Middle English popular romance is the most audacious and compendious testimony to the imaginary world of the English Middle Ages. Yet, with few exceptions, it remains under read and under studied. Pulp fictions of medieval England demonstrates that popular romance merits and rewards serious critical attention and that it is crucial to our understanding of the complex and conflicted world of med…
From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodifi…
It is strange— Proust wrote in 1909—that, in the most widely different departments... there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American.â€? In the spirit of Proust's admission, this engaging and critical volume offers the first comparative reading of the French novelist in the context of American art, literature, and culture. In …
Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age is the first extensive study of the collected edition as an editorial genre within American literary history. Unlike editions of an author’s “selected works” or thematic anthologies, which clearly indicate the presence of non-authorial editorial intervention, collected editions have typically been arrange…
There is no doubt that the beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by crises of debt. Less well known is that literature played a historical role in defining and teaching debt to the public. Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt addresses how neoliberal finance has depended upon a historical linking of geopolitical inequality and financial representation that positions t…
his volume examines the "problems" with Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. While the play is not considered one of the playwright's "problem plays," the author of this short volume believes there are many inconsistencies within the work, particularly with the character of Falstaff.
Privately Empowered responds to the lack of adequate attention paid to Islam in Africa in comparison to the Middle East and the Arab world. Shirin Edwin points to the embrace between Islam and politics that has limited Islamic feminist discourse to regions where it evolves in tandem with the nation-state and is commonly understood in terms of activism, social affiliations, or struggles for lega…
The book inquires into Aristotle’s claim that of the four kinds of change that exist, locomotion is the most fundamental and important kind. In a first step, the author shows that the arguments for the thesis of locomotion’s priority play a crucial role in the argument of Physics VIII and for the understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature in general. The main focus o…
Examines the underlying precarity in twenty-first-century immigrant fiction and reveals the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology.
"In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room…