You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts (including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles) impress themselves upon Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and 'Canterbury Tales'.
From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity are dizzyingly complex and increasingly planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction argues for contemporary fiction's capacity to help those who may feel despair at the enormity of such problems--not, as one might think, through the ambitious search for grand solutions, but rather by inculcating a temperament of modesty. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, this volume shows how contemp...
This revisionist literary history of early court poetry illuminates late-medieval and early modern theories of literary production.
Anne Schuurman makes the striking argument that medieval literature engenders the spirit of capitalism by defining the sinner as debtor.
This volume brings together five translations of Aesopian fables that range from the beginning to the end of the English Renaissance. At the centre of the volume is an edition of the entirety of Arthur Golding’s manuscript translation of emblematic fables, A Morall Fabletalke (c. 1580s). By situating Golding’s text alongside William Caxton’s early printed translation from French (1485), Richard Smith’s English version of Robert Henryson’s Middle-Scots Moral Fabillis (1577), John Brinsley’s grammar school translation (1617), and John Ogilby’s politicized fables translated at the end of the English Civil War (1651), this book shows the wide-ranging forms and functions of the fable during this period.
Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama. Carefully combing ...
Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.
Domestic violence against women is an oppressive condition that extends across race, class, and gender. This work examines intimate partner violence against women in Memphis, Tennessee, focusing on Mexican immigrant and Mexican American female survivors of domestic violence. Author M. Helena Vanderlei Collins interviewed ten Mexican immigrant women and seven Mexican American women to investigate factors that influence helpseeking behavior. Collins focused on the perceptions of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American women regarding the social services available to them and explored how their help-seeking behavior is affected by their degree of acculturation and the incidence of intimate partn...
What grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds.
Reading 'Piers Plowman' is an indispensable scholarly guide to a magnificent - and notoriously difficult - medieval poem. With 'Piers Plowman', the fourteenth-century poet William Langland proved that English verse could be at once spiritually electrifying and intellectually rigorous, capable of imagining society in its totality while at the same time exploring heady ideas about language, theology and culture. In her study of Piers Plowman, Emily Steiner explores how Langland's ambitious poetics emerged in dialogue with contemporary ideas; for example, about political counsel and gender, the ethics of poverty, Christian and pagan learning, lordship and servitude, and the long history of Christianity. Lucid and comprehensive, Steiner's study teaches us to stay alert to the poem's stunning effects while still making sense of its literary and historical contexts.