Literary Criticism - General

In 1700, Shakespeare was viewed as one of the leading Renaissance playwrights, but not as supreme. By 1800, he was not only widely performed and read but celebrated as a universal genius and a national literary hero. What happened during the intervening years is...

The essays in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England explore maternity's textual and cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences from 1540-1690. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production...

Considering the presence and influence of educated women of letters in Spain and New Spain, and drawing from a wide variety of sources, this study looks at the life and work of early modern women who advocated by word or example for the education...

Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics who offer a range of perspectives and critical methods, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. In line with the goals of Ashgate's Research Companion series, the editors and contributors provide an overview of Beddoes's...

New work on women thinkers often makes the point that philosophical conceptual thought is where we find it, examples such as Simone de Beauvoir and the nineteenth century Black American writer Anna Julia Cooper assure us that there is ample room for the development...

Alongside his reputation as an author, H.G. Wells is also remembered as a leading political commentator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building Cosmopolis presents the worldview of Wells as developed between his student days at the Normal School of Science (1884-1887)...

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction seeks to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society, as mediated through works of fiction. The eleven essays here, written by musicologists and literary scholars, range over a...

The first detailed, student-focused introduction to modernist avant-garde performanceThis textbook introduces the reader to modernist avant-garde theatre. It clearly explains the key terms as well as the major movements, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, Workers' theatres, Constructivism and the Living Newspaper, and Mass Performance, using...

This collection of 13 original writings, including a newly translated piece by Virilio himself, is the first genuine appraisal of Virilio's contribution to contemporary art, photography, film, television and more. Paul Virilio is one of the leading and most challenging critics of art and...

How are we to understand the process of transformation, the creation of the new, and its relation to what has come before? In History and Becoming, Craig Lundy puts forward a series of fresh and provocative responses to this enduring problematic. Through an analysis...

This book offers an in-depth examination of cinema and its philosophical significance. Alex Ling employs the philosophy of Alain Badiou to answer the question central to all serious film scholarship - namely, 'can cinema be thought?' Treating this question on three levels, the author...

Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are...

In these 15 taster essays you will discover the key concepts and critical approaches of the theorists who have had the most significant impact on the humanities since 1990. On completing each chapter, you will find suggestions for further reading so that you can...

Even though sitcom has been a consistent staple of broadcasting the world over, rigorous academic work on it as a genre remains limited. This book examines sitcom as an industry in terms of production, audiences and texts, drawing on a range of examples and...

For better or worse, Rorty has shaped the trajectory of academic philosophy. A decade after his passing, his legacy is ever present, especially in context of the growth of the far right, the struggle over the meaning of justice and equity, and the ecological...

Composed after the election of the first black U.S. president, after the post-global financial crisis, more than a decade after 9/11, and concomitant with a rash of xenophobic incidents across the globe, Unveiling Whiteness distills key themes associated with a post-millennial global whiteness.Author: Veronica...

The development of new sexualities and gender identities has become a crucial issue in the field of literary and cultural studies in the first years of the twenty-first century. The roles of gender and sexual identities in the struggle for equality have become a...

In Gothic Machine, David Jones reveals the intriguing relationships between Gothic literature, film, and the media existing prior to the advent of the cinema. Jones tracks the Gothic horror genre from its earliest days as literature, through phantasmagoria and the magic lantern shows of...

The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat is the most influential figure in twentieth-century Persian fiction--and the object of a kind of cult after his suicide in 1951. His masterpiece The Blind Owl is the most important novel of modern Iran. Its abrupt, tortured opening sentence,...

Departing from established structuralist or psychological approaches to the fantastic, Jos Monlecn offers an ideological reading of this literary product of mass culture. In an exploration of the origins and development of the fantastic, Monlecn traces the relation of reason to unreason in light...

Emperor Taizong (r. 626-49) of the Tang is remembered as an exemplary ruler. This study addresses that aura of virtuous sovereignty and Taizong's construction of a reputation for moral rulership through his own literary writings--with particular attention to his poetry. The author highlights the...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you...

Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces...

The Peloponnesian War, which destroyed imperial Athens and ultimately Sparta as well, continues to fascinate students of history, politics, and human nature. Thucydides' account of the twenty-seven-year conflict charts the opposition between the two great powers of the classical Greek world and the ways...

This English translation of Michel Serres' 1982 book Genèse captures in lucid prose the startling breadth and depth of his thinking, as he probes the relations between order, disorder, knowledge, anxiety, and violence. Written in a unique blend of scientific discourse and lyrical outburst,...

Law is a profession of words. Simultaneously celebratory of great prose and dogmatically insistent on precise usage, law is a stage for verbal virtuosity, linguistic mastery, and persuasive argument. Yet the linguistic display is not without substance: the words of law take on a...

Finding Italy explores the journey of the Romans' ancestor Aeneas and his fellow Trojans from their old home, Troy, to their new country, Italy, narrated in Vergil's epic poem Aeneid. K. F. B. Fletcher argues that a main narrative theme is patriotism, specifically the...

When theater and related forms of live performance explore the borderlands labeled animal and autism, they both reflect and affect their audiences' understanding of what it means to be human. Affect, Animals, and Autists maps connections across performances that question the borders of the...

The Measure of Manliness is among the first books to focus on representations of disability in Victorian literature, showing that far from being marginalized or pathologized, disability was central to the narrative form of the mid-century novel. Mid-Victorian novels evidenced a proliferation of male...

Plass argues that Adorno's essays on literature are of prime importance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse.Selected Contents: Introduction: Adorno's Literary Criticism 1. The Art of Transition 2. Rauschen 3. Conjuration 4. As If 5....

Why are some critical texts more compelling, memorable, or engaging than others? Can criticism be judged as a discourse of description, explanation, and analysis alone, or do our evaluations reflect other kinds of investments in it? In this book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that...

Although the distinctive - and sometimes bizarre - means by which Roman aristocrats often chose to end their lives has attracted some scholarly attention in the past, most writers on the subject have been content to view this a s an irrational and inexplicable...

This book analyzes the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body. Thomas McGlamery views each of these authors' literary output as an effort to "work through" the political meanings associated with the...

Complementing other volumes in the Shakespeare Criticism Series, this collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater. The essays will cover a wide spectrum of topics and utilize a...

Autism, a neuro-developmental disability, has received wide but often sensationalistic treatment in the popular media. A great deal of clinical and medical research has been devoted to autism, but the traditional humanities disciplines and the new field of Disability Studies have yet to explore...

An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature, Word of Mouth extends psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the...

The Black Arts Movement was sparked by the Civil Rights movement and the urge to produce and revitalize functional, realistic, and holistic symbols to express African American creativity. When Larry Neal began his quest for a new dramatic form to epitomize African American self-determination...

In this timely study, Batra examines contemporary drama from India, Jamaica, and Nigeria in conjunction with feminist and incipient queer movements in these countries. Postcolonial drama, Batra contends, furthers the struggle for gender justice in both these movements by contesting the idea of the...

Both Hegel's philosophy and psychoanalytic theory have profoundly influenced contemporary thought, but they are traditionally seen to work in separate rather than intersecting universes. This book offers a new interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and brings it into conversation the work of two...

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical...

Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books is a comprehensive resource that builds bridges between the traditional focus and methodologies of literary studies and the actualities of modern and contemporary literature, including the realities of professional writing, the conventions and practicalities of the publishing...

Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we're not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not...

Literature and Food Studies introduces readers to a growing interdisciplinary field by examining literary genres and cultural movements as they engage with the edible world and, in turn, illuminate transnational histories of empire, domesticity, scientific innovation, and environmental transformation and degradation. With a focus...

This student guidebook offers a clear introduction to an often complex and unwieldy area of literary studies. Tracing epic from its ancient and classical roots through postmodern and contemporary examples this volume discusses: a wide range of writers including Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer,...

Recently, scholars in a variety of disciplines--including philosophy, film and media studies, and literary studies--have become interested in the aesthetics, definition, and ontology of the screenplay. To this end, this volume addresses the fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the screenplay: What is...