The mystery plays of medieval England have traditionally been analysed in ways which centre on the texts and their religious significance. Hans-Jurgen Diller's major study, first published in German, seeks to recover their dramatic potential by focusing on the function of language in conventional modes of speech, prayer, address and dialogue. He looks at speech and dramatic form in the plays to reveal new insights concerning spatial and temporal orientation, the expression of emotions, and the relationships between characters on stage, between actor and audience, and between the dramatic...

Hermann Fischer's lively and original study of Romantic verse narrative traces the origins and development of this poetic form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It brings together the longer epic verse tales of Scott, Byron and Southey and the more lyrical forms of Romantic narrative poetry in the revealing but neglected context of the genre and its history. Professor Fischer addresses the question of genre from both theoretical and historical viewpoints. His study illuminates many areas of Romantic literature, including the role of the medieval revival and the decline of...

Manfred Pfister's book is the first to provide a coherent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of plays in all their dramatic and theatrical dimensions. The materical on which his analysis is based covers all genres and periods of drama, from Greek tragedy and comedy to the contemporary theatre, with the plays of Shakespeare providing a special focus. His approach is not historical but systematic, combining more abstract categorisations with detailed and concrete interpretations of specific sample texts. An extensive international bibliography of relevant theatre and drama studies...

The mystery plays of medieval England have traditionally been analysed in ways which centre on the texts and their religious significance. Hans-Jurgen Diller's major study, first published in German, seeks to recover their dramatic potential by focusing on the function of language in conventional modes of speech, prayer, address and dialogue. He looks at speech and dramatic form in the plays to reveal new insights concerning spatial and temporal orientation, the expression of emotions, and the relationships between characters on stage, between actor and audience, and between the dramatic...

Mock-heroic poetry is one of the most characteristic genres of English neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, including not only masterpieces such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, but also numerous minor poems. This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions, and the history of the mock-heroic genre. Broich first shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses--epic, comedy, parody, satire, and occasional poetry. Later, he traces the history of mock-heroic poetry: its foreign sources, its beginnings in England, the...

This major and acclaimed study of the symbolist tradition in England focuses on the years 1850 to 1900 and discusses the poetry of such as William Morris, O'Shaughnessy, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Wilde and Yeats, paintings by Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, and critical works by Keble, Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, Pater and Arthur Symons. This volume considers the changes from romantic symbol through Victorian 'type' and 'emblem' to late romantic image. This study of both literature and the visual arts is comparative in nature, attempting to establish an English symbolist...

Dickens' plots have often been dismissed as conventional or cheaply sensational: Anny Sadrin argues that they should rather be seen as the embodiment of one of Dickens's central preoccupations: dramatised rituals of succession. Through readings of individual texts Professor Sadrin shows how the simple pattern of quest for father which characterises Oliver Twist develops in Dickens's later novels into an extended exploration of the triple inheritance of looks, name and property. Increasing intricacies of plot represent growing tension between conflicting forces in the parent child...

The image of the 'fallen woman' was a common one in Elizabethan literature. This 1990 study, translated from the original German by the author, deals with an unconventional aspect of the motif; the genre of 'complaint' in which writers enabled women to put their own case, bewailing their fate, invoking pity, and stressing private rather than public virtues. The book begins with a group of Elizabethan poems in which women lament their unfortunate lives. It goes on to deal with a range of works, tracing the complaint from classical models such as Ovid's Heroical Epistles to Chaucer's Legend of...

Mock-heroic poetry is one of the most characteristic genres of English neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, including not only masterpieces such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, but also numerous minor poems. This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions, and the history of the mock-heroic genre. Broich first shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses--epic, comedy, parody, satire, and occasional poetry. Later, he traces the history of mock-heroic poetry: its foreign sources, its beginnings in England, the...

Originally published in German in 1981, and first published in English as this Cambridge edition in 1990, Natascha Wurzbach's study of the street ballad was the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which had previously been vastly neglected. Attention is focused on the social and cultural conditions which accompanied its development. The contemporary reputation of the street ballad is examined, as is the importance of the genre for the history of ideas. It is also looked at as a literary form. In the period from 1550 to 1650 the street ballad was a widespread and...