The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. Against the background of the debates on…
Many modern Beowulf translations, while excellent in their own ways, suffer from what Kathleen Biddick might call “melancholy” for an oral and aural way of poetic making. By and large, they tend to preserve certain familiar features of Anglo-Saxon verse as it has been constructed by editors, philologists, and translators: the emphasis on caesura and alliteration, with diction and syntax smo…
Freedom from Violence and Lies is a collection of forty-one essays by Simon Karlinsky (1924–2009), a prolific and controversial scholar of modern Russian literature, sexual politics, and music who taught in the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 to 1991. Among Karlinsky’s full-length works are major studies of Marina Tsvetaeva and…
Over the course of the 19th century a remarkable array of types appeared in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the currency lass”, the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the colonies’ developing sense of identity; others were more ephemeral. But all had a role to play in shaping and reflecting the social and economic c…
As Samuel Richardson's 'exemplar to her sex,’ Clarissa in the eponymous novel published in 1748 is the paradigmatic female victim. In Clarissa’s Ciphers, Terry Castle delineates the ways in which, in a world where only voice carries authority, Clarissa is repeatedly silenced, both metaphorically and literally. A victim of rape, she is first a victim of hermeneutic abuse. Drawing on feminist…
In Adulterous Nations, Tatiana Kuzmic enlarges our perspective on the nineteenth-century novel of adultery and how it often served as a metaphor for relationships between the imperial and the colonized. In the context of the long-standing practice of gendering nations as female, the novels discusse—Eliot's Middlemarch, Fontane's Effi Briest, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, along with Enoa's The …
Poetry expressing criticism of social, political and cultural life is a vital integral part of Persian literary history. Its principal genres - invective, satire and burlesque - have been very popular with authors in every age. Despite the rich uninterrupted tradition, such texts have been little studied and rarely translated. Their irreverent tones range from subtle irony to crude direct insul…
German radicals of the 1960s announced the death of literature. For them, literature both past and present, as well as conventional discussions of literary issues, had lost its meaning. In The Institution of Criticism, Peter Uwe Hohendahl explores the implications of this crisis from a Marxist perspective and attempts to define the tasks and responsibilities of criticism in advanced capitalist …
In Literary Obscenities, Erik Bachman offers a comparative historical account of the parallel development of legal obscenity and literary modernism in this period. Getting Off the Page demonstrates that obscenity trials in the early twentieth century staged a wide-ranging cultural debate about the broader ramifications of the printed word’s power to “deprave,” “excite,” and offend—o…
A literary mirror is the first English-language work to comprehensively analyse Indonesian-language literature from Bali from a literary and cultural viewpoint. It covers the period from 1920 to 2000. This is an extremely rich field for research into the ways Balinese view their culture and how they respond to external cultural forces. This work complements the large number of existing studies …