This volume continues the story of English literature through most of the Victorian period--a period that in religion and politics, science and technology, sociology, social life, and its physical environment, witnessed the often painful development of modern England. Paul Turner studies not only traditional genres like poetry, drama, and history, but also scientific and technical writing, art criticism and religious controversy, biography, autobiography, travel books, and books for children. With over 170 authors discussed, the book is a complete survey of the field as seen in the light of present-day scholarship, and against the context of classical and established precedents.
If cultured people are expected to have read all the significant works of literature, and thousands more are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those inevitable social situations where we're forced to talk about books we haven’t read? In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn attention from critics and readers around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it.
The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.
This book provides a fascinating account of rooms in selected works by Virginia Woolf. Casting them as spaces which are at once material, textual and emotional, the volume shows Woolf’s rooms to be consistently connected to wider geographies of modernity and therefore central to her writing of gender, class, empire and the nation.
What does it mean to study Shakespeare within a multicultural society? And who has the power to transform Shakespeare? The Diverse Bard explores how Shakespeare has been adapted by artists born on the margins of the Empire, and how actors of Asian and African-Caribbean origin are being cast by white mainstream directors. It examines how notions of 'race' define the contemporary British experience, including the demands of traditional theatre, and it looks at both the playtexts themselves and contemporary productions.
