This is an interdisciplinary account of a now forgotten success story in the history of the society and culture of the Netherlands. Eight case studies of women writers between 1919 and 1970 trace the unconscious politics of the personal in narratives of women's identity and experience through close readings of texts located in the culture of the time. Jane Fenoulhet, whose knowledge of Dutch literature and culture in the twentieth century is unparalleled in the English-speaking world, tracks the public representation of women's private project of self development to the moment when the...

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was unquestionably one of the most celebrated and reviled French thinkers of the last thirty years. Outside France, his influence in comparative literature circles, through deconstruction and other ideas, has been so profound that his personal role as a leader of contemporary French philosophy has been almost overlooked. Perhaps because there is no equivalent in English-speaking countries to the timetabling of philosophy in the French education system, writers on Derrida outside France have not fully appreciated the importance of this political and cultural...

The great Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin spans 39 volumes and, over the course of the century, further compilations of his private diaries and letters have appeared, but the most important epistolary relationship of his later years, shared with his Scottish cousin Joan (Agnew Ruskin) Severn, has until now been entirely unpublished. These letters - more than 3,000 of them - have been challenging for Ruskin scholars to draw upon, with their baby-talk, apparent nonsense and unelaborated personal references. Yet they contain important statements of Ruskin's opinions on travel, on...

In the hundred years since the last major history of English metre was published, dramatic changes have occurred in both the way that poets versify in English and the way that scholars analyse verse. Free verse is now firmly established alongside regular metre, and linguistics, statistics, and cognitive theory have contributed to the analysis of both. This new study covers the history of English metre up to the twenty-first century and compares a variety of modern theories to explain it. The result is a concise and up-to-date guide to metre for all students and teachers of English poetry.

Poetry and philosophy - from the time of Kant to the mid-twentieth century - are centrally concerned with the question of how the Spirit - or the Holy Spirit - is present in the world. This book argues that the development of modern poetry in German and English can be seen as a protracted response to the religious crises of post-Idealist thought. The German tradition develops through poets such as Holderlin as much as through philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, and in England, German ideas profoundly influenced the British Idealist school. Cooper's compelling study makes parallel...

In contrast to the vernacular literary traditions of France, Italy and England, comic tales in verse flourished in late medieval Germany, providing bawdy entertainment for larger audiences of public recitals as well as for smaller numbers of individual readers. In a sustained close analysis, Sebastian Coxon explores both the narrative design and fundamental thematic preoccupations of these short texts. A distinctively performative tradition of pre-modern narrative literature emerges which invites its recipients to think, learn and above all to laugh in a number of different ways.

Adrian Stokes (1902-72) - aesthete, critic, painter and poet - is among the most original and creative writers on art of the twentieth century. He was the author of over twenty critical books and numerous papers: for example, the remarkable series of books published in the 1930s; The Quattro Cento (1932), Stones of Rimini (1934), and Colour and Form (1937) that embraced Mediterranean culture and modernity. His criticism extends the evocative English aesthetic tradition of Walter Pater and John Ruskin into the present, endowed by a stern sensibility to the consolations offered by art and...

The strange M. Proust - the narrator, the author, and the embodiment of A la Recherche du Temps perdu - is now so canonical a writer that his very strangeness is easily overlooked. His book made of other books, his epic composed of extraordinary miniatures, his orderly structure where every law is subverted, his chronology where time can be undone and his geography where places can superimpose: in these, and many other ways, Proust continues to astonish even readers who have engaged with him for their entire careers. In this book, arising from the Princeton symposium of 2006, major critics...

If the past is indeed a foreign country, then how can we make sense of its richness and difference, without approaching it on our terms alone? Pre-histories and afterlives, methods that have emerged in recent work by Terence Cave, offer new ways of shaping the stories we tell of the past and the analyses we offer. In this volume, distinguished contributors engage in a dialogue with these two new critical methods, exploring their uses in a range of contexts, disciplines, languages and periods. The contributors are Terence Cave, Marian Hobson, Anna Holland, Neil Kenny, Mary McKinley, Richard...

Terence Cave's work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970: together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practiced in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide...