Browse by Subject: Literature

Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history.

This volume offers a broad and rich view of the tradition of Old French epic poetry, or chansons de geste, by providing an updated English translation of three central poems from the twelfth-century Guillaume d’Orange cycle.

This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with intangible things in his dreamlike masterpiece Finnegans Wake. Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce wrote this work to suggest exactly why it follows the order it does in its finished form.

Joyce and Geometry reveals the full extent to which the modernist writer James Joyce was influenced by the radical theories of non-Euclidean geometry. Tracing Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works, Ciaran McMorran delves into a major theme in Joyce’s work that has not been thoroughly explored until now.

This book is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce’s entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings.

Focusing on the works of Edith Wharton and her contemporaries, Melanie Dawson discusses representations of modern American identities past early youth in twentieth-century literature. Dawson sets Wharton’s work at the center of a vital debate about the contested privileges associated with age in contemporary culture.  

Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience.            

Challenging the tendency of scholars to view women writers of the modernist era as isolated artists who competed with one another for critical and cultural acceptance, Women Making Modernism reveals the robust networks women created and maintained that served as platforms and support for women’s literary careers. This volume shows how women’s writing communities interconnected to generate a current of energy, innovation, and ambition that was central to the modernist movement.

An award-winning collection from an acclaimed contemporary poet  

Contributors to this collection consider the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in many different ways. Inherently unstable, identity is created, re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Additionally, taken together the essays posit that an individual may identify with a group, existing within it, and yet remain foreign to it.