An exploration of the multiple meanings of “Spanishness” in 20th-21st century fiction. This book calls for a re-evaluation of what being Spanish means, analyzing themes like immigration, nationalism, and memory to dispel stereotypical notions of Spain.
Words into Pictures
This collection of new essays explores E. E. Cummings as both poet and artist. Bringing together the verbal and the visual, the volume examines under-researched fields of his unique, genre-crossing work.
This illustrated book explores the diversity of children’s book illustration as a space for cultural dialogue. It considers how illustrations from different traditions are histories of art and style that enable us to traverse boundaries and dissolve barriers.
Making the Stage
In an increasingly technological and isolated culture, theatre seems a primitive art form. Yet these essays reveal that theatre not only survives but defines the vital political discussions prohibited by a manipulated media.
This volume addresses the economy of the spectacular in Shakespeare’s plays, from early modern England to twenty-first-century adaptations. It asks what is behind the spectacular. Is there a manipulative purpose? How far-reaching are the political and ideological stakes?
Rethinking the Vanguard
This study re-interprets the historical avant-garde from 1917 to 1962, focusing on the convergence of aesthetics and politics. From the Bolshevik Revolution to decolonizing movements, it reveals the vanguard’s transformation and its relevance today.
In Search of the Medieval Voice
This collection of articles is an intriguing way of looking at medieval identity. Reaching beyond literature, this book examines the authorial and pictorial voice, the voice of national identity, and even the physical attributes a medieval voice may have had.
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.
The Mystery of Hamlet
Hamlet kills Polonius thinking he is Claudius. Yet he cannot kill Claudius. Why? Shakespeare understood the Freudian slip centuries before Freud, using hints to reveal the secrets of a disillusioned idealist’s tragically conscientious character.
One World Periphery Reads the Other
These essays study the decentering interplay between “peripheral” areas and marginalized social groups. They explore rich “South-South” cross-cultural exchanges that disrupt the center-periphery dichotomy, creating multiple centers without Western mediation.
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.
In the Jaws of the Leviathan
How do we witness the unspeakable? This book analyzes portrayals of genocide in film and fiction from Africa, Asia, and South America. It contrasts the indirect metaphors of commercial media with the direct, personal gazes found in experimental works.
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.
Irish Childhoods
This book explores how contemporary Irish children’s fiction engages with the past. It reveals how constructions of childhood in novels and films are used to explore complex questions of Irish history, culture, and identity.
Hybridity
This volume critically assesses the notion of hybridity in literature and the visual arts from the eighteenth century to the present. It examines the concept as one held in contempt by purists, promoted by syncretists, and viewed with suspicion by its critics.
Peripheral Transmodernities
This collection of essays explores the critical dialogue between the Hispanic/Latino world and Asian and Arab cultures. Bypassing old colonial centers, these South-to-South dialogues provide vivid examples of de-colonizing impetus and cultural resistance.
Subaltern Vision
This volume offers a stimulating collection of essays on literary representations of subaltern issues by Indian novelists such as Amitav Ghosh, Mahasweta Devi, Kiran Desai, and Rohinton Mistry. Essential reading on the gap between India’s haves and have-nots.
Richard Dadd is a trickster, an Elizabethan Puck in a Victorian insane asylum. His existence foreshadows the inexplicable labyrinths of contemporary existence, entering the fragmented shards of today’s world long before the artists who would try to map it.
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.
Theory That Matters
Theory That Matters offers an up-to-date assessment of literary and cultural theory. The volume launches a defence of theory, demonstrating this is not achieved at the expense of praxis, but by showing its currency through a variety of contexts.