In The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, Deanna Smid presents a literary, historical account of imagination in early modern English literature, paying special attention to its effects on the body, to its influence on women, to its restraint by reason, and to its ability to create novelty. An early modern definition of imagination emerges in the work of Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, Edward Reynolds, and Margaret Cavendish. Smid explores a variety of literary texts, from Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler to Francis Quarles's Emblems, to demonstrate the...

What can translations reveal about the global reception of any authorship? In Jane Austen Speaks Norwegian: The Challenges of Literary Translation, Marie Nedregotten Sørbø compares two novels and six translations of them. The discussion is entirely in English, as all Norwegian versions are back-translated. This study therefore lends itself to comparisons with other languages, and aims to fill its place as one component in a worldwide field of research; how Jane Austen is understood and transmitted. Moreover, this book presents a selection of pertinent issues for any translator, including...

Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction investigates Morrison’s aesthetics in terms of narrative’s ethical import. Morrison’s writing is concerned with ethically debatable issues and it offers a problematic representation of human experiences in African American history. Whilst previous critical studies consider ethics in relation to events in the story, Palladino explores its intersection with aesthetics. Narrativizing the moral law, Morrison’s imperative is to relate the past, and to find ways to tell what is often unspeakable. The quest for ways to narrate horrific facts...

In American Migrant Fictions: Space, Narrative, Identity, Sonia Weiner focuses on novels of five American migrant writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, who construct spatial paradigms within their narratives to explore questions of linguistic diversity, identities and be-longings. By weaving visual techniques within their narratives (photography, comics, cartography) authors Aleksandar Hemon, G.B. Tran, Junot Díaz, Boris Fishman and Vikram Chandra convey a surplus of perspectives and gesture towards alternative spaces, spatial in-between-ness and transnational space.

Through a comparison with theatrical performance the argument develops that in both theatre and fiction the concepts of performance and performativity transform classical Indian mythic poetics. In the mythic symbiosis of performance and storytelling in Indian tradition, myth becomes a liberating space of consciousness, where rigid categories and boundaries are transcended.

In T. S. Eliot’s Ascetic Ideal, Joshua Richards charts an intellectual history of T. S. Eliot’s interaction with asceticism. This history is drawn from Eliot’s own education in the topic with the texts he read integrated into detailed textual analysis. Eliot’s early encounters with the ascetic ideal began a lifetime of interplay and reflection upon self-denial, purgation, and self-surrender. In 1909, he began a study of mysticism, likely, in George Santayana’s seminar, and thereafter showed the influence of this education. Yet, his interaction with the ascetic ideal and his...

In this book, Heather McAlpine argues that emblematic strategies play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been acknowledged, and that reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an awareness of these strategies permits a new understanding of the movement’s engagements with ontology, religion, representation, and politics. The emblem is a discursive practice that promises to stabilize language in the face of doubt, making it especially interesting as a site of conflicting responses to Victorian crises of representation. Through analyses of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,...

Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry is the first book in years that attends to the entire oeuvre of the Irish-American poet, critic, lyricist, dramatist and Princeton professor from his debut with New Weather in 1973 up to his very recent publications. Ruben Moi’s book explores, in correspondence with language philosophy and critical debate, how Muldoon’s ingenious language and inventive form give shape and significance to his poetry, and how his linguistic panache and technical verve keep language forever surprising, new and alive.

How are well-known female characters from the Bible represented in late 20th-century novels? Bertrand shows how biblical women in contemporary literature are given a voice that rests not only on words but also on silences. Exploring the many forms that silence can take, she presents an innovative typology that sheds light on this profoundly meaningful phenomenon.

In American History in Transition, Yoshinari Yamaguchi provides fresh insights into early efforts in American history writing, ranging from Jeremy Belknap’s Massachusetts Historical Society to Emma Willard’s geographic history and Francis Parkman’s history of deep time to Henry Adams’s thermodynamic history. Although not a well-organized set of professional researchers, these historians shared the same concern: the problems of temporalization and secularization in history writing. As the time-honored framework of sacred history was gradually outdated, American historians at that time...