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

The Gaelic Revival has long fascinated scholars of political history, nationalism, literature, and theater history, yet studies of the period have neglected a significant dimension of Ireland's evolution into nationhood: the cultural crusades mounted by those who believed in the centrality of the Irish language to the emergent Irish state.

This book attempts to remedy that deficiency and to present the lively debates within the language movement in their full complexity, citing documents such as editorials, columns, speeches, letters, and literary works that were influential at the...

What is the role of poetry in bringing about change? This book explores that question in the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley, examining his fascination with the role of contingency in physical and historical processes. In considering the long-standing debate over Shelley's philosophical stance, Hugh Roberts turns to the poet's reading of Lucretius to show how Shelley developed an alternative approach to the issues of history, change, time, and process--one that incorporates the most compelling features of skepticism and idealism. He sheds new light on the importance of De rerum natura...

"Clarissa" on the Continent defines and explores two strategies of literary translation--creative vs. preservative and strong vs. weak--as they transform one of the most influential English novels. Thomas Beebee compares the two opposing strategies as they influence the French translation of Clarissa by the novelist Antione Francois de Prevost and the German translation by the Gottingen Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, and in doing so he demonstrates that each translator found authority for his procedure within the text itself. Each translation is also examined in...

For students of the poet, Robert Fallon's Milton in Government fills a gap in modern knowledge of his life, the ten years he labored as Secretary for Foreign Languages to the English Republic. For Interregnum historians, the book offers a study of the international affairs of the Republic from a unique perspective, as well as a detailed analysis of the government bureaucracy that conceived and articulated foreign policy during the 1650s. Milton's decade of public service to the English Republic, and the collection of State Papers which are the product of those years, have been...

Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose analyzes the emergence of civil prose in texts of the early modern period and defends English Renaissance writers against the current attack on their aristocratic politics.

Using Thomas More's History of King Richard III, Philip Sydney's Defense of Poetry, Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Anne Hall demonstrates the emerging differentiation of civil and ceremonial prose in the early modern period. These works combine ceremonial discourse,...

Recent critics view Wordsworth's incarnational rhetoric as the expression of an unfulfilled desire for representational adequacy. David Haney, however, argues that Wordsworth's interpretation of the Christian concept of incarnation engages historical contingency and mortality by emphasizing the translation of spirit into mortal, historical humanity. The incarnational analogy also provides an important locus for Romantic thought about the tension between the inherited Enlightenment epistemology based on instrumental reason in the service of representation and the desire for an alternative...

Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-ca. 1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif, is the earliest woman writer of English we know about. Although she described herself as "a simple creature unlettered," Julian is now widely recognized as one of the great speculative theologians of the Middle Ages, whose thinking about God as love has made a permanent contribution to the tradition of Christian belief. Despite her recent popularity, however, Julian is usually read only in translation and often in extracts rather than as a whole.

This book presents a...

Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel focuses on the novels of R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie and explores the tension in these novels between ideology and the generic fictive strategies that shape ideology or are shaped by it. Fawzia Afzal-Khan raises the important question of how much the usage of certain ideological strategies actually helps the ex-colonized writer deal effectively with postcolonial and postindependence trauma and whether or not the choice of a particular genre or mode employed by a writer presupposes the extent to...

The adventures and antics of James Bond have provided the world with many of the most gripping story lines of the last half-century. Fleming's novels were best-sellers in their day, and the Bond films have been even more popular, becoming the most enduring and successful film franchise in history. By some estimates, half of the world's population--billions of people--have seen a James Bond movie, thus viewing an image of global struggle through Western eyes and obtaining a particular perception of Britain and the world. This fascinating and accessible account of the global phenomenon uses...

To English poets and writers of the seventeenth century, as to their predecessors, mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols God's wrath. Yet, less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of mountain splendor, of glorious heights that stirred their souls to divine ecstasy. In this very readable and fascinating study, Marjorie Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to mountain glory. She examines various...

Among Old English poems, "Genesis A" is second both in length and importance only to Beowulf. With this new edition, Alger N. Doane reveals both the full stature of the poem and the significant achievement of the poet. Indeed, Doane s creative and scrupulous work calls for both a rereading and a reassessment of" Genesis A "among all scholars in the field.
In the editing of the text and the commentary the heart of the work Doane brings his full learning to bear in the service of illuminating the poem. His detailed commentary touches upon all the points of interest of the poem, and...