Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Originally published between 1932 and 1945, the eleven-volume Works of Edmund Spenser collects The Faerie Queene along with Spenser's minor poems, prose works, and Alexander C. Judson's The Life of Edmund Spenser.

In 1732, a blasphemous burlesque of the Christian Atonement was published in England without comment from the government or the Church of England. In Hogarth's Harlot, Ronald Paulson explains this absence of official censure through a detailed examination of the parameters of blasphemy in eighteenth-century England and the changing attitudes toward the central tenets of the Christian Church among artists in this period. Discerning a profound spiritual and cultural shift from atonement and personal salvation to redemption, incarnation, and acts of charity and love, Paulson focuses on...

Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and...

When we speak of the English Renaissance, what is it that we are naming, what are we recognizing reborn? As the essays in this latest collection from the English Institute demonstrate, our basic notions of the period have themselves been reconceived. In Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce, seven critics defamiliarize the images of the Renaissance -to permit the repressed to return, to acknowledge the presence of the unassimilable ghost the mark of difference of an age that is at once self and 'other'.-

John Hollander discovers a -hidden undersong- in the Spenserian lyric, while...

-All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.---Basil Bunting

A close poetic ally of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, the British poet Basil Bunting is best known for his use of specific musical form in poetry. Several of his works, including his long poem Briggflatts, are in the form of the sonata. Although his language is plain,...

The Romantics lived through a turn of the century that, like our own, seemed to mark an end to history as it had long been understood. They faced accelerated change, including unprecedented state power, armies capable of mass destruction, a polyglot imperial system, and a market economy driven by speculation. In Romanticism at the End of History, Jerome Christensen challenges the prevailing belief that the Romantics were reluctant to respond to social injustice. Through provocative and searching readings of the poetry of Wordsworth; the poems, criticism, and journalism of Coleridge;...

Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men--one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British...

Long considered the essential guide to Joyce's famously difficult work, Roland McHugh's "Annotations to "Finnegans Wake"" provides both novice readers and seasoned Joyceans with a wealth of information in an easy-to-use format uniquely suited to this densely layered text. Each page of the "Annotations" corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of "Finnegans Wake" and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate...

James Joyce's use of ten one hundred-letter words in Finnegans Wake has always been an intriguing feature of that novel. Eric McLuhan takes a new by placing the Wake in the tradition of Menippean satire, where language is used to shock and provoke. Seen in this light, Joyce's peculiar language and style become part of this Menippean tradition through his use of the linguistic 'thunderclap'.

The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake is the first book to examine this strangest and most prominent aspect of the language of the Wake, and explain its use in...

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics is on the cutting edge of an original and exciting new trend in Joycean studies, as it combines the study of literature, technology, and communication to reveal James Joyce as 'a key figure in the history of cyberculture.'

Donald Theall examines for the first time how Joyce conceived of the artist as an engineer and the artist's works as constructions, and reveals the importance of Joyce's understanding of the direction of a developing technoculture. Theall explores the interrelationships between the machinic and the processes of encoding,...

Disguise is a recurring figure in many Renaissance texts. In its apparent intention to deceive, it raises complex issues of identity, motivation, and the construction of character. Lloyd Davis's Guise and Disguise examines disguise as a rhetorical and dramatistic motif in a wide range of Renaissance texts. Drawing on the sociological analyses of character in the work of Goffmann and Garfinkel as well as on recent historicist studies of Renaissance literature, Davis argues against an essentialist notion of identity. He posits a counter-tradition of character as invented, shaped...

Love, lust and human suffering - passion in all its aspects - was Samuel Richardson's great theme. The essays in Passion and Virtue are thematically united by the moral vision in Richardson's novels. The novels reveal the conflicting demands of human passion, through the ennobling and destructive aspects of love and lust, and the attempt to achieve a virtuous existence through Christian suffering. This conflict is considered and critically analyzed in fourteen essays, all originally published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the leading periodical for fiction from this period....

This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft and Inchbald, and the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth, and others, Private Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary works and the...

Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction is a lively discussion of the debates about the uses of the past contained in British fiction since the Falklands crisis. Drawing on a diverse and original body of work, Suzanne Keen provides a detailed examination of the range of contemporary 'romances of the archive, ' a genre in which British novelists both deal with the loss of Empire and a nostalgia for the past, and react to the postimperial condition of Great Britain. Keen identifies the genre and explains its literary sources from Edmund Spenser to H.P. Lovecraft and...

The forerunner of today's book clubs, nineteenth-century literary societies provided a lively social and intellectual forum where people could gather and discuss books, cultural affairs, and current events. In Come, bright Improvement Heather Murray explores the literary societies of Ontario between 1820 and 1900 - some of which are still in existence today - and examines the extent to which they mirrored or challenged contemporary social, political, and intellectual trends.

Based on a wealth of original research with periodicals and local archival materials, Murray traces...

Sexual politics in the Renaissance dictated a strong opposition to any kind of homoerotic attachments, or discussion thereof, forcing Renaissance poets and playwrights to find other means of representing these connections. In this compelling and intriguing work, Stephen Guy-Bray argues that early modern authors used renditions of Theocritan and Virgilian pastoral, as well as epic poetry, for the exploration and the allusive presentation of homoerotic and homosocial themes.

Drawing on the poetry and plays by such authors as Castiglione, the Earl of Surrey, Milton, Spenser, Barnfield,...

George Herbert is best known as a seventeenth-century sacred poet, often associated with such writers as John Milton and John Donne, but it is Herbert's portrait of an idealized rural clergyman in The Country Parson which perhaps best shows Herbert's engagement in a wide range of complex social debates. In Full of all knowledg', Ronald Cooley examines the 1632 pastoral manual through four distinct lenses, each representing the perspective of a particular historical sub-specialty: church history, the history of the 'learned professions' (law and medicine), local and...

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is increasingly recognized as the most influential writer of the twentieth century. Sales of his books remain exceptionally high, and Middle-earth fan clubs flourish around the world. The massive success of the film versions made of The Lord of the Rings, and released between 2001 and 2003, have only added to his popularity.

Throughout his life, Tolkien was acutely aware of the power of myth in shaping society; so much so, that one of his earliest ambitions as a writer was to create a mythology for England. The Middle-earth of The Lord of the...

James Joyce's writings have been translated hundreds of times into dozens of different languages. Given the multitude of interpretive possibilities within these translations, Patrick O'Neill argues that the entire corpus of translations of Joyce's work - indeed, of any author's - can be regarded as a single and coherent object of study.Polyglot Joyce demonstrates that all the translations of a work, both in a given language and in all languages, can be considered and approached as a single polyglot macrotext.

To respond to, and usefully deconstruct, a macrotext of this kind...

The Anglo-Saxons placed a great deal of importance on wisdom and learning, something Beowulf makes dramatically clear when he uses his 'wordhord' to command respect and admiration from his friends and foes alike. Modern day scholars no longer have recourse to the living language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons, and as a result must turn to their 'wordhords' - the literary, historical, and cultural artefacts that have survived in various degrees of intactness - to learn about life in Anglo-Saxon England.

This collection of essays, gathered to honour the memory of the noted...