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Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia

Michael Pifer

By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a region of stunning cultural diversity, home not only to Armenians and Greeks but also to Persians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Jews, and ... More

By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a region of stunning cultural diversity, home not only to Armenians and Greeks but also to Persians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Jews, and others. Kindred Voices explores how the Muslim and Christian poets of Anatolia grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of religious instruction to their intermingled communities. This unique, under-studied convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period’s literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem. Although these poets were later constructed as foundational figures in their own “national” literary histories, they first emerged, before the rise of the Ottomans, from a shared and fraught terrain.Less

Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4

Marcel Proust

William C. Carter (ed.)

Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, is notable for its ... More

Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, is notable for its pioneering discussion of homosexuality. After its publication, Colette wrote to Proust, “No one has written pages such as these on homosexuals, no one!” This edition is edited and annotated in the endeavor to bring the classic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation closer to the spirit and style of the original.Less

Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Zander Brietzke

Magnum Opus offers an original and provocative analysis of Eugene O'Neill's unfinished cycle play project. From 1935 to 1939, Eugene O'Neill worked on a series of plays that would trace the history ... More

Magnum Opus offers an original and provocative analysis of Eugene O'Neill's unfinished cycle play project. From 1935 to 1939, Eugene O'Neill worked on a series of plays that would trace the history of an American family through several generations. He completed just two of the proposed eleven plays—A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions—before putting the project aside and taking up The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Most critics have viewed the Cycle as an extended warmup exercise, but Zander Brietzke treats the Cycle on its own terms as separate from the final plays and as O’Neill’s definitive statement on the effects of human greed and capitalism run amuck. The two plays that he did finish, numbers five and six, right in the middle, represent the core of the entire cycle and allude to the family’s past and predict its future in a critique of the American Dream. Combining archival research, literary analysis, and theatrical imagination, Magnum Opus untangles many myths about the Cycle, advances a female character as hero in a new interpretation, and proposes a new production concept as an epic event, a historical drama of our time.Less

Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police

Sal Nicolazzo

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of ... More

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. The book argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. The author's research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth-century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, this work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.Less

Hamlet's Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies

Peter Lake

This incisive book reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In ... More

This incisive book reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus, the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, the book argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.Less

The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture

Sarah Bilston

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, ... More

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane Ellen Panton, this book bring forgotten voices back into the conversation about the growth of a new landscape, a new way of life.Less

Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Noelle Gallagher

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often ... More

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. This book explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. The book highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.Less

The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830

David Francis Taylor

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense ... More

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.Less

The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

Jason Tougaw

The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple ... More

The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, and Siri Hustvedt, Ellen Forney, and David B.—arguing that their experiments with literary form offer a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Tougaw surveys memoirs about life with autism, epilepsy manic depression, or brain injury; revisionist mystery novels; and graphic narratives that engage neuroscience. The book argues that these works offer insight about how it feels and what it means to live with a brain whose role in the making of self or consciousness is far from fully understood. Brain memoirs and neuronovels revel in the mysteries of the explanatory gap between brain physiology and mental experience. In the process, these literary works offer an antidote to polarizing and outmoded debates about the “cerebral subject,” whether we are our brains (or not our brains). Rather than engaging in abstract philosophical debate, these literary works explore questions about neurodiversity politics and the stakes of rapidly advancing brain research for people whose experience represent what critic Ralph Savarese calls “all manner of neurologies.” Less

The Other Middle East: An Anthology of Modern Levantine Literature

Franck Salameh

This book is an original collection of Middle Eastern literature (Levantine literature). It offers a glimpse into a contemporary Middle East that defies common Western misconceptions and prejudices. ... More

This book is an original collection of Middle Eastern literature (Levantine literature). It offers a glimpse into a contemporary Middle East that defies common Western misconceptions and prejudices. Compiled over the course of more than two decades, the featured prose and poetry in translation reveals an extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures, and a surprising range of sentiments and ideas, that provide Western readers with a powerful new understanding of the rich mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. The book explores the lives, thought, and works of some twelve Levantine literati, while assessing the possibility of valorizing a greater degree of pluralism in Middle Eastern public life, even as the modern Middle East as we have come to know it through the twentieth century seems to have “collapsed” in the aftermath of the 2010 events formerly known as the “Arab Spring.”Less