“The Real Thing”
Tom Stoppard is the most significant living British dramatist. The critical essays in this volume celebrate his insightful and wry work, addressing well-known plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as well as his critically neglected fiction.
(Re)writing and Remembering
The contributions to this volume discuss the extent to which fictional acts of remembering are also acts of rewriting the past to suit the needs of the present. They focus on a range of narratives, from poetry to biopics—from the ostensibly fictional to the implicitly real.
A Holistic Perspective on Harold Pinter’s Drama
This book explores Harold Pinter’s plays, from his comedies of menace to his memory and political works. It analyzes the thematic constants—intrusion, anxiety, silence, and power games—that define the term “Pinteresque” and connect his entire dramatic oeuvre.
This study examines how 20th-century absurdist theatre reveals humanity’s angst by confronting the subconscious self with the socio-moral façade. It highlights the dramatic revolution of the mid-20th century through the plays of Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, and others.
This volume examines anguish in late 19th–early 20th century art, literature, and philosophy. It reveals the tension between anguish and art, showing how historical events and new inquiries generated an anguish that proved uniquely fertile for artists.
Apocalyptic Projections
Apocalyptic Projections have been pondered since Biblical times. While the concept of apocalypse evokes images of total oblivion, threads of possibility and redemption offer a potential fabric of hope.
As Time Goes By
This volume provides literary analyses of ageing through writers from Cervantes to Cixous. Exploring universal themes, these essays offer portraits of what age is, has been, and might be, demonstrating literature’s power to reflect social trends.
Churchill’s Socialism
While Caryl Churchill is celebrated, her socialism has been overlooked in favour of gender and postmodern themes. This book examines eight of her plays, reframing her work within socialist discourses to produce persuasive political readings of her drama.
This volume offers critical perspectives on literature and culture, contesting the New World Order and the hegemony of stronger nations. With a significant focus on Islam, it challenges academic discourses founded upon Western-style scholarship.
Culture-blind Shakespeare
This collection of essays offers a plethora of responses to Shakespeare by both Western and Eastern critics, indicating that the Bard crosses all nationalities and deserves to be defined as a global writer.
The most comprehensive review of deaf characters in literature available. Examining 300 years of examples in novels, comics, and film, this work identifies key trends through the lens of deaf education, the use of sign language, and the rise of deaf identity and communities.
Diversity and Homogeneity
This edited volume explores issues related to the nation, ethnicity and gender in literature, film, media and theatrical performance in both the UK and the USA, investigating the problematics of migration, citizenship, terrorism, and equality in modern multicultural societies.
This book investigates the fate of Shakespearean supernatural dimensions in the Age of Reason. Using adapted versions of Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest, it explores two main strategies used to “rationalize” the supernatural: its omission or its aestheticization into spectacle.
Emerald Green
Emerald Green is an ecocritical study of Irish literature’s reverence for the natural world. It examines writers from ancient hermit poets to modern naturalists, exploring how Ireland’s landscape—shaped by famine, loss, and rebirth—defines its literature.
Engaging Art
In essays from around the globe, this book reveals how artists make their art, resist censorship, and retain a creative spirit. It explores how they find space to work and exhibit in a politicized world where artistic freedom is often limited by economic and political pressures.
English Without Boundaries
This conference proceedings demonstrates the strength of English studies across the world, with contributions from scholars in China, Finland, Israel, Italy, Japan and Portugal, as well as from Canada, the UK and the USA, showing the energy and breadth of English studies today.
These essays explore Claire Messud’s fiction and its complex narration of cosmopolitan entanglements. Foci include emigrant identities, 1960s Pop Art, and 9/11 trauma. This collection also provides an interview with the author.
Uncovering Machiavelli’s sources, from Livy to Boccaccio, these essays trace surprising connections to Shakespeare and Mantegna, revealing how and why Christian authors drew on the pre-Christian world.
Experiencing Gender
This publication investigates the concept of gender in an international context. Focusing on various critical approaches, it explores how gender identities are shaped by socio-cultural factors, and provides a map of how gender experiences are represented in the arts.
Food and Appetites
This book traces food as hunger, desire, and appetite in the arts. Examining hunger in literature and art, it explores food’s significance as a metaphor for social class, inequality, and gluttony, revealing the problems of excessive human cravings.