, less well known, but is no less compelling than her gro…
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…
Byron and the Forms of Thought is a major new study of Byron as a poet and thinker. While informed by recent work on Byron's philosophical contexts, the book questions attempts to describe Byron as a philosopher of a particular kind. It approaches Byron, rather, as a writer fascinated by the different ways of thinking philosophy and poetry are taken to represent. After an Introduction that expl…