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Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance (The New Middle Ages)
By Linda Marie Rouillard. 2020
Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance focuses on the incest motif as used in numerous medieval narratives. Explaining the…
weakness of great rulers, such as Charlemagne, or the fall of legendary heroes, such as Arthur, incest stories also reflect on changes to the sacramental regulations and practices related to marriage and penance. Such changes demonstrate the Church's increasing authority over the daily lives and relationships of the laity. Treated here are a wide variety of medieval texts, using as a central reference point Philippe de Rémi's thirteenth-century La Manekine, which presents one lay author's reflections on the role of consent in marriage, the nature of contrition and forgiveness, and even the meaning of relics. Studying a variety of genres including medieval romance, epic, miracles, and drama along with modern memoirs, films, and novels, Linda Rouillard emphasizes connections between medieval and modern social concerns. Rouillard concludes with a consideration of the legacy of the incest motif for the twenty-first century, including survivor narratives, and new incest anxieties associated with assisted reproductive technology.The Lost Romantics: Forgotten Poets, Neglected Works and One-Hit Wonders
By Norbert Lennartz. 2020
This book features a collection of essays, shedding subversively new light on Romanticism and its canon of big-six, white, male…
Romantics by focusing on marginalised, forgotten and lost writers and their long-neglected works. Probing the realms of literary and cultural lostness, this book identifies different strata of oblivion and shows how densely the net of contacts and rivalries was woven around the ostensibly monolithic stars of the Romantic age. It reveals how the lost poets inspired the production of anthologised poetry, that they served as indispensable muses, sidekicks and interlocutors of the big six and that their relevance for the literary scene has been continuously underrated. This is also surprisingly true for some creators of famous one-hit wonders (Frankenstein, The Vampyre) who were suddenly rocketed to fame or notoriety, but could not help seeing their other works of fiction turning into abortive flops.The ‘memsahibs’ of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In…
recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women’s travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent, they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women’s Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives – here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions – were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women’s interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women’s passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women’s writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women’s educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature. This volume includes two texts, Ann Deane, A Tour Through the Upper Provinces of Hindostan (1823) and Julia Maitland, Letters from Madras (1846).The ‘memsahibs’ of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In…
recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women’s travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent, they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women’s Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives – here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions – were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women’s interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women’s passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women’s writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women’s educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature. This final volume reproduces a text by Mary Sherwood, called The Life of Mrs Sherwood (1854).The ‘memsahibs’ of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In…
recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women’s travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent, they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women’s Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives – here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions – were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women’s interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women’s passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women’s writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women’s educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature. This second volume includes two texts, Harriet Newell, Memoirs of Mrs Harriet Newell (1815) and Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India (1817).British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects
By Sheshalatha Reddy. 2017
This book examines imperial and nationalist discourses surrounding three contemporaneous and unsuccessful mid-nineteenth-century colonial uprisings against the British Empire: the…
Sepoy Rebellion (1857) in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion (1867) in Ireland. In reading these three mid-century rebellions as flashpoints for the varying yet parallel attempts by imperialist colonialists, nationalists, and socialists to transform the oppressed colonized worker (the subjected laborer) into one whose identity is created and limited by labor (a laboring subject), this book also tracks varying modes of resistance to those attempts in all three colonies. In drawing from a range of historical, literary, and visual sources outside the borders of the Anglophone literary canon, this book contends that these texts not only serve as points of engagements with the rebellions but also constitute an archive of oppression and resistance.Avidly Reads Theory
By Jordan Alexander Stein. 2019
Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood…
and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas. As an avowed “theory head,” Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater (Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present)
By James Leve, Donelle Ruwe. 2020
Bringing together scholars from musicology, literature, childhood studies, and theater, this volume examines the ways in which children's musicals tap into…
adult nostalgia for childhood while appealing to the needs and consumer potential of the child. The contributors take up a wide range of musicals, including works inspired by the books of children's authors such as Roald Dahl, P.L. Travers, and Francis Hodgson Burnett; created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lionel Bart, and other leading lights of musical theater; or conceived for a cast made up entirely of children. The collection examines musicals that propagate or complicate normative attitudes regarding what childhood is or should be. It also considers the child performer in movie musicals as well as in professional and amateur stage musicals. This far-ranging collection highlights the special place that musical theater occupies in the imaginations and lives of children as well as adults. The collection comes at a time of increased importance of musical theater in the lives of children and young adults.Coventry: Essays
By Rachel Cusk. 2019
A selection of her non-fiction writings that offer both new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction…
and forge a startling critical voice on some of our most personal, social and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, politics, D.H. Lawrence, Francoise Sagan and Elena Ferrante. Named for an essay in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite and dazzling to behold.CliffsNotes on Joyce's Ulysses (Cliffsnotes Ser.)
By Edward A Kopper. 1991
Hailed by many as the best novel of all time, and cursed by just as many as utterly unreadable, one…
thing’s for sure: Ulysses is one of a kind. Those who are willing to take on this behemoth of a book will be rewarded with a trip through almost every variety of human experience under the sun. Summaries and commentaries will keep you on track as you step into the daily life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and watch their stories unfold. In-depth character analysis, critical essays, and insight into the novel's literary devices will help unlock the novel’s deeper layers. You'll also discover background information on the life of James Joyce and the creation of this, his most famous work.Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock
By Terrence T. Tucker. 2017
"An important and timely expansion of American racial discourse. Tucker’s demonstration of how the comic is not (just) funny and…
how rage is not (just) destructive is a welcome reminder that willful injustice merits irreverent scorn. "—Derek C. Maus, coeditor of Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights "Adroitly explores how comic rage is a skillfully crafted, multifaceted critique of white supremacy and a soaring articulation of African American humanity and possibility. Sparkling and highly readable scholarship."—Keith Gilyard, author of John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love—Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America’s racial divide. In Furiously Funny, Tucker finds that comic rage developed from black oral tradition and first shows up in literature by George Schuyler and Ralph Ellison shortly after World War II. He examines its role in novels and plays, following the growth of the expression into comics and stand-up comedy and film, where Richard Pryor, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock have all used the technique. Their work, Tucker argues, shares a comic vision that centralizes the African American experience and realigns racial discourse through an unequivocal frustration at white perceptions of blackness. They perpetuate images of black culture that run the risk of confirming stereotypes as a means to ridicule whites for allowing those destructive depictions to reinforce racist hierarchies. At the center of comic rage, then, is a full-throated embrace of African American folk life and cultural traditions that have emerged in defiance of white hegemony’s attempts to devalue, exploit, or distort those traditions. The simultaneous expression of comedy and militancy enables artists to reject the mainstream perspective by confronting white audiences with America’s legacy of racial oppression. Tucker shows how this important art form continues to expand in new ways in the twenty-first century and how it acts as a form of resistance where audiences can engage in subjects that are otherwise taboo.Der Jungste Tag (Twentieth Century Texts)
By Odoen Von Horvath. 1986
Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: If It Sounds Like Writing
By Charles J. Rzepka. 2020
A scholarly exploration of Elmore Leonard—provides original essays and fresh insights on the author’s works and influence Labelled as “the…
closest thing America has to a national novelist,” Elmore Leonard’s clean and direct writing, engaging bad guys, and deadpan humor resonate with readers around the nation and throughout the world. Popular films based on his books continue to introduce new audiences to Leonard’s unique way of engaging with complex themes of American culture and pop-culture history. Yet surprisingly, academic treatments of his writing are almost nonexistent. Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard is an original anthology that covers the topics, themes, literary and narrative style, and enduring influences of one of the finest crime writers in the history of the genre. This unique collection of essays explores the ways in which Leonard’s work reflects America’s dynamic, ever-changing culture. Divided into two parts, the book first examines major themes and topics in Leonard’s works, followed by detailed case studies of five individual works including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Essays discuss topics such as Leonard’s skill at conveying sense of place, his use of dress and appearance in his crime fiction, the influence of romantic comedies and westerns on his writing, and the concepts of moral luck, determinism, and existentialism found in his novels. Unique and thoroughly original, this book: Covers Leonard’s entire career, including his early Western novels and his work in visual media Illustrates Leonard’s genius at handling free indirect discourse Discusses the author’s influence, legacy, and contemporary relevance in various contexts Explores Leonard’s success at making himself “invisible” in his own writing Includes an insightful introduction from the book’s editor Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard is an ideal resource for academics and students in the field of genre studies, especially crime fiction, and general readers with interest in the subject.Drawing extensively on unpublished manuscript sources, this study uncovers the culture of experimentation that surrounded biblical exegesis in fourteenth-century England.…
In an area ripe for revision, Andrew Kraebel challenges the accepted theory (inherited from Reformation writers) that medieval English Bible translations represent a proto-Protestant rejection of scholastic modes of interpretation. Instead, he argues that early translators were themselves part of a larger scholastic interpretive tradition, and that they tried to make that tradition available to a broader audience. Translation was thus one among many ways that English exegetes experimented with the possibilities of commentary. With a wide scope, the book focuses on works by writers from the heretic John Wyclif to the hermit Richard Rolle, alongside a host of lesser-known authors, including Henry Cossey and Nicholas Trevet, and many anonymous texts. The study provides new insight into the ingenuity of medieval interpreters willing to develop new literary-critical methods and embrace intellectual risks.Jane Austen's Style: Narrative Economy and the Novel's Growth
By Anne Toner. 2020
Jane Austen is renowned for the economy of her art: for the close focus of her romantic plots and the…
precision of her writing style. Exploring that economy stylistically and structurally, this book traces Austen's keen interest in narrative form. Anne Toner pinpoints techniques that are fundamental to the distinctiveness of Austen's fiction, many of which have been little explored to date. Toner argues that Austen's conciseness in terms of plotting, narrative description and in the depiction of dialogue also contributed to her innovations in representing thought, expanding the novel's capacity to depict consciousness. Narrative and rhetorical features are presented clearly and accessibly and will open up new ways of thinking about prose style with implications for the study of fiction beyond Austen's own.Research on the relationship between the apocalyptic tradition and the literary imagination has typically espoused a temporal approach which in…
one way or another revolves around the order of events that precedes the end of history and the ensuing establishment of a new world. This study, by contrast, explores the spatial dimensions of apocalypse, more precisely the way in which the settings of the Book of Revelation are taken up by contemporary American writers and related to more general but also more contested concerns of territorial integrity and national identity. Influenced by Lefebvre’s theories, the study understands territory not simply as the container of certain structures and practices but also as the result of them, just as bird song is not framed by but rather constructive of territorial borders. It is the equivalent of such ‘songs’ that this book seeks to listen in on, i.e. the apocalyptic narratives that have been passed on through the centuries to define and sustain territory on a local, regional, and national level, and the way in which seven novels by Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon respond to them.Shakespeare and Sexuality in the Comedy of Morecambe & Wise (Palgrave Studies in Comedy)
By Stephen Hamrick. 2020
Contextualizing the duo’s work within British comedy, Shakespeare criticism, the history of sexuality, and their own historical moment, this book…
offers the first sustained analysis of the 20th Century’s most successful double-act. Over the course of a forty-four-year career (1940-1984), Eric Morecambe & Ernie Wise appropriated snippets of verse, scenes, and other elements from seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays more than one-hundred-and-fifty times. Fashioning a kinder, more inclusive world, they deployed a vast array of elements connected to Shakespeare, his life, and institutions. Rejecting claims that they offer only nostalgic escapism, Hamrick analyses their work within contemporary contexts, including their engagement with many forms and genres, including Variety, the heritage industry, journalism, and more. ‘The Boys’ deploy Shakespeare to work through issues of class, sexuality, and violence. Lesbianism, drag, gay marriage, and a queer aesthetics emerge, helping to normalize homosexuality and complicate masculinity in the ‘permissive’ 1960s.Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
By Rachel Vorona Cote. 2020
Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the…
brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang)A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments In The Making Of Emily Dickinson
By Martha Ackmann. 2020
An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her…
groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism
By Adam R. Ochonicky. 2019
How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of…
Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.