Literature reveals the intense efforts of moral imagination required to articulate what justice is and how it might be satisfied. Examining a wide variety of texts including Shakespeare's plays, Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, and modernist poetics, Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions explores how literary laws and values illuminate and challenge the jurisdiction of justice and the law.

During Virginia Woolf's lifetime Britain's position in the world changed, and so did the outlook of its people. The Boer War and the First World War forced politicians and citizens alike to ask how far the power of the state extended into the lives of individuals; the rise of fascism provided one menacing answer.

In this book, Theodore M. Andersson, a leading scholar of the Norse sagas, introduces readers to the development of the Icelandic sagas between 1180 and 1280, a crucial period that witnessed a gradual shift of emphasis from tales of adventure and personal distinction to the analysis of political and historical propositions. Beginning with the first full-length sagas and culminating in the acknowledged masterpiece Njáls saga, Andersson emphasizes a historical perspective, establishing a chronology for seventeen of the most important sagas and showing how they evolve thematically and stylistically over the century under study.

The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular-the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle.

The orientation of academic institutions has in recent years been moving away from highly specialized area studies in the classical sense towards broader regional and comparative studies. Cultural studies points to the limitation of Western approaches to non-Western cultures - a development not yet reflected in actual research and data collections.