Search

Figures of Chance II: Chance in Theory and Practice proposes a multidisciplinary analysis of cultural phenomena related to notions of chance and contingency. Alongside its transhistorical companion volume (Figures of Chance I), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, by varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. This volume reevaluates the role played by figurative representations of chance in contemporary discourses about chance and contingency. Written by seven interdisciplinary teams, and encompassing philosophy, literature, history of science, sociology, mathematics, cognitive science, information science, and art history, this text puts scientific conceptions of chance into dialogue with their contemporary literary and artistic representations. It thus brings out the central role played by art in the human perception of chance, and in our methods for projecting the future, in order to better understand contemporary human attitudes in the face of risk.The Introduction and Chapter One of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome charts the role of the sublime in first-century debates about how and why we investigate the natural world. It shows how the sublimity of the study of nature--the scientific sublime--animates Manilius'Astronomica, Seneca's Natural Questions, Lucan's Civil War, and the anonymous Aetna, and explores how these authors inflect and deploy the scientific sublime in their respective historical and socio-political contexts. Imbued with the triumphal optimism of the Augustan moment, Manilius takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride through the expanses of the heavens, reveling in the infinite dimensions of the cosmos and the astounding ability of his mathematical calculations to uncover the mind of god; this is the ultimate intellectual pursuit. The instability and paranoia of the Neronian period fundamentally compromise this posture. In Natural Questions, Seneca rejects Manilius'celestial adventure and redirects the reader's gaze to atmospheric phenomena. The turbulence and tumult of meteorological inquiry do not lead to certain knowledge, but Seneca hopes that its electric vitality might counteract the allure of morally corrupt pastimes and of political power itself. For Lucan, the Manilian and Senecan projects are delusional fantasies. The study of nature, stripped of the illusion that it serves some higher purpose, constitutes a distraction from the urgent necessity of civil war, and those characters who understand nature's mechanics appear laughably irrelevant or downright deadly. In the early Flavian period, the Aetna poet rehabilitates the ecstatic charge of natural inquiry. Dismissing the lofty aspirations of Manilius and Seneca, the author careens over Sicily's jagged terrain and plunges the reader into the depths of the earth searching for terrestrial knowledge. By the poem's conclusion, however, sheer awe before the amphitheatrical spectacle of nature supplants the rush of philosophical analysis as the goal of studying the earth; this attitude connects the poet with Longinus and the Elder Pliny. Through close readings, this book tells a new story about the study of nature at Rome. It locates the sublimity of that study at the center of early imperial Latin literature and thereby renders the classical sublime more expansive, dynamic, and contested.

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature considers how the avalanche of printed numbers characterizing the period affected its literature. It looks at the influence of a variety of cultural and historical movements, such as the rise of statistics and of democratic Liberalism and concurrent developments in mathematics. This book takes as its starting point and focus the presence of actual numbers--ordinal and cardinal, Arabic, Roman, and spelled out in words--within the century's literary texts. It is through the deployment of such figures that texts display their number sense; similarly, readers develop the faculty of number sense by paying careful attention to their presence. And contemplation of a text's use of numbers, while frequently pointing to specific historical contexts, also enables more fundamental recognitions about how literature makes meaning. The Number Sense asks what kinds of work, intellectual and ethical, literature's numerical figures perform. Why are some writers especially prone to include numbers? What affordances do they wield in various literary environments and against the backdrop of the numbery nineteenth century? When do textual numbers really count and when do they ask us to keep count? How do they stage contests between the one and the many, individuals and collectives? How do they relate to formal aspects of works, like plot and character, narrative, and lyric Lingering over literary measures illuminates the way numbers help shape texts into the recognizable forms we call genres. To that end, the book considers the works of poets, like Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Byron, and of novelists working in a broad range of genres, including Jane Austen, George Gissing, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy. The numbers embedded in their fictions and verse can serve both as valves, releasing cultural pressures, and as fulcrums, places where pressures coincide to create new forms of literary agency.

This book explores the construction of male sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and overturns longstanding views. Far from desiring heterosexual sex and wishing to bond with other men through fraternity, the male protagonists of classic American literature mainly want to be left alone. Greven makes the claim that American men, eschewing both marriage and male friendship, strive to remain emotionally and sexually inviolate. Examining the work of traditional authors - Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Cooper, Irving, Stowe - Greven discovers consistently resistant portrayals of male characters who defend their individuality through a lockdown on sexuality. Objects of desire from both women and other men, the inviolate males discussed in this study disrupt established gendered and sexual categories, inspiring fresh analysis of the era and its literary depiction of American manhood. This second edition of Men Beyond Desire (2005) expands the analysis of male sexuality to include discussions of developments in the field of masculinity studies. It includes a new introduction that introduces the complementary figure of the “victim-monster” and revisits the work of Leslie Fiedler, and a new chapter that focuses on Melville's tale'Bartleby the Scrivener'(1856). Chapter 4 expands the analysis of the intersections among free love, health reform, and male sexuality in The Blithedale Romance (1852), and chapter 9 expands the discussion of Billy Budd, Sailor to address questions of race and the role of the Handsome Sailor.

Founded in 1820 by Henry Southern,'The Retrospective Review'aimed to recall the public from an exclusive attention to new books, by making the merit of old ones the subject of critical discussion. This edition reproduces in facsimile all 18 volumes of the periodical published between 1820-1854.

Founded in 1820 by Henry Southern,'The Retrospective Review'aimed to recall the public from an exclusive attention to new books, by making the merit of old ones the subject of critical discussion. This edition reproduces in facsimile all 18 volumes of the periodical published between 1820-1854.

This biography represents a nuanced account of Edith Rickert's life—and inner life. It follows Rickert's own writing and draws attention to her life as a writer. Rickert has been long remembered as a medievalist, but she also contributed to American scholarship, pedagogy, and codicology. Born into a family of very modest means in Canal Dover, Ohio, she numbered among the University of Chicago's earliest doctoral students (1895-1899) and was among the first eight women to reach the top of that University's professorial ladder. She prepared what remains the definitive edition of the medieval romance Emaré. She documented aspects of the medieval, as well as Chaucer's life, with a historian's accuracy and a novelist's insight. In the Ladies Home Journal she wrote on women's issues that remain pressing today. With University of Chicago professor John Matthews Manly (1865-1940), she prepared numerous readers and textbooks, including several that helped putcontemporary British and American literature on the academic map. Again in collaboration with Manly, she was responsible for what has been described as “perhaps the most important of the MI-8 solutions” during World War I,as well as the eight-volume edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1940). Rickert also published short stories, novels, poems, and essays. As this biography shows, Rickert's achievement as a writer was equal to her work as a literary critic.

Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion. This series is the first complete scholarly edition of the entire run of Defoe's Review. It is fully reset and supported by full editorial apparatus.

The novels in this collection present a vivid picture of late-Regency society clinging to modes of behaviour which soon became obsolete and mark an important point of transition to Victorian cultural values.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic imposed immobility on large sectors of the world's population, with confinement becoming an everyday reality. The lives of those who previously enjoyed the privileges of being ‘fast castes'ground to a halt, while at the same time the displacement of more vulnerable populations along well-established migration corridors has been radically reduced. The result has been a recalibration of the scale of journeying, with travellers slowing down their journeys and readjusting their relationship to the proximate and nearby. This situation has provided an opportunity for those who study travel and travel writing to rethink their objects of study and approaches to them. This volume explores and historicizes the phenomenon of ‘microtravel', designating slower journeys within a limited radius which allow, and sometimes necessitate, new forms of experiencing the world.

As a geo-historical place, the beach integrates a variety of characteristics and functions so multiple that they tend to contradict each other. The beach is both a place of work and trade but also of leisure; it is both a place of therapy and health but also of migration, war, and death; it is a place of mass tourism and boredom but also the place of experiencing the Other; it is a public place but also an uncivilized and desolate place.This book studies the literary representation of the beach from ancient Greek literature up until today, drawing on English, French, Italian, American, and Spanish literatures from various periods and genres and presenting multiple ways of comparing and understanding literary beaches as a ubiquitous literary phenomenon. It demonstrates how the literary beach as a both geo-historical place and as an aesthetic literary commonplace has been a constant and privileged resource for the analysis of more general existential, sociological, and moral problems. This is the case when for instance the Tahitian beach becomes the place of the'already modern'in Stevenson's tales, or when the Italian beach becomes a question of modern feminism in Ferrante.In this sense, literature expands the local or national beach by articulating its transnational complexities.

Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) provides a broad spectre of early modern manifestations of human fascination with fish – “fish” understood in the early modern sense of the term, as aquatilia: all aquatic animals, including sea mammals and crustaceans. It addresses the period's quickly growing knowledge about fish in its multiple, varied and rapidly changing interaction with culture. This topic is approached from various disciplines: history of science, cultural history, history of collections, historical ecology, art history, literary studies, and lexicology. Attention is given to the problematic questions of visual and textual representation of fish, and pre- and post-Linnean classification and taxonomy. This book also explores the transnational exchange of ichthyological knowledge and items in and outside Europe. Contributors: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.

Founded in 1820 by Henry Southern,'The Retrospective Review'aimed to recall the public from an exclusive attention to new books, by making the merit of old ones the subject of critical discussion. This edition reproduces in facsimile all 18 volumes of the periodical published between 1820-1854.

The'Critical Review'reflects the political, scientific and literary debate of the times. The journal was edited for its first seven years by Tobias Smollett and reflected the slashing, combative style and intellectual range of its editor. This 16-volume set reproduces this journal.

Half a millennium of English and American fantasies of Venice: this collection of essays by leading critics in the field explores the continued and continuing fascination of travellers, writers, artists, theatre workers and film makers with the amphibious and ambiguous city in the lagoon. There is hardly another place in Europe that has become so much of a palimpsest, inscribed with the fantasies, the dreams and nightmares of generations of foreigners, and this turns Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds into a particularly pertinent case study of the ways cultural difference within Europe is experienced, enacted and constructed. The essays range across five centuries - from the Renaissance to our postmodern present, from Shakespeare and his contemporary Coryate to recent novels, detective fiction and films - and, in contrast to previous studies focussing on the Grand Tour, they emphasise more recent developments and how they continue or disrupt traditional ways of perceiving - or being blind to! - Venice.

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Central to any reappraisal of Southey's mid to late career, is'Roderick'. This best-selling epic romance has not been republished since 1838 and is contextualised here within Southey's wider oeuvre. The four-volume edition also benefits from a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, endnotes and a consolidated index.

Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) was a key figure in the radical movement of the 1790s. This work is intended for scholars wanting to understand Britain and its literature in the 1790s.

Può Ovidio esule essere considerato un poeta cothurnatus? La sperimentazione letteraria che attraversa tutta la sua produzione poetica fino alle elegie dal Ponto attinge anche al teatro? Quale ruolo svolge la tradizione drammaturgica greco-romana nel racconto della sua esperienza di relegato? Quali effetti produce il riuso di stilemi e modelli teatrali in una poesia di matrice elegiaca? Il volume tenta di rispondere a questi interrogativi unendo all'analisi filologica, intertestuale e lessicale dell'ultima poesia ovidiana un esame tecnico-formale delle dinamiche tipiche della messa in scena. La trama di allusioni e reminiscenze tragiche rintracciabile in Tristia ed Epistuale ex Ponto sembra, infatti, rispondere a una precisa strategia narrativa, che attraverso l'esasperazione patetica, la drammatizzazione di situazioni e personaggi, l'approfondimento emotivo e psicologico, dàvita a un racconto caratterizzato da una forte “attitudine teatrale”.

Obwohl eines der prominentesten Themen literarischer Texte, fand das Reisen in der Literaturwissenschaft lange Zeit wenig Beachtung. Stärker in den Blick rückte es erst die sozialgeschichtlich orientierte Reiseliteraturforschung der 1980er Jahre, die sich allerdings vor allem für Reiseberichte im engeren Sinn interessierte. Seither wurde die Frage des ‚Reisen Schreibens‘ in vielfältiger, auch fiktionale Literatur berücksichtigender Weise neu akzentuiert, ohne dass dieses weite Gebiet jedoch systematisch erfasst worden wäre. Das Handbuch bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über einschlägige Texte, Topoi und Schreibweisen sowie den Stand und die wichtigsten Tendenzen der zunehmend medien- und kulturwissenschaftlich ausgerichteten Forschung. In über hundert Einzelartikeln verhandelt es das Schreiben über Reisen in seiner ganzen Bandbreite zwischen Dokumentation und Fiktion, pragmatischem Bericht und poetischem Projekt, nüchterner Aufzeichnung und ästhetischem Experiment. Dabei liegt der Schwerpunkt auf der deutschsprachigen Literatur; die Einbeziehung weiterer Medien und Sprachen versteht sich aber auch als Einladung zu einer stärker transphilologisch und intermedial ausgerichteten Reiseforschung.

The English Civil War was not simply a conflict between two opposing, unstable, complicated alliances of various factions, but a war of words. Supporters of the King and allies of Parliament and the New Model Army clashed over ideals, ideas, and concepts as they each sought to impose their understanding of history and visions of the future, realizing that victory could only be secured by establishing a political and cultural language that would guide and direct those who used it. Accordingly, the Civil War witnessed vociferous arguments over many key English words central to life and thought in the seventeenth century, and often up to the present day. Words at War seeks to bring together scholars of literature, history, religion, and philosophy to analyse the ways in which key terms were deployed and debated in the Civil War and Commonwealth. In doing so it refocuses attention on ideas and concepts that shaped the modern world well beyond the bloody conflict on the battlefield.

One of Daniel Defoe's greatest achievements was the writing and publication of his'Review'. Covering his many interests, both contemporary and historical, Defoe published his journal twice and latterly three times a week. This volume reproduces the'Review'from the year 1704.

Part of James Joyce's genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, “a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.” How might we learn to regain some of the child-like play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that comes so naturally to Joyce? The Joyce of Everyday Life teaches us how to interpret seemingly mundane objects and encounters with openness and active curiosity in order to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. Through a close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, this book shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, and everchanging world. Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey demonstrates how his writing might prompt us to engage in a different kind of reading, treating words and fiction as tools for expanding the boundaries of the self with humor and feeling. A book for everyone who loves language, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.

In 1858, Rosina Bulwer Lytton was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by her husband, the eminent Victorian politician and novelist, Edward Bulwer Lytton. After the disintegration of their marriage, Rosina wrote letters to prominent figures in which she revealed details about Edward's mistresses and illegitimate children.

'The Wizard of Mecosta'offers an extended analysis of the fiction of Russell Amos Kirk (1918-1994), a central figure in modern American conservatism who is often referred to as “the father” of the same. Born and raised in Michigan, Kirk was also a prolific writer of fiction, who published almost two dozen short stories and three novels over the course of his long career. At the heart of everything Kirk wrote was what he referred to as the “moral imagination,” a phrase he borrowed from Edmund Burke and often used to describe the instructive and enlightening purposes of great literature. Despite his prominent reputation as a public man of letters and the respect of fellow authors including Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, Kirk's fiction was never very popular, and has fallen into almost complete obscurity in the present.'The Wizard of Mecosta'is the first full-length study ever published about Kirk's fiction, and the only work of any length to consider the entirety of his output, including all of the stories and novels he wrote. By emphasizing how Kirk's fiction illuminates certain aspects of his social and political theory,'The Wizard of Mecosta'distinguishes itself from the half-dozen or more studies of the author's life and work that have been published since his death in 1994. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in American conservatism, as well as fans and scholars of the sort of Gothic horror in which Kirk, unexpectedly, excelled. Through his stories of avenging ghosts and timeless journeys through the afterlife, he reminds us of the existence of “permanent things,” the core values and beliefs of Western society, which he strove all his life to preserve. It is high time that his fiction found a more appreciative, and larger, audience.

Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us.The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust', which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance.Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.

The primary aim of Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction is to introduce the emerging cross-disciplinary area of study that combines the fields of crime fiction studies and criminology. The study of crime fiction as a genre has a long history within literary studies, and is becoming increasingly prominent in twenty-first-century scholarship. Less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which elements of criminology, or the systematic study of crime and criminal behaviour from a wide range of perspectives, have influenced the production and reception of crime narratives. Similarly, not enough attention has been paid to the ways in which crime fiction as a genre can inform and enliven the study of criminology. Written largely for undergraduate and graduate students, but also for scholars of crime fiction and criminology interested in thinking across disciplinary boundaries, Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction provides full coverage of the backgrounds of the related fields of crime fiction studies and criminology, and explores the many ways they are reciprocally illuminating.The four main chapters in Section 1 (Orient You) familiarize readers with the history and contours of the broad fields within which Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction operates. It introduces the history of crime and criminology, as well the history of crime fiction and the academic field dedicated to its study. In its final chapter it looks at the ways these areas of study can be conceptually interrelated. Section 2 of the book (Equip You) is dedicated to examining aspects of criminological theory in relation to various forms of crime fiction. It highlights a range of the most relevant theories, paradigms, and problematics of criminology that appear in, shed light on, or can be effectively illuminated through reference to crime fiction. Its five chapters deal with the definition of crime; explanations for crime and criminal behaviour; investigations into crime; the experience of crime; and, finally, punishments for crime. All of these areas are examined alongside examples of crime fiction drawn from across the genre's history. Section 3 (Enable You) presents six case studies. Each of these reads a work of crime fiction alongside one or more criminological approaches. Each case study is supplemented with a set of questions addressing issues central to the study of crime in fiction.

Unfinishedness and incompleteness are a central feature of ancient Greek and Roman literature that has often been taken for granted but not deeply examined; many texts have been transmitted to us incomplete. How and to what extent has this feature of many texts influenced their aesthetic perception and interpretation, and how does it still influence them today? Also, how do various editorial arrangements of fragmentary texts influence the reconstruction of closure? These important questions offer the opportunity to bring together specialists working on Greek and Roman texts across various genres: epic, tragedy, poetry, mythographic texts, rhetorical texts, philosophical treatises, and the novel. Reading a text by focusing on its current unfinishedness or incompleteness, or the textual signs suggesting an unfinished or incomplete state, the contributors examine the relations between author, reader and text as underscored by the verbal, generic and aesthetic features of each work. This edited volume brings together a broad spectrum of approaches to ancient and modern texts and aims to reach out to a broad scholarly community consisting not only of Classicists but also scholars of other literature and aesthetics.

This book analyzes the philosophical dimensions of fairy tales from cultures all around the world. Though there is a robust literature that analyzes fairy tales from sociological and historical perspectives and psychology has also focused on mining these stories for insights, this book is unique in its focus on fairy tales as philosophical texts. Bringing together scholars from a truly global range of philosophical and literary traditions, this book shows that fairy tales encapsulate the human dilemma of living in the world, trying to make meaning, and charting a course through good and evil. The book's contributors study fairy tales from East Africa, Australia, Jewish Eastern Europe, Iran, Korea, Turkey, Indigenous North America, and beyond. Ending with a section on Philosophy for Children, this book will also be of interest to scholars and practitioners in this subfield, in addition to scholars of philosophy and popular culture and philosophy of literature.

Experimental translation has been surging in popularity recently—with avant-garde translation at the combative forefront. But how to do it? How to read it? Translator, Touretter plays on the Italian dictum traduttore, traditore—“translator, traitor”—to mobilize the affective intensity of Tourettic tics as a practical guide to making and reading avant-garde translations. It smashes the theoretical literature on the sublime from Longinus to Kant into Motherless Brooklyn, both the 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem and its 2019 screen adaptation by Edward Norton, in order to generate out of their collision a series of models—visual, aural/oral, and kinesthetic—for avant-garde literary translation.

The articles in Myths of Origins provide insights into the universality of myths of origins as patterns of literary creation from Antiquity to the present. The essays range from an investigation of the six models of beginnings in Western literature to the workings of modern myths of origins in postcolonial literature and relocate the discussion on myths of origin in a wider context that besides the humanities considers linguistics and the impact of new technologies. The contributing authors to the volume shed light on issues relating to myths of origins by linking this subject to literary creation and adopting a multidisciplinary approach.

This book delivers an innovative critical approach to better understand U.S. fiction of the information age, and argues that in the last eighty years, fiction has become increasingly concerned with its representations of mathematical ideas, images, and practices. In so doing, this book provides a fuller, transnational account of the place of mathematics in understanding mathematically informed novels. Literature and science studies have acknowledged and situated historical points of cultural crossover; by emphasising mathematics within this larger intellectual context – and not as an unlikely and alien adjunct to post-war culture – this monograph clarifies how mathematically informed postmodern fictions work in a cognate fashion to other fields undergoing structuralist revolutions. This is especially evident in fiction by the key, mathematically-literate Postmodern authors upon whom this study focuses, namely, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, through which recent the technological revolutions, facilitated by mathematics, manifest in cultural discourse.

Reading John Milton is a guide to Milton's writings written for students, teachers, and readers everywhere seeking to approach this major figure in English and world literature. Milton's works range from the monumental epic Paradise Lost to moving personal sonnets, from the tragic grandeur of Samson Agonistes to prose defenses of political liberty and religious tolerance. This book offers clear, fresh introductions and commentary that make an author with a reputation for difficulty relevant and accessible.Individual texts are placed in their literary and historical contexts, and explored so as to encourage fresh, independent interpretations informed by the contemporary humanities. Carefully organized for ease of use, the book opens with reasons why Milton matters, ideas for critical approaches, and a biography of Milton. Subsequent chapters are dedicated to groups of works or individual masterpieces. Key themes are placed in focus and a full overview provided for all of Milton's major poems. Each chapter includes a set of stimulating questions and activities and suggestions for further reading keyed to a generous bibliography, including online resources.Reading John Milton is both an ideal introduction and a complete companion for anyone ready to experience the sublimity and delight of reading Milton.

Since the early 20th century, American writers have both recorded and fictionalized the real-life activities of great athletes, as well as created original characters for sports stories. How have women fared in this literature? Women Characters in Baseball Literature is the first comprehensive evaluation of the women characters of baseball literature, including women's crucial roles on and off the field of play. Applying several feminist theories and examining the works in the context of both myth and psychology, the author discusses baseball fiction written by both men and women. Among the topics discussed are the literary implications of motherhood; how patterns of behavior in women characters often recall Greek goddesses; and how women characters and the feminist imagination enrich the literature of this apparently masculinized sport. Authors covered include Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, August Wilson, Lamar Herrin, Nancy Willard, Silvia Tennenbaum, Karen Joy Fowler, and others.

Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion. This series is the first complete scholarly edition of the entire run of Defoe's Review. It is fully reset and supported by full editorial apparatus.

Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion. This series is the first complete scholarly edition of the entire run of Defoe's Review. It is fully reset and supported by full editorial apparatus.

Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion. This series is the first complete scholarly edition of the entire run of Defoe's Review. It is fully reset and supported by full editorial apparatus.

Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion. This series is the first complete scholarly edition of the entire run of Defoe's Review. It is fully reset and supported by full editorial apparatus.

Discusses one of Daniel Defoe's greatest, but least known works, his periodical the'Review of the State of the British Nation'. Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion.

Part of a seven-volume facsimile set, this volume comprises firsthand accounts of France in the 1790s. It includes Helen Maria Williams'letters which narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland which comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace.

A reintroduction to the myth of Amphion, recovering an overlooked sphere of lyric tradition. Amphion is the figure in Greek mythology who played so skillfully on a lyre that stones moved of their own accord to build walls for Thebes. While Amphion still presides over music and architecture, he was once fundamental to the concept of lyric poetry. Amphion figured the human power to inspire action, creating and undoing polities by means of language. In contrast to the individual inspiration we associate with the better-known Orpheus, Amphion represents the relentless, often violent, play of harmony and disorder in human social life. In this wide-ranging study, Leah Middlebrook introduces readers to Amphion-inspired poetics and lyrics and traces the tradition of the Amphionic from the Renaissance through modernist and postmodern poetry and translation from the Hispanic, Anglophone, French, Italian, and ancient Roman worlds. Amphion makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the connection between poetry and politics and the history of the lyric, offering an account well-suited to our times.

The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer's Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual “organism,” John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations. Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer's uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer's portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

Mithilfe der poetologischen Diskriminierung des Wunderbaren gelingt es der Gattung Roman, sich als kulturelles Leitmedium der anbrechenden Moderne zu konstituieren. Gleichzeitig lässt sich beobachten, dass in Romane immer wieder wunderbare Erzählungen eingeschaltet werden. Wie ist diese spannungsvolle Konstellation einander gegenüberstehender erzählerischer Normen zu verstehen? „Thauma(u)topoiesis“ rekonstruiert eine literatur- und geistesgeschichtliche Verschiebung im Problemfeld des Wunderbaren von der ontologischen Skepsis der Aufklärung gegenüber dem Wunder zu ästhetischen, poetologischen und ethischen Dimensionen einer poietischen Verwunderung. Vor diesem Hintergrund lässt sich verdeutlichen, wie sich die Diegese des aufgeklärten Romans durch das Inserat thaumaturgischer Erzählungen auf eine Hermeneutik der Selbst-Auslegung hin öffnet.

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature examines the intersection of transgender studies and literary studies, bringing together essays from global experts in the field. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of trans literature, highlighting the core topics, genres, and periods important for scholarship now and in the future.Covering the main approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of the core topics guiding contemporary trans literary theory and criticism, including the Anthropocene, archival speculation, activism, BDSM, Black studies, critical plant studies, culture, diaspora, disability, ethnocentrism, home, inclusion, monstrosity, nondualist philosophies, nonlinearity, paradox, pedagogy, performativity, poetics, religion, suspense, temporality, visibility, and water. Exploration of diverse literary genres, forms, and periods through a trans lens, such as archival fiction, artificial intelligence narratives, autobiography, climate fiction, comics, creative writing, diaspora fiction, drama, fan fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, manga, medieval literature, minor literature, modernist literature, mystery and detective fiction, nature writing, poetry, postcolonial literature, radical literature, realist fiction, Renaissance literature, Romantic literature, science fiction, travel writing, utopian literature, Victorian literature, and young adult literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, gender studies, trans studies, literary theory, and literary criticism.

James Joyce's evocations of his characters'thoughts are often inserted within a commonplace that regards the mind as an interior space, referred to as the ‘inward turn'in literary scholarship since the mid-twentieth century. Emma-Louise Silva reassesses this vantage point by exploring Joyce's modernist fiction through the prism of 4E – or embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive – cognition. By merging the 4E framework with cognitive-genetic narratology, an innovative form of inquiry that brings together the study of the dynamics of writing processes and the study of cognition in relation to narratives, Modernist Minds: Materialities of the Mental in the Works of James Joyce delves into the material stylistic choices through which Joyce's approaches to mind depiction evolved.

This book in Tagore studies offers a fresh analysis of Tagorean thought by working through the philosophy and poetics of plasticity. As a prominent figure in plastic theory,Ghoshexplores Tagore''s views on education, identity politics, environment, and literature through what he calls the'plastic principle'. This deconstructs Tagore''s thinking on''sahitya'', ecosophy, historicity and philosophy of history, and aesthetic education and the notion of the political. Not a standard intellectual biography or historical study, this book radicalizes how we think and interpret Tagore to arrive at whatGhoshcalls Plastic Tagore. The book, thus, thinksafter yesterday.

Travel Writing and Cultural Transfer addresses the multifaceted concept of cultural transfer through travel writing, with the aim of expanding our knowledge of modes of travel in the past and present and how they developed, as did the way in which travel was reported.Travel as both factual and fictional— with authors and narratives moving between different worlds— is one of the many devices that demonstrate the fluidity of the genre. This fluidity accounts for the manifold and powerful influence of travel writing on processes of cultural transfer. This volume also illustrates that cultural transfer is frequently linked to issues of power, colonialism and politics. The various chapters investigate the transmission of other cultures, ideas and ideologies to the writer's own cultural sphere and consider how the processes of cultural transfer interact with the forms and functions of travel writing.

Founded in 1820 by Henry Southern,'The Retrospective Review'aimed to recall the public from an exclusive attention to new books, by making the merit of old ones the subject of critical discussion. This edition reproduces in facsimile all 18 volumes of the periodical published between 1820-1854.