The English humour magazine Punch, or the London Charivari, which first appeared in 1841, quickly became something of a national institution with a large and multi-layered readership. Though comic in tone, Punch was deeply serious about upholding high literary and artistic standards, about dealing with serious subject-matter, and about attempting to nurture its readers appreciation of the national drama and of Shakespeare s plays in particular. The author s detailed examination of Punch s constant advocacy of Shakespeare reveals telling new evidence concerning the...

This book brings together for the first time interviews with sixteen major writers in the English language from Malaysia and Singapore. Three generations of writers representing various literary genres and ethnic groups come together to make this book fully illustrative of the literature of the two countries. In their respective interviews, the writers discuss significant issues pertaining to their own lives, careers, and works. They also explain what they think of the present state of their own societies, literatures, and cultures, and where they stand vis-a-vis the questions of religion,...

In a series of ten historical and literary studies, this volume analyses the complex narrative of changing political identities in early modern Europe and maps out some of the dominant ways in which European-ness was articulated in documents of the period. As the collection unfolds, its contributors explore these themes from a whole range of geographical perspectives, including not only accounts of British culture, but also those describing cultural relations and political identities with regard to Italy, Spain, France, the Papacy, the Netherlands, Bohemia and the Americas, for example....

This book provides an accessible and yet thorough analysis of the work of Michele Roberts, a prolific half-English and half-French writer who can claim both literary and popular appeal. Roberts s work is examined alongside contemporary feminist theory, particularly the work of Luce Irigaray and feminist philosophers of religion. The book traces the development of Roberts s work from its origins in the feminist movement of the seventies, through its engagement with the philosophy of religion and its interest in historiography, to the postmodern playfulness of her latest work. At the same time,...

In spite of the widespread fascination with the life and work of American artist Joseph Cornell in both the academy and the gallery, studies of Cornell to date have been circumscribed by a range of critical cliches about the artist being a childlike dreamer, hermetically sealed off from the world, which has prevented his work from being fully understood in all of its complexity and diversity. This book contains more than 50 illustrations of the artist s work many never before reproduced and provides 13 ground-breaking new essays on the artist s films, dossiers, pill-boxes, magazine work,...

As they oscillate and flow between action and aesthetics, habit and creativity, rhythms are vital to our understanding of how subjectivities are constructed upon the shifting borderlines between life and art. Yet whilst rhythm remains an established concept in studies of French poetry, this is the first major overview to address the centrality of rhythm in fields such as literature, philosophy, dance and film, and to link these debates across periods and disciplines within French Studies. Drawing on thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Lefebvre, Meschonnic, and Virilio, the...

The overall aim of this book is the application of stylistic theories and frameworks to literary texts for a deeper level of interpretation. For this purpose the author conducted an analysis based upon the concepts of polyphony and focalization of three novels from different literary periods commonly labeled Pre-modernism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, namely, George Eliot s Middlemarch (1871-2), Joseph Conrad s Nostromo (1904), and Saul Bellow s Herzog (1964). Inspired by the work of Russian linguist-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin the author attempts to clarify...

This book is the first ever full-length study of the reception of British cinema in post-war France, challenging Francois Truffaut s infamous dismissal of British cinema as a contradiction in terms, a comment which has been, and still is, widely reproduced, yet has until now remained critically unexplored.
A historical account, the book gathers together well-known episodes (such as Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s) and critics (Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard), along with original new material, and thus throws new light on a topic which, given the influential nature...

This work is for comparative linguists and celticists who are keen to study Breton but may be too daunted to undertake such a venture by the wide variety of orthographical conventions which exist in Breton.
The chronological development of the Breton orthographical debates during the twentieth century is charted along with an attempt to discern the ideological, political and personal motivations which lay behind those debates. Based on a substantial corpus of hitherto unpublished original documents and personal interviews, the research throws new light on the nature of the political,...

This work is for comparative linguists and celticists who are keen to study Breton but may be too daunted to undertake such a venture by the wide variety of orthographical conventions which exist in Breton.
The chronological development of the Breton orthographical debates during the twentieth century is charted along with an attempt to discern the ideological, political and personal motivations which lay behind those debates. Based on a substantial corpus of hitherto unpublished original documents and personal interviews, the research throws new light on the nature of the political,...