We are now in the Age of Caliban rather than in the Time of Ariel or the Era of Prospero, Harold Bloom claimed in 1992. Bloom was specifically referring to Caliban's rising popularity as the prototype of the colonised or repressed subject, especially since the 1980s. However, already earlier the figure of Caliban had inspired artists from the most divergent backgrounds: Robert Browning, Ernest Renan, Aime Cesaire, and Peter Greenaway, to name only some of the better known. Much has already been published on Caliban, and there exist a number of excellent surveys of this character's appearance...

Since cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies - a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies...

Kathryn Ambrose offers a new approach to the Woman Question in mid- to late-nineteenth-century English, German and Russian literature. Using a methodological framework based on feminist theory and post-structuralism, she provides a re-vision of canonical texts (such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Effi Briest, Fathers and Children and Anna Karenina) alongside lesser-known works by Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Her exploration of the semiotics of barriers - as...

The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious...

Challenge and Continuity is the first full-length attempt to map an important feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature: the thematic novel. It analyses it first in D.H. Lawrence, revealing how in The Rainbow and Women in Love the psychology of the characters is brought into a wider social and ideological context that generates their controlling themes. Having defined an alternative tradition, exemplified by George Eliot and Tolstoy, focused primarily on individual development, it examines how that kind of interest was aligned in the nineteenth century with the thematic, in a...

The sixteen articles in The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing are a welcome contribution to the growing interest in Canadian culture, indicating its variety - Aboriginal, Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian culture and their interrelationships are all represented. In classical oratory the term "rhetoric" signifies the art of influencing the thought and conduct of readers and listeners, and this concept is used as an underlying current of debate in this volume. Contributors address the theme of identity and post-colonial disputation in their explorations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing...

Although the title of this volume is Aldous Huxley between East and West, the order of the articles found within goes from West to East, which naturally imitates Huxley's own progress, especially since he went to the trouble of stepping out as far West as possible before starting for the East. Indeed one could argue that he was already on his way there before he left for California, a continuous journey, perhaps, since from the Californian shores of the Pacific the East is the further West. After the Introduction which places Huxley between East and West, the book starts with a consideration...

The twenty-one essays collected in this volume offer a broad range of critical views on the intricate interdependence between verbal and visual representation. Drawing on recent research, scholars from Europe, America and Asia approach the topic from a host of different angles, exploring topics such as popular visual cultures in Japan, devotional graffiti in a Piedmontese chapel, textual trompe-l'oeil in Jaques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind or the relationship between the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and the representation of landscape in the texts of James Fenimore Cooper. The...

The significance of D. H. Lawrence's reading of two Italian Futurist volumes in the summer of 1914 is widely acknowledged, but the nature of its significance has not been more closely examined, nor traced through his major fictional and discursive writings of the Great War and its aftermath. D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism addresses the oversight, firstly by examining the context to Lawrence's now famous June 1914 letters concerning Futurism; secondly, by placing Futurism - and Lawrence's interest in Futurism - in the light of the movement's intellectual indebtedness to nineteenth-century...

The history of the Novel is a story of perpetual change, so that its identity still remains open to question. The sixteen articles in Reinventions of the Novel investigate connections, differences and similarities in the Novel around the world for the past three hundred years. Rather than searching for the essence of the genre, they look for the formal and thematic patterns on which the novel thrives, considering such matters as tradition and modernity, realism, rhetoric and identity, tableau and spatiality, and wondering whether epic and avant-garde are not quite contradictory terms. Close...