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In the 30 years since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning overthrew traditional modes of Shakespeare criticism, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have rapidly become the dominant modes for studying and writing about the Bard. This comprehensive guide introduces students to the key writers, texts and ideas of contemporary Shakespeare criticism and alternatives to new historicist and cultural materialist approaches suggested by a range of dissenters including evolutionary critics, historical formalists and advocates of 'the new aestheticism', and the more politically active presentists. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory covers such topics as: - The key ...
Borrowed Imagination: The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources examines masterpieces of English Romantic poetry and shows the Arabic and Islamic sources that inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Byron when composing their poems in the eighteenth, or early nineteenth century. Critics have documented Greek and Roman sources but turned a blind eye to nonwestern materials at a time when the romantic poets were reading them. The book shows how the Arabic-Islamic sources had helped the British Romantic Poets not only in finding their own voices, but also their themes, metaphors, symbols, characters and images. The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources is of interest to scholars in English and comparative literature, literary studies, philosophy, religion, government, history, cultural, and Middle Eastern studies and the general public.
Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-liter...
Das Nichts stellt eine Konstante in Leopardis Werk dar, deren Darstellung bei Weitem nicht auf die bloße Nennung des ,nulla' beschränkt ist. Es erweist sich als polyvalente Denkfigur, die unter anderem auf Mangel, Abwesenheit, Wertlosigkeit, Zersetzung und Vergehen verweist. Durch eine genaue Betrachtung der unterschiedlichen Nichts-Konzeptionen wird eine gleitende Semantik sichtbar, die im ganzen Werk dynamisch bleibt. Diese entsteht durch die wiederholte Parallelisierung von gegensätzlichen Begrifflichkeiten wie ,Vernunft und Natur', ,Antike und Moderne', ,Dichtung und Philosophie', ,Materie und Geist', ,Leben und Tod', ,Inneres und Äußeres', etc. Dies ist aber nicht die einzige Funktion, die das Nichts in Leopardis Gedankenbewegungen einnimmt: Das Nichts entpuppt sich vielerorts als Orientierungspunkt.
For Jerome McGann, the purpose of scholarship is to preserve and pass on cultural heritage, a feat accomplished through discussion among scholars and interested nonspecialists. In The Scholar’s Art, a collection of thirteen essays, McGann both addresses and exemplifies that discussion and the vocation it supports. Of particular interest to McGann is the demise of public discourse about poetry. That poetry has become recondite is, to his mind, at once a problem for how scholars do their work and a general cultural emergency. The Scholar’s Art asks what could be gained by reimagining the way scholars have codified the literary and cultural history of the past two hundred years and goes on ...
Marriage between older husbands and younger wives was common in nineteenth-century literature, and as Godfrey skillfully argues, provides a useful window into the dynamics of the patriarchic paradigm. Examining canonical and non-canonical texts from Sense and Sensibility to Dracula, this study finds that literary January-May marriages respond to distinctively nineteenth-century anxieties regarding gender roles by deploying a surprising range of modes—parody, incest, aesthetics, horror, economics, and love. The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature ultimately argues that age—like race, sexuality and class—is an essential component of gendered identities.
Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents a major intervention in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. It takes as its prime aim the reading of neglected poetry, principally by women, which qualifies as either poetry of `sensibility' or poetry of `sentiment', terms which comprised the revolution in poetic style of the eighteenth century. Later reactions against these new technical and imaginative resources produced a state of cultural amnesia which The Poetics of Sensibility Rmoves to correct. While much excellent scholarly work has been devoted to this kind of writing, especially in the past few years, the critical focus has almost always been upon prose fiction and drama. Furthermor...
This inspiring exploration of romantic poetry includes the works of such well-known romantics as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Burns, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Also revived are the long-forgotten works of women romantic writers, including Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Anne Yearsley, Anne Radcliffe, Lady Morgan, and others.
"English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press." Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters--"black riders" on a blank page--that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance of printing, and demonstrates the continued interest of postmodern writers in the "visible language" of modernism. McGann then offers a philosophical investigation into the relation of knowledge and tru...