Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - General

Begun by young rebels committed to revolutionizing the creative arts, Pre-Raphaelitism has moved from the margins of nineteenth-century art and literature to the vanguard of interdisciplinary studies. The term is now used to denote the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Decadent movements in art, culture, and literature, but it has remained as difficult to define as ever. Haunted Texts attempts to meet the challenge of defining and illustrating the full spectrum of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Working with a diverse range of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, painting, decorative arts, book...

Since Arthur Symons s declaration in 1895 in the Saturday Review that Christina Rossetti was among the great poets of the nineteenth century, Rossetti s image among critics has undergone permutations as divergent as Victorian culture is from postmodern. Now Diane D Amico redeems Rossetti from the various one-dimensional castings assigned her across the generations those of a saint writing poetry for God; of a sexually repressed, neurotic woman of minor talent; and, most recently, of a subversive feminist questioning the patriarchy and renders a fuller, more intricate understanding of the...

"A splendid piece of scholarly work. . . . Scholars of twentieth-century theater, whether Italianists or not, would find this book immensely useful."--Rebecca West, University of Chicago
This study examines the later plays of Luigi Pirandello--those he wrote for his actress and muse Marta Abba--in light of the recent publication of their correspondence. It traces the Nobel Prize winner's entire creative process, revealing how his perception of women shaped his philosophy of art and life, and highlights the structurally necessary shift from the male protagonist of the early and more...

The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth...

"The evil that men do" has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. Early writers used theater to communicate human experiences and to display reverence for the gods governing daily life. Playwrights from Euripides onward sought inspiration from this interplay between the worldly and the occult, using human belief in the divine to govern characters' actions within a dramatic arena. The constant adherence to the supernatural, despite changing religious...

The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights.The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years.Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured.What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the...