What kinds of worlds will exist in our future? How will technology shape our cities, homes, and ourselves? This collection of essays explores science fiction’s new spaces—from utopias and dystopias to alien cityscapes—and discusses capitalism, equality, and feminist critique.
Victorian Fiction as a Bildungsroman
This book shows that the Victorian Bildungsroman has a unique development history and a thematic and narrative pattern. It details this tradition’s entrance into Victorian literature, scrutinizing novels to question whether their perspectives fit the shape of the genre.
Critical Engagements on African Literature
This is the first book devoted to Isidore Diala’s award-winning drama and poetry. The essays offer fresh insights on African literary landscapes, exploring themes of national history, ritual aesthetics, postcolonial implosions, oil politics, exile, and gender.
Facing Trauma in Contemporary American Literary Discourse
In a culture where trauma breeds fear and aggression, this book turns to literature. Analyzing works by authors like Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, it shows how a good story can become a space for curiosity and healing in the face of uncertainty.
The Unknowable in Literature and Material Culture
How do we come to know the hidden, unspoken, and “unknowable”? Inspired by this question, the contributors to this volume explore fin de siècle homosexuality, Émile Zola as a seeker of concealed truths, crises of representation, and the dialogue between self and other.
This book features accessible close readings of modern poetry’s engagement with religious experience. It presents diverse modes of the poetic endeavor to capture the divine, exploring a spectrum of attitudes from Christian faith to the worship of nature as the Force of Life.
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.
A Fred Will Reader samples writings from poetry to philosophy. Naming the world, Will says, is half the world. The other half is supplied by the reader. By reading each other globally, we can learn to reconstruct the broken totality of the human condition.
This is the first in-depth English analysis of the nine short poems, or romances, by Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross. Focusing on the Trinity, it explores their literary, theological, and mystical elements, tying them to San Juan’s better-known works.
Maurice Chapelan was three distinct writers: a poet, a famed grammarian, and an author of romans galants. But a unifying thread ran through his literary output: a beauty, simplicity and elegance of style, revealing a love of the French language and a hint of libertinage.
For the curious reader, these essays explore Shakespeare and his re-envisioners; modern novels that interrogate identity; and underappreciated writers. They conclude with a series of pensees that reflect upon the interpretative craft itself.
Vergil’s Eclogues
In his Eclogues, Vergil introduced the pastoral genre to Latin literature. This book shows his dialogue with the earlier Greek and Latin tradition is not merely typical of his time, but a dynamic literary method used to define the character of each poem.
At the end of the 18th century, the British focus shifted from classical ideals to the rediscovery of Old Germanic culture. This book examines travel narratives from 1794 to 1845, shedding light on the representation of Germanness in relation to British national identity.
This volume explores how the interplay of “exile” and “return” in Anglo-Caribbean literature shapes identity. Against a history of colonialism, diaspora, and slavery, it raises questions about literature’s function in an increasingly hybrid and transcultural world.
This volume intersects the study of American literature and history with urgent environmental and global perspectives. It re-conceptualizes relationships based on an ecological ethics, exploring topics from ecofeminism and migration to animal studies and climate activism.
This book challenges the view of Restoration drama as purely domestic. It reveals how heroic plays used stereotypes of the Ottoman Turks to dramatize England’s own revolution, regicide, and restoration, while shaping an emerging British imperial ideology.
The first study of its kind, this collection explores Beowulf’s extensive impact on contemporary culture. Topics range from film, television, and video games to graphic novels and children’s literature, demonstrating the epic poem’s continuing cultural power.
Recent Scholarship on Japan
This collection of cutting-edge scholarship surveys Japanese literature from classical to contemporary. It explores works from Heian-era female authors to Haruki Murakami, relating them to Japanese society, the global context, and the vital role of translation.
Psychological Realism in 19th Century Fiction
This study applies psychoanalytic theories to nineteenth-century fiction like Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre, illuminating the psyches of their characters. It brings forth a novel view of criticism, arguing that an approach dismissive of the psychological aspect is incomplete.
Law, Literature and Political Philosophy in the Spanish Golden Age
This analysis of 16th and 17th century Spain discusses the Catholic reason of state, anti-Machiavellianism, and royal power from the view of Golden Age authors. Literature, law, and political philosophy combine to offer an unusual portrait of power in a time of deep change.