Browse by Subject: Literature

In Signs That Sing, Heather Maring argues that oral tradition, ritual, and literate Latin- based  practices are dynamically interconnected in Old English poetry. Resisting the tendency to study these different forms of expression separately, Maring contends that poets  combined them in hybrid techniques that were important to the development of early English  literature.

Establishing Edith Sitwell at the center of British modernism, this volume showcases her many achievements in poetry, autobiography, novel writing, criticism, art, and performance. Forgoing the gossip about her eccentric appearance and self-fashioned persona that has too often overshadowed serious writing about her work, the contributors explore how Sitwell combined persona and poetry to foster an outpouring of iconoclastic creativity.

Precarious Passages unites literature written by members of the far-flung Black Anglophone diaspora. Rather than categorizing novels as simply "African American," "Black Canadian," "Black British," or "postcolonial African Caribbean," this book takes an integrative approach: it argues that fiction creates and sustains a sense of a wider African diasporic community in the Western world.

The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the nineteenth century. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant form and surveys the fluidity in styles of illustration in serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children's literature, and--more recently--graphic novels.

In Up to Maughty London, Eleni Loukopoulou offers the first sustained account of Joyce's engagement with the imperial metropolis. She considers both London's status as a matrix for political and cultural formations and how the city is imaginatively represented in Joyce's work.

H.D. called By Avon River "the first book that really made me happy." In this annotated edition, Lara Vetter argues that the volume represented a turning point in H.D.’s career, a major shift from lyric poetry to the experimental forms of writing that would dominate her later works

Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce's impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century.

Long overshadowed by fellow confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton seldom features in literary criticism, despite being one of America’s most influential women writers. Now in this much-needed volume Sexton and her poetry are reassessed for the first time in two decades.

Here, Shaw's long-recognized influence on feminism is reexamined through the lens of twenty-first-century feminist thought as well as previously unpublished primary sources. New links appear between Shaw's writings and his gendered notions of physicality, pain, performance, nationalism, authorship, and politics.

In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf's diaries, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer's life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929.