This is the first book to explore color history in Asia. Color is a language of signals, associated with changes in society, economic development, and dynasties. A valuable resource for practitioners of art and design, it offers a new perspective on Chinese aesthetics.
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.
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.
Promised End
The whole meaning of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy depends on Lear’s last lines. Is his vision an epiphany or delusion? Is the play nihilistic or redemptive? This book deploys a wide spectrum of critical approaches to enlist readers in a quest for the answer.
This collection of essays examines dystopian fiction in literature, TV, and games. Capturing the dilemmas of our precarious epoch, it offers new interpretations of classics like Orwell and Atwood and pop culture phenomena like The Hunger Games and Fallout.
Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers
Classic Russian fiction was crucial to Virginia Woolf’s vision of British modernism. We follow Woolf as she begins to learn Russian, invents a character for a story by Dostoevsky, ponders over Sophia Tolstoy’s suicide note, and proclaims Chekhov a truly ‘modern’ writer.
This book explores the relationship between Ruskin and Turner through their mutual fascination with water, focusing on The Harbours of England. It reveals how water became a multifaceted symbol of tradition, progress, and nationalism in the nineteenth century.
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.
Shakespeare’s King Lear
Nagarajan provides this comprehensive edition of King Lear, presenting years of research. He illustrates Shakespeare’s use of language, Elizabethan theatre, history and values of the play, analysis of enigmatic scenes, and glimpses into its performance history.
This collection of essays by international scholars provides new pathways through Frankenstein. Chapters explore the iconic novel’s themes, cultural context, and its numerous afterlives in film, games, and more, stimulating a new appreciation for the classic.
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.
This volume explores the connections between literary figures, artists, and locations of the Victorian era. It covers writers and painters like Charles Dickens and D. G. Rossetti, addresses transatlantic links, and includes influential figures from other periods.
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.
Mapping Cultural Identities and Intersections
This book applies imagology to film, art, and narratives to explore identity construction. Through interdisciplinary approaches, it examines cultural and ethnic identities—the self and the other—with a focus on literary works as they are translated from one culture to another.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.