Browse

The Body in Arabic Love Poetry: The 'Udhri Tradition

Jokha Alharthi

This book radically re-interprets the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age. It challenges stereotypical ideas about the absence of the body in ʿUdhri love poetry. Investigating ... More

This book radically re-interprets the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age. It challenges stereotypical ideas about the absence of the body in ʿUdhri love poetry. Investigating the ʿUdhri tradition through close readings of the classical 10th-century Arabic sources including anthologies such as the Kitab al-Aghani, the book contributes to literary studies on the representations of the body. It also includes close readings of difficult literary texts in classical Arabic including the work of ʿUrwah b. Hizam, Majnun Layla,  Qays b. Dharih, Jamil Buthaynah and Kuthayyir ʿAzzah.  The author re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She avoids familiar clichés about the purity of love in ‘Udhri poetry. Broadly speaking, this book is an Arabic counterpart to the western medieval concept of unconsummated courtly love. It questions the traditional much-vaunted emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body. Less

The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 1: Underground to Otherground

Kenneth White

Cairns Craig (ed.)

This first volume of Kenneth White’s long-awaited Collected Works brings together three of his early prose-books : Incandescent Limbo, Letters from Gourgounel, Travels in the Drifting Dawn. These are ... More

This first volume of Kenneth White’s long-awaited Collected Works brings together three of his early prose-books : Incandescent Limbo, Letters from Gourgounel, Travels in the Drifting Dawn. These are neither novels nor simple travelogues. Working out his own vocabulary, as he so often does, White calls them either « waybooks », books that cross territories on a multi-dimensional scale, or « staybooks », concerned with the deep habitation of a place. In every case, the aim of this intellectual nomad, inventor of the theory-practice of geopoetics, is to open up new existential and mental space, outwith a pseudo-cultural context that White analyzes in his essays as the tail-end of a tail-end, however productive.Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

Maud Ellmann, Sian White, and Vicki Mahaffey (eds)

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism showcases cutting-edge developments in Irish and modernist studies. Extending the timeline of modernism, the Companion reaches back to the Irish Literary ... More

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism showcases cutting-edge developments in Irish and modernist studies. Extending the timeline of modernism, the Companion reaches back to the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth century and forward to recent innovations in the arts. The Companion also calls for a more inclusive understanding of Irish modernism, drawing greater attention, for example, to the pioneering work of women and prompting a richer awareness of 'gender trouble' in the long twentieth century. It departs from other handbooks and critical anthologies by highlighting the ‘heresies’ of Irish modernism, its trademark modes of resistance to orthodoxy and tradition. Among those modes, the Companion identifies ‘heresies of time and space’, ‘heresies of nationalism’, ‘aesthetic heresies’, and ‘heresies of gender and sexuality’ as the organising rubrics for each section of the volume, concluding with ‘critical heresies’ that have reshaped the academic field. Under these five rubrics, contributors address a wide range of modernist achievements in drama, poetry, fiction, cinema, journalism, decorative arts, and philately, while the introduction offers pointers for further exploration of Irish music, painting, and architecture, accompanied by photographic reproductions. Granting that heresies often overlap, the chapters are organized to reflect their respective emphases, with the proviso that heresies are defined by their impurity, as well as by the orthodoxies they betray—the word ‘betray’ implying both transgression and revelation.Less

The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900

David Finkelstein (ed.)

Winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, this is a thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900. It is a unique ... More

Winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, this is a thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900. It is a unique collection of essays examining nineteenth-century British and Irish journalism and communication history during a key period of change and development. It covers an important point of expansion in periodical and press history across the four nations of Great Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), concentrating on cross-border and transnational comparisons and contrasts in nineteenth-century media history and communication. Designed to provide readers with a clear understanding of the current state of research in the field, in addition to an extensive introduction, it includes fifty newly commissioned chapters and case studies exploring a full range of press activity and press genres during this intense period of change. Along with keystone chapters on the economics of the press and periodicals, production processes, readership and distribution networks, and legal frameworks under which the press operated, the book examines a wide range of areas from religious, literary, political and medical press genres to analyses of overseas and émigré press and emerging developments in children’s and women’s press.Less

Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance: Hellenism as Theatricality

Olga Taxidou

This book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward ... More

This book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D. and Bertolt Brecht in creating a modernist aesthetic in performing, dancing, translating and designing Greek tragedies, sometimes for the stage and sometimes for the page. The book proposes a modernist aesthetic of Greek tragedy based on Hellenism as theatricality that radically revises the philosophical discourses of tragedy. Theatricality is read within the broader modernist experiments that reconfigure the relationships between the play-text and the stage, the body of the performer and the written word, while also re-conceptualising the main authors/creators of the performance event. Most such modernist experiments exhibit a strong attachment to notions of Greek tragedy. Sometimes these notions are based on readings of actual play-texts or archeological findings, but more often than not they rely on creative versions and encounters with Greek tragedy that help to revise ideas about classicism, its authenticity and cultural currency, and contribute towards an understanding of Greek tragedy that allows for theatrical experimentation that at once looks backwards, unearthing a radical potential in Greek tragedy itself (after Nietzsche and the Cambridge Ritualists), and forward to reception theory and to the late 20th and 21st century performances of Greek tragedy.Less

Hotel Modernity: Corporate Space in Literature and Film

Robbie Moore

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and ... More

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. The book defines corporate space as the new urban, capital-intensive, large-scale spaces brought about by corporations during the nineteenth century, including department stores, railway stations and banking halls. Only in hotels, however, did the individual live within corporate space: sleeping in its beds and lounging in its parlours. The hotel structured intimate encounters with the impersonal and the anonymous, representing a radically new mode of experience. In chapters featuring readings of both canonical and relatively little-studied texts by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Bennett, and Henry Green, alongside films by F. W. Murnau, Segundo de Chomón, and Charlie Chaplin, Hotel Modernity considers the relationship between new kinds of spatial organisation and new forms of subjective and intersubjective life. Hotels provoked these writers and filmmakers to rethink the conventions and functions of fictional characters. This book charts the warping and decentring of the category of ‘character’ within the corporate, architectural, informatic and technological networks which come to define hotel space in this period.Less

Iranian Literature after the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World

Laetitia Nanquette

This book analyses the field of contemporary Iranian literature. It explores how literature has functioned and circulated since the 1979 revolution until the present, both within Iran and in ... More

This book analyses the field of contemporary Iranian literature. It explores how literature has functioned and circulated since the 1979 revolution until the present, both within Iran and in countries of the Iranian diaspora, focusing on North America, Western Europe and Australia. It focuses on prose productions, analysing several genres and media. The book takes Iran as its starting point, revealing the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society, before turning to the global diaspora to examine the current dynamics of literary production and circulation between Iranian diasporic spaces and the homeland. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary Iranian literary field in its relation to the social, economic and political fields, both within Iran and in the diaspora. It is also a critical intervention in the field of World Literature as it explores Persian literary texts and the Iranian literary field in their worldly dimensions, with an interdisciplinary and global perspective. It is based on 15 years of fieldwork and travels in Iran, with unique interviews, data collection and participant observation.Less

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction

Hannah Lauren Murray

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. It brings together fiction and multiple ... More

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. It brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US including natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism and spiritualism. Moving beyond an anthropological framework of liminality and its focus on ritualised behaviour in tribal societies, this book examines liminality as both a temporary transformative experience and a permanent condition of exclusion and loss for White men in the early United States. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, the book argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Liminal Whiteness contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of Whiteness and citizenship in the early US, and which resonates with contemporary discussions of White cultural anxiety and fragility. Fears of losing Whiteness in the early US were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.Less

Literature and Consolation: Fictions of Comfort

Jürgen Pieters

By focusing on a number of significant moments in the interlocking histories of the book’s two central concepts – literature and consolation – this study articulates the premises that underlie the ... More

By focusing on a number of significant moments in the interlocking histories of the book’s two central concepts – literature and consolation – this study articulates the premises that underlie the assumption that literary writings can bring comfort. What is it in these texts that provides this special experience? How does literature help us to understand what consolation means and the effects it can have on individual readers? The intersecting ideas of literature and consolation, from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Flaubert through to Roland Barthes, Denise Riley and Julian Barnes, guide today’s readers on how literature provides examples, food for thought and good companionship in times of grief and pain. Taking its cue from the rich history of consolatory thinking, the book shows how writers from different times have explored the potential of their writing to offer solace. The result of these explorations, this book argues, has shaped the history of Western literature decisively.Less

Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome's Dance after 1890

Megan Girdwood

Ranging from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this book examines literary and choreographic representations of the figure of Salome, the biblical woman who danced for the head of St ... More

Ranging from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this book examines literary and choreographic representations of the figure of Salome, the biblical woman who danced for the head of St John the Baptist. The age of modernism witnessed an extraordinary cross-fertilisation of the arts of literature and dance, grounded in a shared appetite for formal experimentation and inter-related ideas about the representational capacities of the performing body. Following her conspicuous revival in the nineteenth-century French Symbolist movement, Salome became a focal point for these recurring interplays between text and performance, inspiring an unprecedented corpus of plays, fictions, paintings, dance performances, and silent films devoted to her ‘dance of the seven veils’. This book considers how Salome’s dancing body, across its numerous modernist iterations, framed critical questions about inter-arts collaboration, influence, aesthetic autonomy, and the porousness of different disciplines, thereby unsettling more traditional views of aesthetic hierarchies and related assumptions about female creative agency. Following salient versions of Salome from fin-de-siècle music halls and avant-garde theatres to the projects of the Ballets Russes, female film pioneers, and modernist playwrights, this book considers canonical authors such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, as well as lesser-known but crucially influential performers, from the modern dancers Loïe Fuller and Maud Allan, to Ida Rubinstein, Alla Nazimova, and Ninette de Valois.Less

Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics

Gemma Moss

Why was music so prominent in modernist literature? Why did so many modernist writers turn to an abstract art form like music to help them explore politics, gender, war, capitalism, technology and ... More

Why was music so prominent in modernist literature? Why did so many modernist writers turn to an abstract art form like music to help them explore politics, gender, war, capitalism, technology and the social functions of art? Using an approach to music informed by T. W. Adorno, this book examines the real-world, political significance of seemingly abstracted things like musical and literary forms. Re-assessing music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner, this book re-shapes temporal, aesthetic and political understandings of modernism by arguing that music plays a crucial role in on-going attempts to investigate language, rational thought and ideology using aesthetic forms. Finally, through an analysis of twenty-first-century novelists who have returned to modernist music and methods of formal innovation, this book argues that we need a new account of modernism, which is still being produced today. Since contemporary writers continue to ask what can be achieved by combining musical and literary forms, and to debate the value of linguistic and rational meaning against music’s non-referential, emotive communicative capacities, this book provides a methodology that offers a purchase on matters we have not yet found our way out of.Less

Modernist Intimacies

Elsa Högberg (ed.)

This book traces modern intimacy back to the first decades of the twentieth century, and shows that modernism played a crucial role in its emergence. Intimacy can no longer be seen as an exclusively ... More

This book traces modern intimacy back to the first decades of the twentieth century, and shows that modernism played a crucial role in its emergence. Intimacy can no longer be seen as an exclusively private, familiar sphere of life independent of socio-political realities; disruptive and inescapably public, intimacy from the modernist period to the present furthers reactionary and violent as well progressive and creative forces. Modernist Intimacies offers incisive, original perspectives on intimacy as a vital dimension of modernist aesthetic and social practices. The twelve contributors engage topics from music-making, wartime radio broadcasting and transnational relations to diary-writing, affect, sexual pleasure, queer religiosity and same-sex love. In attending to a wide range of print literary texts as well as other media such as church murals and sonic archives, the volume also points to the resonance of modernist intimacies in our own time.Less

Reverberations of Revolution: Transnational Perspectives, 1770-1850

Elizabeth Amann and Michael Boyden (eds)

Cutting across disciplines and linguistic borders, this book highlights revolutionary moments in Europe, the United States and the Caribbean between the mid-eighteenth century and the revolutions of ... More

Cutting across disciplines and linguistic borders, this book highlights revolutionary moments in Europe, the United States and the Caribbean between the mid-eighteenth century and the revolutions of 1848. Its chapters adopt transnational approaches to revolution to show how political uprisings often reverberated far beyond the borders of the states directly affected in the form of narratives, metaphors, translations, letters, pamphlets and dialogues, as well as physical objects.Less

Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition

Guy J. Reynolds

Deploying the concepts and techniques of Body Studies, this book remaps Willa Cather’s writing from the 1890s through to 1940. This study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the senses and reads ... More

Deploying the concepts and techniques of Body Studies, this book remaps Willa Cather’s writing from the 1890s through to 1940. This study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the senses and reads Cather as a writer at the transition from late Victorian to Modernist models of representation. The book presents suggestive new ways of understanding her depictions of disability , male bodies and Native American culture, not to mention her narratives of whiteness and of the black body. The book explores Cather’s ‘sensorium’ – her imaginative exploration of sounds, sights, tastes, smells and the tactile. Sensing Willa Cather draws on recent work in queer, disability, ageing and food studies to re-contextualize her fiction. The first three chapters explore Cather’s writing in relationship to sense studies, and also such movements as Aestheticism and Modernism. The next five, roughly tracing the evolution of her career from an apprenticeship as a reviewer and journalist through to the established novelist, focus on the five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell: each sense is successively linked to Cather’s work, and used to explore her profound interest in corporealism. The final chapter. ‘The Body of the Author’, then examines Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Cather’s representation both of her own bodily presence and that of other writers.Less

Shakespeare and Latinidad

Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta (eds)

Shakespeare and Latinidad is a curated collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s ... More

Shakespeare and Latinidad is a curated collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays. It is the first truly comprehensive treatment of the myriad intersections of Latinx practitioners and art with Shakespearean performance, adaptation, and pedagogy. The collection includes leading academics, playwrights, and theatre practitioners; its blend of scholarly essays, practitioner essays, and interviews reflects the transdisciplinary synthesis of scholarship, dramaturgy, and pedagogy that shapes Latinx engagement with Shakespeare. The collection brings together the diverse voices working in this field today including leading academics, playwrights and theatre practitioners. This blend of essays and interviews reflects the transdisciplinary synthesis of scholarship, dramaturgy, and pedagogy that shapes Latinx engagement with Shakespeare. The collection includes essays and dialogues from actors, directors, scholars, playwrights, and vocal coaches. Essays cover a range of topics that include translating Shakespeare into contemporary English, Latinx actors portraying Shakespearean roles as either Latinx or non-Latinx, strategies for engagement for devised theatre and theatre for young audiences, directors’ Latinx visions for Shakespeare, and scholarly analysis of productions, adaptations, and initiatives for Latinx Shakespeares. The collection highlights productions, adaptations, and theatres from throughout the United States, in large cities and rural areas, from predominantly-white theatres to theatres of colour.Less

Virgil's English Translators: Civil Wars to Restoration

Ian Calvert

This book considers the writers who translated Virgil into English during the civil wars, Interregnum and early years of the Stuart Restoration (c. 1636–c. 1661). It argues that these writers ... More

This book considers the writers who translated Virgil into English during the civil wars, Interregnum and early years of the Stuart Restoration (c. 1636–c. 1661). It argues that these writers translated and imitated Virgil in order to display and interrogate their political loyalties, articulate personal responses to past traumas, draw attention to the contingent nature of the systems of government which followed the death of Charles I in 1649 (particularly Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate) and express their hopes for the country’s future. This future often, but not invariably, imagined a restored Stuart monarchy under Charles II, and all of the translators in this period spent time in royal service or were associated with the royalist cause. Their writings, however, demonstrate that royalism encompassed a wide variety of opinions, some of which emphasised a sense of duty to an individual or dynasty, but others were more committed to monarchy as an institution or to monarchical forms of government. This book also situates the translations within each author’s wider body of work in order to identify further political resonances in their individual receptions of Virgil and illuminate Virgil’s broader status and cultural function in the period.Less

Walter Scott and Short Fiction

Daniel Cook

Walter Scott’s historical novels dominated the literary marketplace for much of the nineteenth century. As an author of short fiction, in which he also excelled, he has received far less attention. ... More

Walter Scott’s historical novels dominated the literary marketplace for much of the nineteenth century. As an author of short fiction, in which he also excelled, he has received far less attention. Walter Scott and Short Fiction is the first extended study of The Author of Waverley’s only collection of short stories, Chronicles of the Canongate; periodical and gift-book pieces; and interpolated tales that appeared in the novels, such as ‘The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’, a devilish folk story, and ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, which remains one of the most widely anthologised short prose works ever written. Through extensive readings of the Highland stories (‘The Highland Widow’ and ‘The Two Drovers’), his Indian novella (The Surgeon’s Daughter), Gothic keepsakes (‘My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror’ and ‘The Tapestried Chamber’), his Calabrian tale Bizarro, and other texts, this book offers new insights into the production and consumption of the short story, the novella, the tale, the sketch, and other forms of fiction in the early nineteenth century and beyond.Less