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In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically—what Das terms “retro-progressively”—into the labor pool of the British empire.

While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as “other.” By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women’s narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.

This volume presents three plays by women that were written in specific household contexts and survive in distinctive handwritten copies dating from their authors’ lifetimes. Care is taken in the introductions, notes, and apparatus to make the plays accessible to non-specialist readers while also preserving early modern orthography, punctuation, and manuscript practices. Each play is presented in an edited old-spelling text and set within its literary, biographical, and theatrical context. The volume as a whole foregrounds the early modern household as a uniquely productive setting for women’s theatrical and literary activity.

Volume 66 in the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Chicago Series

Margaret Fell (1614–1702), one of the co-founders of the Society of Friends and a religious activist, was a prolific writer and distributor of Quaker pamphlets. This volume offers eight texts that span her writing career and represent her range of writing: autobiography, epistle or public letter, examination or record of a trial, letter to the king, and argument for women’s preaching. These selections also document Fell’s contributions to Friends’ theology, exemplify seventeenth-century women’s English-language literacy, illustrate Fell’s theories of biblical reading, and exhibit the common qualities of Quaker rhetoric.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 65

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women’s importance in moments of historical crisis.

While Romantic epics did not all engage in radical questioning or undermining of authority, this study calls attention to some of the more provocative poems in their approach to gender, culture, and history. This study prioritizes long poems written by and about women during the Romantic era, and does so in context with influential epics by male contemporaries. The book takes its cue from a dramatic increase in the publication of epics in the early nineteenth-century. At their most innovative, Romantic epics provoked questions about the construction of ideological meaning and historical memory, and they centralized women’s experiences in entirely new ways to reflect on defeat, loss, and inevitable transition. For the first time the epic became an attractive genre for ambitious women poets.

The book offers a timely response to recent groundbreaking scholarship on nineteenth-century epic by Herbert Tucker and Simon Dentith, and should be of interest to Romanticists and scholars of 18th- and 19th-century literature and history, gender and genre, and women’s studies.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

Through a detailed analysis of medieval Spain's best known literary works, this book examines two common images of woman--the sexually attractive matron of the Christian upper classes, and the beautiful, pure, and sexually ripe upper-class Muslim or Jewish woman who is submissive to Christians. Suggesting a link between these images and the issues of political and military power, religious difference, and language in the context of reconquest Castile, the book argues that female representation in the literature provides a resolution of Christian-Muslim military conflict.
This volume is the first in the field of medieval Hispanic studies to reexamine the canon in the light of recent critical work on language, gender, power, and the effects of domination. It shows how the texts imaginarily liberate Christian women from the authority of their husbands, in order to demonstrate how women's access to the discourses of power leads to tragedy and ruin for the men who fail to silence them.
Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile makes the argument that dominant-"other" struggle, waged on the terrains of gender, religion, and war, is the most appropriate paradigm for discussing literary texts produced in the last centuries of reconquest. More than any other culture, medieval Spain reminds us of the provisional nature of national, religious, and sexual identity.
Exploring the gendering of subjects in society, the volume will be of interest to those in cultural and gender studies, Hispanic studies, medieval studies, and Middle Eastern studies. All texts are translated, and maps and illustrations help orient the reader.
Louise Mirrer is Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Minnesota.

In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with traditional female roles of wife and mother- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes. In her isolation and helplessness, she provided social reformers with a powerful image of working-class suffering that appealed to the sensibilities of the upper classes and helped galvanize public opinion around the need for reform.

Women, Work, and Representation addresses the use of that image in the reform movement, underscoring the shock to the Victorian public when reports revealed that the profession of needlework was extremely hazardous, even deadly.

Author Lynn M. Alexander traces the development of the symbol of the seamstress through a variety of presentations, drawing from the writings of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and George W. M. Reynolds, and on visual representations by Richard Redgrave, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, John Everett Millais, John Leech, John Tenniel, and Hubert von Herkomer.

Written to appeal to Victorian scholars, women's studies scholars, and those interested in semiotics and aestheticism, Women, Work, and Representation includes twenty illustrations, most from periodicals of the day, providing new insights into the lives of working women throughout the Victorian era.

In Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala bring together established scholars and new voices to illuminate a previously understudied but consequential element of life in the Middle Ages. Contributors focus on representations of women’s friendships in medieval European literature and their afterlives both to historicize them and draw out the finer nuances of the multitude of forms, affects, values, and ethics that emerge within those friendships. This volume examines works by Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Marie de France, female saints, and late-Middle Scots poets alongside lesser-known late medieval lyrics and Middle English romances to chart women’s friendships and their many and sometimes conflicting affinities with the cultural categories of gender, religion, politics, and sexuality. In addition to exploring the parameters of female friendship across a range of texts and historical contexts, contributors evaluate the political, religious, and civic structures negotiated in public and private and engage with the long history of theory and philosophy on friendship. The result is a theoretical and historical rubric for the future study of women’s friendships in medieval texts and beyond.

Contributors:
Penelope Anderson, Andrea Boffa, Jennifer N. Brown, Christine Chism, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Laurie Finke, Carissa M. Harris, Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Clare A. Lees, Karma Lochrie, Gillian R. Overing, Alexandra Verini, Usha Vishnuvajjala, Stella Wang

In 1883 the editor of a penny newspaper stood trial three times for the "obsolete" crime of blasphemy. The editor was G. W. Foote, the paper was the Freethinker, and the trial was the defining event of the decade. Foote's "martyrdom" completed blasphemy's nineteenth-century transformation from a religious offense to a class and cultural crime.

From extensive archival and literary research, Joss Marsh reconstructs a unified and particular account of blasphemy in Victorian England. Rewriting English history from the bottom up, she tells the forgotten stories of more than two hundred working-class "blasphemers," like Foote, whose stubborn refusal to silence their "hooligan" voices helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today. The new standards of criminality used to judge their "word crimes" rewrote the terms of literary judgment, demoting the Bible to literary masterpiece and raising Literature as the primary standard of Victorian cultural value.

Word Play traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‑garde trends. In the more repressive environment following Stalin’s rise to power, experimental aesthetics were largely relegated to unofficial and underground literature, but unofficial writers continued to author children’s books, which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time. 
 
Word Play focuses on poetry as the primary genre for both children’s and unofficial literature throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature poets‑cum‑children’s writers—Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Grigoriev, Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Dmitri Prigov—whose unpublished work was not written for children but features lexical and formal elements, abundant humor, and childlike lyric speakers that are aspects of the childlike aesthetic. The book concludes with an exploration of the legacy of this aesthetic in Russian poetry today. Drawing on rich primary sources, Word Play joins a growing literature on Russian children’s books, connecting them to avant-garde poetics in fresh, surprising ways.

At the site of everyday social interaction, the street has always provided a source of inspiration for writers, artists and musicians. It has also become the focus for critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau in their attempt to push the limits of textual analysis beyond literature and art towards our daily experience of the world. This collection of essays and interviews examines the street as both the site and space of competing discourses and also a form of discourse in its own right. Covering a broad range of topics including the role of the street in literature, photography and journalism, practices which take place upon the streets such as skateboarding, graffiti and flânerie and the politics and philosophy involved in negotiating the street, Word on the Street affirms the continued and renewed importance of the pedestrian street in the social consciousness of the the 21st century.

David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed largely outside the canon of Serbian literature, have influenced a generation of Balkan writers. This collection gathers Albahari's best and most important stories, moving from an early preoccupation with the family and Central European culture to metafictional searches for the roots of his identity.

Proper words in proper places, remarked Dean Swift, make the true definition of style. According to this definition, John Sparrow fully qualifies as a stylist. His skillful compound of wit, pungency, and accurate observation, his irreverence, his ear for language and hatred of cant are unsurpassed. This book brings together pieces broadcast by the BBC, a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, and, even, a university sermon. It proves that John Sparrow is one of those rare people whose spoken words lose none of their power when translated to the printed page.

Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics explores the identity, role, and subjectivity of the speaker in Wordsworth's finest and best-known longer lyrics—"Tintern Abbey," "Resolution and Independence," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "Elegiac Stanzas." Because Wordsworth is the most autobiographical poet of the Romantic period, and perhaps in the English language, readers naturally take the speaker to be the poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, "the poet in his own person."

Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in the characterization of the speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical, or cultural terms. Leon Waldoff examines the critical issues posed by these different understandings of the speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical "I" that deals with the dramatic and psychological complexities of the speaker's act of self-representation.

Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining the speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldoff suggests that the lyrical "I" in each poem is a transitional self of the poet. The poem offers, in the suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which the speaker attempts to act out, in the sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of the self.

In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, the book shows that the major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act of self-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and the self- dramatizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of the subjectivity he represents.

Waldoff concludes that Wordsworth's lyrical "I" requires a conception of subjectivity that gives greater recognition to its individual, psychological dimensions and to the art of self-representation in each poem than recent Wordsworth criticism has provided. This important new work will be appreciated by anyone interested in Wordsworth or in Romantic poetry.

“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage,” William Hazlitt recalled, “He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth.” Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know—and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy.

Wordsworth’s Fun explores the writer’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth’s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth’s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet’s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.
 
 

Wordsworth is England's greatest poet of the French Revolution: he witnessed some of its events first hand, participated in its intellectual and social ambitions, and eventually developed his celebrated poetic campaign in response to its enthusiasms. But how should that response be understood? Combining careful interpretive analysis with wide-ranging historical scholarship, Chandler presents a challenging new account of the political views implicit in Wordsworth's major works–in The Prelude, above all, but also in the central lyrics and shorter narrative poems.

Central to the discussion, which restores Wordsworth to both the French and English contexts in which he matured, is a consideration of his relation to Rousseau and Burke. Chandler maintains that by the time Wordsworth set forth his "program for poetry" in 1798, he had turned away from the Rousseauist idea of nature that had informed his early republican writings. He had already become a poet of what Burke called "second nature"–human nature cultivated by custom, habit, and tradition–and an opponent of the quest for first principles that his friend Coleridge could not forsake. In his analysis of the poetry, Chandler suggests that even Wordsworth's most apparently private moments, the lyrical "spots of time," ideologically embodied the uncalculated habits of an oral narrative discipline and a native English mind.

Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde.

Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.

Worms. Natural history is riddled with them. Literature is crawling with them. From antiquity to today, the ubiquitous and multiform worm provokes an immediate discomfort and unconscious distancing: it remains us against them in anthropocentric anxiety. So there is always something muddled, or dirty, or even offensive when talking about worms. Rehabilitating the lowly worm into a powerful aesthetic trope, Janelle A. Schwartz proposes a new framework for understanding such a strangely animate nature. Worms, she declares, are the very matter with which the Romantics rethought the relationship between a material world in constant flux and the human mind working to understand it.

Worm Work studies the lesser-known natural historical records of Abraham Trembley and his contemporaries and the familiar works of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, William Blake, Mary Shelley, and John Keats, to expose the worm as an organism that is not only reviled as a taxonomic terror but revered as a sign of great order in nature as well as narrative. This book traces a pattern of cultural production, a vermiculture that is as transformative of matter as it is of mind. It distinguishes decay or division as positive processes in Romantic era writings, compounded by generation or renewal and used to represent the biocentric, complex structuring of organicism.

Offering the worm as an archetypal figure through which to recast the evolution of a literary order alongside questions of taxonomy from 1740 to 1820 and on, Schwartz unearths Romanticism as a rich humus of natural historical investigation and literary creation.

Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature by authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. It begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, and James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.    

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Writing AIDS: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature by Jodie Parys examines the ways in which AIDS has pervaded the personal and social imaginings of the body by highlighting textual representations found in Spanish American literature where AIDS has a significant role. This book addresses the current void in literary theory about HIV/AIDS in Spanish America by drawing together diverse literary texts to illuminate how these Spanish American writers have chosen to depict this disease and how their texts will be archived for future generations. All of the works are united under the broad topic of the body, conceived of as the individual comprising a physical, emotional, and spiritual entity both in isolation and in communion with others. Because HIV and AIDS are physical viruses that attack real bodies, it is the initial portal of entry into the exploration of the notion of identity and how it is impacted and altered by the arrival of AIDS. However, each individual is also a part of a larger community, and the virus itself impacts society as well as individuals. These separate but related concepts—the individual and social bodies—are the uniting themes that are woven throughout the entire study.

Though the practice of self-translation long predates modernity, it has found new forms of expression in the global literary market of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The international renown of self-translating authors Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, and Vladimir Nabokov has offered motivation to a new generation of writers who actively translate themselves.

Intervening in recent debates in world literature and translation studies, Writing It Twice establishes the prominence and vitality of self-translation in contemporary French literature. Because of its intrinsic connection to multiple literary communities, self-translation prompts a reexamination of the aesthetics and politics of reading across national lines. Kippur argues that self-translated works should be understood as the paradigmatic example of world literature and, as such, crucial for interpreting the dynamics of literary circulation into and out of French.

In her book, Pamela Genova suggests that as critics move in general from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, the mutability of the phenomenon is highlighted in a rich and illuminating manner. By exploring the conditions of the creation of these works, accenting the original aims of the artists, the manipulations carried out by art dealers, gallery owners, and boutique managers, as well as the gestures of explanation, interpretation, and judgment offered by the professional and amateur critics, Japonisme takes on an even more versatile nature. Further, a complex web of correspondence germinates among these artists—both French and Japanese—and their many critics. It is in this light that the truly rich character of Japonisme comes forth, since the undesirability, even the impossibility of the attempt to reduce it to a single genre, style, era, or cultural cadre attests to its elusiveness and its Protean nature. Japonisme does not correspond to a single dictionary definition, no matter how subtle or self-aware that definition might be. By situating the dynamics of Japonisme as a response on the part of French culture to the culture of Japan, we gain a keener sense of the multiplicity of modern French sensibility itself, of how the awareness of a nation’s language, history, and art forms can be creatively reflected in the images of a culture seemingly radically different from its own.

When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Dara Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth-century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety. Tracing the rhetorical circulation of this affect from advice literature through the memoirs of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851) and Catharine Tait (1819–1878), as well as fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, and Charlotte Mary Yonge, Regaignon gives maternal anxiety a literary-rhetorical history. She does this by bringing concepts such as uptake and genre ecology into literary studies from rhetorical genre theory, making a case for a mobile and culturally influential notion of genre. Examining specific case studies on child death, paid childcare, and infant doping, among others, Regaignon argues that the ideology of nurturing motherhood was predicated upon the rhetorical cultivation of maternal anxiety—which has had significant consequences for the experience of motherhood and maternal feeling.

The subject of Writing Ravenna is the Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis, composed by Agnellus Andreas, a priest of Ravenna, between 830 and 845 C.E. The Liber Pontificalis has often been studied as a source for ecclesiastical and art history, but hardly ever as a literary creation, in spite of its originality and importance.
Writing Ravenna is an attempt to deal with this work's literary significance and specifically with what it tells us about the creation and circulation of narrative in the Early Middle Ages. The book's first chapter analyzes the ways in which the local and international interests of the Ravenna clergy are reflected in the design, genre, and narrative rhetoric of the Liber. The second chapter characterizes the specific textuality, given that the Liber was composed for oral delivery. The final chapter offers translations of the four most interesting narrative sequences in the Liber, followed by full analyses of sources, narrative technique, and ideological aims.
Writing Ravenna will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars, including art historians, scholars of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, religious historians, and literary critics.
Joaquin Martinez Pizarro is Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is also the author of A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages.

In Writing against War, Charles Andrews integrates literary analysis and peace studies to create innovative new ways to view experimental British fiction in the interwar period.
 
The cataclysm of the First World War gave rise to the British Peace Movement, a spectrum of pacifist, internationalist, and antiwar organizations and individuals. Antiwar sentiments found expression not only in editorials, criticism, and journalism but also in novels and other works of literature. Writing against War examines the work of Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Siegfried Sassoon, Rose Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf to analyze the effects of their attempts to employ fiction in the service of peace activism. It further traces how Huxley, Woolf, and others sought to reconcile their antiwar beliefs with implacable military violence.
 
The British Peace Movement's failure to halt the rise of fascism and the Second World War continues to cast a shadow over contemporary pacifist movements. Writing about War will fascinate scholars of peace studies and literature and offers valuable insights for current-day peace activists and artists who seek to integrate creativity with activism.
 

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

The 1960s protest movements marked an astonishing moment for West Germany. They developed a political critique, but are above all distinctive for their overwhelming emphasis on culture and the symbolic. In particular, reading and writing had a uniquely prestigious status for West German protesters, who produced an extraordinary textual culture ranging from graffiti and flyers to agit-prop poetry and autobiographical prose. By turns witty, provocative, reflective and offensive, the avantgarde roots of anti-authoritarianism are as palpable in their texts as their debt to high literature. But due to this culture’s (apparently) anti-literary tone, it has often remained illegible to traditional criticism. This volume presents close readings and analyses of emblematic examples of texts, some forgotten, others better known, embedding them in historical, cultural, theoretical and aesthetic context, and illuminating representative moments and preoccupations in anti-authoritarian culture, from the Vietnam War to the Nazi past, to dirt and hygiene. They outline an anti-authoritarian poetics and uncover some of the texts’ latent content, revealing often hidden tensions and contradictions, above all in relation to the German past and questions of authority.

Using the works of Dante as its critical focus, María Rosa Menocal’s original and imaginative study examines questions of truth, ideology, and reality in poetry as they occur in a series of texts and in the relationship between those texts across time. In each case, Menocal raises theoretical issues of critical importance to contemporary debates regarding the structure of literary relations.
Beginning with a reading of La vita nuova and the Commedia, this literary history of poetic literary histories explores the Dantean poetic experience as it has been limited and rewritten by later poets, particularly Petrarch, Boccaccio, Borges, Pound, Eliot, and the all but forgotten Silvio Pellico, author of Le mie prigioni. By blending discussions of Dante’s own marriage of literature and literary history with those investigations into the imitative qualities of later works, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth presents an intertextual literary history, one which seeks to maintain the uncanniness of literature, while imagining history to be neither linear nor clearly distinguishable from literature itself.

From Arthur Conan Doyle to Charles Dickens, Colin Dexter to Kenneth Grahame, writers and artists have often taken inspiration from the Thames. Gathering poetry, artwork, and short excerpts from longer prose, Writing the Thames includes chapters on topics that dominate in literary and artistic depictions of the Thames, from historical events like Julius Caeser’s crossing in 55 BCE and Elizabeth I’s stand against the Spanish at Tilbury to the explorations of the topographers who mapped and drew the river to the many authors, including Thomas More, Francis Bacon, William Morris, and Henry James, who enjoyed riverside retreats. A chapter on boats features the frenetic rowers from Zuleika Dobson, a camping tale from Three Men in a Boat, and the story of William Hogarth’s impulsive five-day trip down the river with four inebriated friends. Some of the best-loved children’s literature has also been inspired by the Thames, including The Wind in the Willows.

Beautifully illustrated with seventy full-color illustrations, this book tells the river’s remarkable story through art, poetry, and prose, while celebrating the writers who helped form its enduring legacy.

An erudite abbess of Port-Royal, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624 – 1684) resisted the demands of church and state to condemn the Jansenist theological doctrines which the convent had long upheld. In her autobiographical Report on Captivity, Angélique de Saint-Jean recounts her personal methods of spiritual resistance as she and her fellow nuns underwent waves of persecution resulting in exile, house arrest, interdict, and excommunication. Her voluminous theological writings present the theoretical basis for this resistance, limiting the claims of political and ecclesiastical authorities over the conscience of the individual. In particular, she defends the right of women to refuse to surrender their convictions due to specious appeals to obedience and humility.

The Bolognese nun Diodata Malvasia was presumed to have authored only one work, The Arrival and the Miraculous Workings of the Glorious Image of the Virgin (1617). In her recently discovered second manuscript chronicle, A Brief Discourse on What Occurred to the Most Reverend Sisters of the Joined Convents of San Mattia and San Luca (1575), her writing demonstrates active resistance to Tridentine convent reform. Together, Malvasia’s works read as the bookends to a lifelong crusade on behalf of her convent.

Emily Brontë’s beloved novel Wuthering Heights has been adapted countless times for film and television over the decades. Valérie V.Hazette offers here a historical and transnational study of those adaptations, presenting the afterlife of the book as a series of cultural journeys that focuses as much on the readers, filmmakers, and viewers as on the dramas themselves. Taking in the British silent film; French, Mexican, and Japanese versions; the British television serials; and more, this richly theoretical volume is the first comprehensive global analysis of the adaptation of Wuthering Heights for film and television.

Wuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Brontë presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism. The novel’s concern with unitary and fragmentary selves has romantic antecedents in DeQuincey and Shelley and in Charlotte Brontë’s figuration of Emily as a lost other self. This concern is, in turn, reflected in the “after-life” of the text in the work of later artists such as George Eliot, Lawrence, Buñuel, and Truffaut.