Bøker i Essays and Studies-serien i rekkefølge

Essays on Shelley's achievements and distinctive qualities as a writer covering the whole range of his work.

Essays exploring interrelated strands of material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing, through a rich variety of case studies.

Essays exploring the complex relationship between literature and science.

A powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today.This book offers a response to the culture of metrics, mass digitisation, and accountability (as opposed to responsibility, or citizenship) that has developed in higher education world wide, as exemplified by the UK's Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF), and the increasing bureaucracy that limits the time available for teaching, research, and even conversation and collaboration. Ironically, these are problems that will be solved only by academicsfinding the time to talk and to work together. The essays collected here both critique the culture of speed in the neoliberal university and provide examples of what can be achieved by slowing down, by reclaiming research and research priorities, and by working collaboratively across the disciplines to improve conditions. They are informed both by recent research in medieval studies and by the problematic culture of twenty-first century higher education. The contributions offer very personal approaches to the academic culture of the present moment. Some tackle issues of academic freedom head-on; others more obliquely; but they all have been written as declarations of theacademic freedom that comes with slow thinking, slow reading, slow writing and slow looking and the demonstrations of its benefits. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Leeds. Contributors: Lara Eggleton, Karen Jolly, Chris Jones, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Heather Pulliam

Essays exploring the opportunities for and challenges to the discipline of English language and literature in education.The study of English literature, language, culture and creative writing is an important and dynamic enterprise. English: Shared Futures celebrates the discipline's intellectual strength, diversity and creativity, explores its futures in the nations of the UK and across the world, and brings together the huge scholarly, cultural and social energy of the biggest subject in the Arts and Humanities in Higher and in Secondary education: the most staff, the most students. It represents the synergies produced when practitioners and students from across the discipline come together, and aims to enable new understanding of the challenges that the discipline faces within schools and universities, the vital cultural and political role that English plays, and a renewed appreciation of the intellectual vitality and commitment of its scholars and students. Overall, it demonstrates the rich ecosystem of a subject crucial to social, cultural, and economic well-being, and offers ways in which its vitality can be ensured in the face of new challenges within and beyond the academy. ROBERT EAGLESTONE is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London; GAIL MARSHALL is Head of the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading. Contributors: James Annesley, Katherine Baxter, Barbara Bleiman, Elleke Boehmer, Kirsti Bohata, Benjamin A. Brabon, Linda Bree, Susan Bruce, Billy Clark, Stefan Collini, Jane Davis, Sarah Dillon, Clare Egan, Elizabeth English, Emily Ennis, Martin Paul Eve, Corinne Fowler, Barbara Gallego Larrarte, Marcello Giovanelli, Diya Gupta, Rob Hawkes, Ann Hewings, Keith Jarrett, Clara Jones, Seraphima Kennedy, Ben Knights, Simon Kovesi, Clare A. Lees, Alison Lumsden, Andrea Macrae, Lewi Mondal, Paul Munden, Daniel O'Gorman, Lynda Prescott, Ilse A. Ras, Catherine Redford, Rick Rylance, Helen Saunders, Jenny Stevens, Marion Thain, Stephen Watkins, Harry Whitehead

The notion of what it means to "e;distort"e; a text is here explored through a rich variety of individual case studies.Distortion is nearly always understood as negative. It can be defined as perversion, impairment, caricature, corruption, misrepresentation, or deviation. Unlike its close neighbour, "e;disruption"e;, it remains resolutely associatedwith the undesirable, the lost, or the deceptive. Yet it is also part of a larger knowledge system, filling the gap between the authentic event and its experience; it has its own ethics and practice, and it is necessarily incorporated in all meaningful communication. Need it always be a negative phenomenon? How does distortion affect producers, transmitters and receivers of texts? Are we always obliged to acknowledge distortion? What effect does a distortive process have on the intentionality, materiality and functionality, not to say the cultural, intellectual and market value, of all textual objects? The essays in this volume seek to address these questions,They range fromthe medieval through the early modern to contemporary periods and, throughout, deliberately challenge periodisation and the canonical. Topics treated include Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Reformation documents and poems, Global Shakespeare, the Oxford English Dictionary, Native American spiritual objects, and digital tools for re-envisioning textual relationships. From the written to the spoken, the inhabited object to the remediated, distortion is demonstrated to demand a rich and provocative mode of analysis. Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, Director of the Centre for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and Director of Stanford Technologies at Stanford University; Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Contributors: Matthew Aiello, Emma Cayley, Aaron Kelly, Daeyeong (Dan) Kim, Sarah Ogilvie, Timothy Powell, Giovanni Scorcioni, Greg Walker, Claude Willan.

New approaches to the topics of old age and becoming old depicted in a range of texts from modern literature.The central focus of this book is the experience of growing old as represented in literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day: an experience shaped by changes in longevity, a new science of senescence, the availability of state pensions, and other phenomena of recent history. The collection considers the increasing prominence of stories of ageing, challenging the idea that old age is an uneventful time outside of the parameters of literary narrative. Instead, age increasingly is the story. As the older population swells, political crises are construed as the old stealing from the young, and the rights of older people are sacrificed to the economics of care,it becomes ever more important to think about and question, as literature does, the symbolic aspects of ageing - the cultural imaginary that determines the way that society sees old age. The work in this volume explores agestories in relation to futurity, precarity and climate change. It brings to light narratives of resistance to colonial imperialism and reproductive futurism framed in terms of age; and tests the lived experience of growing old andthe challenge it offers to individualistic conceptions of selfhood, work and care. The literary works examined - hailing from England, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, and including texts by Margaret Drabble, Samuel Beckett and Matthew Thomas - ask how we feel about ageing - so often the determinant of how we think about it. ELIZABETH BARRY is Reader in English at the University of Warwick; she has written widely on modernist literature, medical humanities and age studies. MARGERY VIBE SKAGEN is Associate Professor in French Literature at the University of Bergen. As a Baudelaire specialist, she works at the interface of literature and other knowledge areas. Contributors: David Amigoni, Elizabeth Barry, Sarah Falcus, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Jacob Jewusiak, Peter Svare Valeur, Margery Vibe Skagen, Helen Small, Emily Timms, Kathleen Woodward.

New essays on the cultural representations of the relationship between Britain and China in the nineteenth century, focussing on the Amherst diplomatic problem.On 29 August 1816, Lord Amherst, exhausted after travelling overnight during an embassy to China, was roughly handled in an attempt to compel him to attend an immediate audience with the Jiaqing Emperor at the Summer Palace of Yuanming Yuan. Fatigued and separated from his diplomatic credentials and ambassadorial robes, Amherst resisted, and left the palace in anger. The emperor, believing he had been insulted, dismissed the embassy without granting it animperial audience and rejected its "e;tribute"e; of gifts. This diplomatic incident caused considerable disquiet at the time. Some 200 years later, it is timely in 2016 to consider once again the complex and vexed historical andcultural relations between two of the nineteenth-century world's largest empires. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume engage with the most recent work on British cultural representations of, and exchanges with, Qing China,extending our existing but still provisional understandings of this area of study in new and exciting directions. They cover such subjects as female foot binding; English and Chinese pastoral poetry; translations; representationsof the trade in tea and opium; Tibet; and the political, cultural and environmental contexts of the Amherst embassy itself. Featuring British and Chinese writers such as Edmund Spenser, Wu Cheng'en, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, James Hilton, and Zhuangzi, these essays take forward the compelling and highly relevant subject for today of Britain and China's relationship. Peter J. Kitson is Professor of English at the University of East Anglia;Robert Markley is W.D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English at the University of Illinois. Contributors: Elizabeth Chang, Peter J. Kitson, Eugenia Zuroski-Jenkins, Zhang Longxi, Mingjun Lu, Robert Markley, EunKyung Min, Q.S. Tong

Essays on the writing and textual culture of Europe in the middle ages.Medieval Europe was characterized by a sophisticated market for the production, exchange and sale of written texts. This volume brings together papers on a range of topics, centred on manuscript studies and textual criticism, which explore these issues from a pan-European perspective. They examine the prolonged and varied processes through which Europe's different parts entered into modern reading, writing and communicative practices, drawing on a range ofapproaches and perspectives; they consider material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the Middle Ages. Dr Aidan Conti teaches in the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen; Dr Orietta Da Rold teaches in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Dr Philip Shaw teaches at the School of English, University of Leicester. Contributors: Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Stewart Brookes, Aidan Conti, Orietta Da Rold, Helen Fulton, Marilena Maniaci, Debora Matos, Annina Seiler, Peter A. Stokes, Nadia Togni, Svetlana Tsonkova, Matilda Watson, George Younge.

The complexity of print culture in Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth century is investigated in these wide-ranging articles.The essays collected here offer examinations of bibliographical matters, publishing practices, the illustration of texts in a variety of engraved media, little studied print culture genres, the critical and editorial fortunes of individual works, and the significance of the complex interrelationships that authors entertained with booksellers, publishers, and designers. They investigate how all these relationships affected the production of print commodities and how all the agents involved in the making of books contributed to the cultural literacy of readers and the formation of a canon of literary texts. Specific topics include a bibliographical study of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and its editions from its first publication to the present day; the illustrations of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the ways in which the interpretive matrices of book illustration conditioned the afterlife and reception of Bunyan's work; the almanac and the subscription edition; publishing history, collecting, reading, and textual editing, especially of Robert Burns's poems and James Thomson's The Seasons; the "e;printing for the author"e; practice; the illustrated and material existence of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, and the Victorian periodical, The Athenaeum. Sandro Jung is Research Professor of Early Modern British Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University. Contributors: Gerard Carruthers, Nathalie Colle-Bak, Marysa Demoor, Alan Downie, Peter Garside, Sandro Jung, Brian Maidment, Laura L. Runge.

Considerations of writing about war, in war, because of war, and against war, in a wide range of texts from the middle ages onwards.

New approaches to women writers and attitudes to women in the Romantic period, principally focused on North America.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years.

Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British women writers.

Essays employing close scrutiny of texts to clarify gender issues in feminist literary criticism.

Articles on the historical, social and political realities of postcolonialism as expressed in contemporary writing.

Specially commissioned essays offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus rediscovered writers.

From Horace Walpole to Angela Carter and the X-Files, new and familiar texts are reassessed, and common readings of Gothic themes and critical approaches to the genre are interrogated.

The problems of translating literature explored through both theoretical approaches and practical case studies.

Slavery as depicted in literature and culture is examined in this wide-ranging collection.

Essays discussing the concept of globalisation as present in works of art and literature.

Essays on the links between film and fiction, and their mutual influence.