The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East?
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition...

While political connections between Ireland and Scotland have been vigorously promoted in recent years, Ray Ryan's book is the first sustained, comparative study of literature and culture from both sites. Analyzing a broad range of Irish and Scottish literary texts, Ryan shifts attention from the traditionally defined canon of Irish culture, and establishes the relevance of Scotland for any future discussion of Irish cultural contexts.

The Benedictine monk John Lydgate was the most admired poet of the fifteenth century. He received commissions from some of the most powerful men in the land (including Henry V); he is spoken of with constant admiration; manuscripts of his work are abundant; many of his poems were put into print by England's earliest printers, ensuring that his influence extended well into the sixteenth century. The Fall of Princes, probably the longest poem in the language, is arguably Lydgate's masterwork; yet, until now, it has received only cursory critical attention. This book offers the first extended...

Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gillespie writes a bibliographical history of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his follower John Lydgate in the century after the arrival of printing in England. Her study is an important new contribution to the emerging "sociology of the text" in English literary and historical studies.
At the center of this study is a familiar question: what is an author? The idea of the vernacular writer was already contested and unstable in medieval England;...

This book places H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) in the context of the wider network of women writers in which she participated. It examines the structures through which they exchanged ideas, such as the little magazines and anthologies, charting changes in focus by the network and the ways that new ideas emerged and were developed.

Modernist texts and writings of protest have until now received most of the critical attention of literary scholars of the First World War. Popular literature with its penchant for predictable storylines, melodramatic prose, and patriotic rhetoric has been much-maligned or at the very least ignored. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War redresses the balance. It turns the spotlight on the novels and memoirs of women writers - many of whom are now virtually forgotten - that appealed to a British reading public hungry for amusement, news, and above all,...

Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures that were exhibited in London in 1799 and 1800. Starting from Fuseli's adaptation, Luisa Cale analyzes how visual practices impact on the act of reading and calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices.
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What happens when we engage with fictional characters? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between the literary and the philosophical, Sophie Ratcliffe onsiders the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. On Sympathy uses dramatic monologues based on The Tempest as its focus, and broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges conventionally accepted ideas of literary identification and sympathy, and asks why...

Thomas Percy's Reliques (1765) is one of the founding texts of English literature, an epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry and dramatically influenced Romanticism. This is the first monograph devoted to Percy's seminal work. It unravels Percy's working methods and examines his correspondence, library, and papers.

Modernism and the Museum proposes an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West. It shows that existing surveys of Modernism tend to treat the early stages of the movement as a purely European phenomenon, and fail to take account of the powerful and direct influence of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands operating via museums and exhibitions, particularly in London. The book presents the poet Ezra Pound and the sculptor Jacob Epstein as two seminal figures whose development of a Modernist aesthetic depended almost entirely on...