Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Literary Authority
This book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention. The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the ...
The Limits of Literary Historicism
The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism—its blind spots, overreach, and reluctance to acknowledge its commitments—this provocative new book seeks a clearer understanding of what historicism can and cannot teach us about literary narrative. Editors Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox have gathered contributions from leading scholars that challenge the dominance of contemporary historicism. These pieces critique historicism as it is generally practiced, propose alternative historicist models that...
A Warning for Fair Women
A Warning for Fair Women is a 1599 true-crime drama from the repertory of Shakespeare's acting company. While important to literary scholars and theater historians, it is also readable, relevant, and stage-worthy today. Dramatizing the murder of London merchant George Saunders by his wife's lover, and the trials and executions of the murderer and accomplices, it also sheds light on neighborhood and domestic life and crime and punishment. This edition of A Warning for Fair Women is fully updated, featuring a lively and extensive introduction and covering topics from authorship and staging to the 2018 world revival of the play in the United States. It includes a section with discussion and research questions along with resources on topics raised by the play, from beauty and women's friendship to the occult. Ann C. Christensen presents a freshly edited text for today's readers, with in-depth explanatory notes, scene summaries, a gallery of period images, and full scholarly apparatus.
Reading Typographically
Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of "losing oneself in a book." Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic. How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religio...
Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European Context
This collection honours the scholarship of Professor David F. Johnson, exploring the wider view of medieval England and its cultural contracts with the Low Countries, and highlighting common texts, motifs, and themes across the textual traditions of Old English and later medieval romances in both English and Middle Dutch.
Schools of Fiction
In Schools of Fiction, Morgan Day Frank considers a bizarre but integral feature of the modern educational experience: that teachers enthusiastically teach literary works that have terrible things to say about school. From Ishmael's insistence in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, to the unnamed narrator's expulsion from his southern college in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the most frequently taught books in the English curriculum tend to be those that cast the school as a stultifying and inhumane social institution. Why have educators preferred the anti-scholasticism of the American romance tradition to the didacticism of sentimentalists? Why...
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing...
Bonds of Secrecy
How beliefs about human and divine secrets informed medieval ideas about the mind and shaped the practices of literary interpretations What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship betw...
Manuscript Poetics
Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological ne...
The Sonnets: The State of Play
Shakespeare's Sonnets both generate and demonstrate many of today's most pressing debates about Shakespeare and poetry. They explore history and aesthetics, gender and society, time and memory, and continue to invite divergent responses from critics and poets. This freeze-frame volume showcases the range of current debate and ideas surrounding these still startling poems. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers, and researchers. Key themes and topics covered include: Textual issues and editing the sonnets Reception, interpretation and critical history of the sonnets The place of the sonnets in teaching Critical approaches and close reading Memorialisation and monument-making Contemporary poetry and the Sonnets All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what is exciting and challenging about Shakespeare's Sonnets. The approach, based on an individual poetic form, reflects how the sonnets are most commonly studied and taught.
