Five Frenchmen go off to war, two of them leaving behind a certain young woman who longs for their return. But the main character in 1914 is the Great War itself. Jean Echenoz, the multiawardwinning French literary magician whose work has been compared to Joseph Conrad and Lawrence Sterne, has brought that deathtrap back to life, leading us gently from a balmy summer day deep into the insatiableand still unthinkablecarnage of trench warfare.
As wars go, the battle between Britain and Argentina for supremacy in the Falklands Islands was little more than a skirmish. Yet few wars have been asked to bear such a heavy and polarized burden of meaning. In this book, David Monaghan employs literary critical methods in developing a comprehensive analysis of the political speeches and journalism through which the Thatcherite myth of British greatness reborn in the Falklands along neo-conservative lines was communicated. He then assesses some of the many dissident films, plays, travel books, and cartoon strips which, in the years since 1982, have used the Falklands War as the basis for national metaphors.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include Mythologies and Camera Lucida.
This stimulating study of Charlotte Bront’s novels draws on extensive original research in a range of early Victorian writings, on subjects ranging from women’s day-dreaming to sanitary reform, from the Great Exhibition to early Victorian religious thought. It is not, however, merely a study of context. Through a close consideration of the ways in which Bront’s novels engage with the thinking of their time, it offers a powerful argument for the ‘literary’ as adistinctive mode of intelligence, and reveals a Charlotte Bront more alert to her historical moment and far more aesthetically sophisticated than she has usually been taken to be. The study will be of interest not only to students of Victorian literature and society, but also to those literary critics and theorists whoare beginning to reconsider the nature of the aesthetic and its relation to ideology.
What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.
Fresh from finishing university in England, Adam Woods arrives in Venice to begin a new chapter in his life. He soon secures employment as the personal assistant of Gordon Crace — a famous expatriate novelist who makes his home in a dank and crumbling palazzo, surrounded by fabulous works of art, piles of unanswered correspondence and the memories of his former literary glory.
This volume on the three Flavian epic poets (Valerius Flaccus, Statius, Silius Italicus) for the first time critically engages with a unique set-up in Roman literary history: the survival of four epic poems from the same period. The interactions of these poems with each other and their contemporary context are explored by over 20 experts and emerging scholars. Together they offer new perspectives to the still increasing readership of Flavian epic poetry.
In 1957, Richard Altick’s groundbreaking work The English Common Reader transformed the study of book history. Inspired by Altick’s research, but digging deep into the neglected records of prison libraries, army barracks or convict ships the authors of A Return to the Common Reader dramatically reconfigure our understanding of the ordinary Victorian readers whose efforts and choices changed our literary culture forever.
In this astute mix of cultural critique and biblical studies, John H. Walton presents and defends twenty propositions supporting a literary and theological understanding of Genesis 1 within the context of the ancient Near Eastern world and unpacks its implications for our modern scientific understanding of origins. Ideal for students, professors, pastors and lay readers with an interest in the intelligent design controversy and creation-evolution debates, Walton’s thoughtful analysis unpacks seldom appreciated aspects of the biblical text and sets Bible-believing scientists free to investigate the question of origins.
Few scholars nursed on the literary canon would dispute that knowledge of Western literature benefits readers and writers of the superhero genre. This analysis of superhero comics as Romance literature shows that the reverse is true–knowledge of the superhero romance has something to teach critics of traditional literature. Establishing the comic genre as a cousin to Arthurian myth, Spenser, and Shakespeare, it uses comics to inform readings of The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, Malory’s Morte and more, while employing authors like Ben Johnson to help explain comics by Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, and Grant Morrison and characters like Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Justice League. Scholars of comics, medieval and Renaissance literature alike will find it appealing.
Hailed as ‘mesmerizing’ (New York Times Book Review) and ‘as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird’ (Richmond Times-Dispatch), A Land More Kind Than Home made Wiley Cash an instant literary sensation. His resonant new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, is a tale of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, a story that involves two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins.
The long-awaited novel from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.
This volume is a comprehensive but accessible guide to the major questions raised by the Hellenistic Jewish work, Joseph and Aseneth. Joseph and Aseneth is an excellent example of the controverted issues of text, dating and Sitz im Leben, when such decisions must be largely based on internal evidence. It provides an entre into the vexed question of genre, given the numerous literary links that have been suggested for it. Its mysterious but engaging plot, and its female protagonist, evoke ongoing sociological and feminist debate. It is thus strongly commended for careful study to students and scholars of Judaism, New Testament, sociology and narratology. Intended as a sound basis for such exploration, this guide also offers a fresh narrative reading in which the revelatory character of Joseph and Aseneth is brought to the forefront.
Currently there is a movement in linguistics towards careful use of corpora in linguistic and text analysis, which has involved both written and spoken corpora and those which combine spoken and written text. Most text analyses address written texts – often literary works – but detailed discussion of the language of a single oral text from multiple perspectives has rarely been published.
This collection of original essays repositions medieval literary studies after an era of historicism. Analyzing the legacy of Marxist and materialist theory on medieval literary criticism, the collection offers new ways of reading texts historically. Drawing upon aesthetic, ethical, and cultural vantage points and methods, these essays demonstrate that a variety of approaches and theories are ‘historical’ and can change what it means to historicize medieval literature. By defining our post-historical moment in medieval English literary studies in terms of new possibilities, this collection will have broad appeal to those interested in the English Middle Ages, history, culture, and reading itself.
Part two of the literary sci-fi thriller follows a boy and a girl who are caught in a warring town where thoughts can be heard and secrets are never safe.
