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…
De proprietatibus rerum, ‘On the properties of things’, has long been referred to by scholars as a medieval encyclopedia, but evidence suggests that it has been many things to many people. The sheer number of extant manuscript copies and printed editions, along with translations, adaptations, and mentions in poems and sermons, testify to its continuous significance for Europeans of all esta…
Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues. "Things" in their novels give us entry into some of the most contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist understanding produces worldly realism, an experimental writing practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people, things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the importance of material objects and b…
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 their continual attempt to transcend what they perceived as the superficiality, commercialism, and precariousness of life in post-World War II America, the Beat writers turned to the classical authors who provided, on the one hand, a discourse of sublimity to help them articulate their desire for a purity of experience, and, on the other, a venerable literary heritage. This volume examines f…
In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was e…
This book examines the role of Persian literature in politics in the tumultuous period of Iranian history from 1950 to 2000, illustrating how intellectuals used poetry, plays, novels and short stories to comment on socio-political developments. The unique aspect of the book is its strong empirical perspective as it analyses how Persian intellectuals dealt with sensor, suppression, imprisonment,…
Dostoevsky attached introductions to his most challenging narratives, including Notes from the House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, and A Gentle Creature. Despite his clever attempts to call his readers' attention to these introductions, they have been neglected as an object of study for over 150 years. That oversight is rectified in First Words, the fi…