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Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros

Gillian Knoll

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the ... More

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.Less

Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press

Iain Crawford

Contested Liberalisms corrects a long-standing critical narrative of the relationship between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. That narrative has occluded the importance of Martineau’s ... More

Contested Liberalisms corrects a long-standing critical narrative of the relationship between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. That narrative has occluded the importance of Martineau’s contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, obscured the degree to which her and Dickens’s public quarrel in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism, and has prevented us from appreciating how those fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society. This book thus focuses upon the role played in the early Victorian press by two of its essential shaping figures, and this project offers a new reading of the formation of the early Victorian press and of the ways in which that press both contributed to and was shaped by a transatlantic community of letters broadly united in support for the advance of progressive values but crucially divided over core elements of the ideology of liberalism itself.Less

Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831

Gerard Lee McKeever

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short ... More

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, it shows, was not a unified ideal in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland but rather a contested body of different ideas, some of which were mutually contradictory. The book untangles the complexity of this term that was applied variously to field drainage, elocution lessons, a taste for landscape scenery and the macrohistory of Western civilisation. As it explores, improvement provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history. The book makes a significant contribution to debates around the relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, stressing a series of aesthetic innovations across the turn of the nineteenth century in a culture that was saturated by the dialectical workings of improvement.Less

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature Between Critique and Utopia

David Johnson

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa examines for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheid. Focused on well-known and obscure literary texts from the ... More

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa examines for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheid. Focused on well-known and obscure literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s, as well as the many manifestos and programmes setting out visions of the future, this book charts the dreams of freedom of five major traditions of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance: the African National Congress (ANC), the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The works of a number of South African literary figures are discussed, including Olive Schreiner, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Alan Paton, Karel Schoeman, Jordan Ngubane, Winnifred Holtby, Ethelreda Lewis, Dora Taylor, Livingstone Mqotsi, Peter Abrahams, Richard Rive, Lauretta Ngcobo and Bessie Head. Political thinkers analysed include Nelson Mandela, R. F. A. Hoernlé, Albert Luthuli, Clements Kadalie, A. W. G. Champion, Edward Roux, James La Guma, Alfred Nzula, I. B. Tabata, Ben Kies, Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and Robert Sobukwe. The theoretical dimensions of the study are orientated in relation to major Marxist critics of utopianism like Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky and Ernst Bloch, as well as to thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Wallerstein, James C. Scott and Jay Winter. More than an exercise in historical excavation, Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa raises challenging questions for the post-apartheid present.Less

Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Michelle Levy

Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins ... More

Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins the work of unearthing the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture: describing the practices by which they were written, shared, altered and preserved; exploring the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability; and explicating the migration of texts between the copying technologies of script and print. Deploying a range of methodologies, including quantitative approaches, it considers both literary manuscripts of texts that went unprinted during the lifetimes of their creators as well as those that were printed, presenting a capacious account of how handwritten literary documents were shared, copied, read, and valued. It describes the material processes that brought these manuscripts to audiences small and large, and preserved them for future generations. This book situates manuscript practices within an expanding print marketplace, arguing that the realms of script and print interacted to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the values ascribed to literary manuscripts and the practices involved in their creation and use, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between various media. It concludes with an examination of the ongoing transformations of Romantic literary manuscripts, by textual scholars and digital humanists.Less

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine: A Critical Facsimile Edition

Robert Carlton Brown

Craig J. Saper and Eric B. White (eds)

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press ... More

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.Less

Reading Experimental Writing

Georgina Colby (ed.)

Bringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate ... More

Bringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Etel Adnan, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.Less

Reading the Road, from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan's Highways

Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus (eds)

This collection of essays examines the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. It explores the place of the road in the early modern imagination and so opens ... More

This collection of essays examines the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. It explores the place of the road in the early modern imagination and so opens windows on a geography which is central to all conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and potentially metaphysical locations. Chapters are grouped under three headings: ‘Shakespeare’s Roads’, ‘The Embodied Road’ and ‘Writing the Road’. These allow particular angles of insight into early modern historical and cultural contexts of physical and imaginary roads and include topics as various as the economics of the early modern road network in Shakespeare’s plays, the implications of the siting of theatres on London’s roads, Shakespeare’s allusions to the dangerous nature of crossroads, the poetry of staging roads, dramatic depictions of travelling communities and masterless fools, the material effects of the physical road in depictions of pilgrimage, and both literal and figurative roads in gendered perceptions of mobility. The complex picture of cultural conceptions and ideologies of the early modern road that emerges enhances our understanding of early modern subjectivities.Less

Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect

Kaye Mitchell

Writing Shame examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature. Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, ... More

Writing Shame examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature. Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental – the book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. Shame is presented here as an emotion of self-assessment, a peculiarly social experience, and a culturally pervasive affect with particular pertinence for understanding contemporary constructions of gendered subjectivity, expressions and experiences of sexual desire, the complexities of embodiment, and social processes of othering. The book, then, unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and arguing that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.Less