Sustainability has become a key socio-political issue over recent years. However, whilst the literary-critical community has advanced enthusiastically on an exciting range of environmentally-based analyses (most obviously through the work of ecocriticism), its response specifically to sustainability—as an attempt to reconceptualise the way we live, as an idea with a particular history, a…
This landmark collection makes a major contribution to the burgeoning field of broadside ballad study by investigating the hitherto unexplored treasure-trove of over 100,000 Central/Eastern European broadside ballads of the Czech Republic, from the 16th to the 19th century. Viewing Czech broadside ballads from an interdisciplinary perspective, we see them as unique and regional cultural phenome…
In Kafka and Wittgenstein, Rebecca Schuman undertakes the first ever book-length scholarly examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language alongside Franz Kafka’s prose fiction. In groundbreaking readings, she argues that although many readers of Kafka are searching for what his texts mean, in this search we are sorely mistaken. Instead, the problems and illusions we portend to …
Within two years of the success of his first play Die Räuber on the German stage in 1781, Schiller wrote a drama based on a rebellion in sixteenth century Italy, its title: The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa. A Republican Tragedy. At the head of the conspiracy stood Gian Luigi de’ Fieschi (1524–1547), Schiller’s Count Fiesco, a clever, courageous and charismatic figure, an epicurean and u…
Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By…
John Donne’s poetry is often difficult and perplexing, even more so because it undergoes a shift away from secular topics after he converts and begins to lead a religious life. Robert S. Jackson’s John Donne’s Christian Vocation is one of the first studies that takes seriously the ways that Donne’s Christian vocation permeates all of Donne’s writings, not just those after his conversi…
Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship provides one the earliest attempts to write a theoretical method for evidence within plays to help determine authorship or to help distinguish the work of one author from another. Samuel Schoenbaum’s study remains valuable, for the attempt to attribute unattributed plays to one or another author remains an ongoing conversation within early…
In a brief essay called Des espaces autres (1984) Michel Foucault announced that after the nineteenth century, which was dominated by a historical outlook, the current century might rather be the century of space. His prophecy has been fulfilled: the end of the twentieth century witnessed a ‘spatial turn’ in humanities which was perhaps partly due to the globalisation of our modern world. I…
Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present is the first comprehensive examination of how the literary production of Benito Pérez Galdós, widely considered Spain’s greatest nineteenth-century novelist, addresses the impact of imperial loss on the citizens of Spain. Well before the events that would lead inexorably toward 1898, Galdós’s texts question the nature of Spanish imperialism and the eff…
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…