Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics who offer a range of perspectives and critical methods, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. In line with the goals of Ashgate's Research Companion series, the editors and contributors provide an overview of Beddoes's criticism and identify significant new directions in Beddoes studies. These include exploring Beddoes's German context, only recently a site of critical attention; reading Beddoes's plays in light of...

This study revaluates the work of the scientist and radical, poet and dramatist and English exile in Germany Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). While his writing has elicited high praise from poets ranging from Robert Browning through Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it on grounds of its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. Countering this scholarly perception, this book deftly relocates Beddoes’s poetry, drama and prose at the centre of Anglo-German de...

In 1878 the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold wrote: 'Goethe is the greatest poet of modern times... because having a very considerable gift for poetry, he was at the same time, in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.' In this Very Short Introduction Ritchie Robertson covers the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): scientist, administrator, artist, art critic and supreme literary writer in a vast variety of genr...

In these essays some of today's leading literary scholars and cultural critics re-examine major writers, genres, and themes in relation to their traditional period affiliations. The essays cover a broad range of writers and periods from the Middle Ages to the present, grouped in two main areas: Chaucer and Medieval and Renaissance studies (Larry D. Benson, Heiko A. Oberman, Lee Patterson, and Aldo Scaglione), and English and American literary history (Sanford Budick, H. M. Daleski, Denis D...

This volume offers a comprehensive critical and theoretical introduction to the genre of the fairy tale. It:explores the ways in which folklorists have defined the genreassesses the various methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of fairy taleprovides a detailed account of the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary formengages with the major ideological controversies that have shaped critical and creative a...

This book substantiates two claims. First, the modern world was not simply produced by "objective" factors, rooted in geographical discoveries and scientific inventions, to be traced to economic, technological or political factors, but is the outcome of social, cultural and spiritual processes. Among such factors, beyond the Protestant ethic (Max Weber), the rise of the absolutist state and its disciplinary network (Michel Foucault), or court society (Norbert Elias), a prime role is played...

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be...

Conceptualizing the curse as the representation of a foundational, mythical violence that is embedded within juridical discourse, Shakespeare’s Curse:The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama pursues a reading of Richard III, King John, and King Lear in order to analyse the persistence of imprecations in the discourses of modernity. Shakespeare wrote during a period that was transformative in the development of juridical thinking. However, takin...

This books is concerned with the multi-contextual aspect of words found in poetry, for one does not only have that context to consider which determines one relevant sense of a word as when one reads a newspaper. That is one reason we can always discover new meanings in a great poem whenever we reread it.

What is Romanticism? In this Very Short Introduction Michael Ferber answers this by considering who the romantics were and looks at what they had in common -- their ideas, beliefs, commitments, and tastes. He looks at the birth and growth of Romanticism throughout Europe and the Americas, and examines various types of Romantic literature, music, painting, religion, and philosophy. Focusing on topics, Ferber looks at the 'Sensibility' movement, which preceded Romanticism; ...

Alive, fresh, and stimulating, the theme of The Double comprises the issues of identity, narcissism, and the fear of death — actually the core of human existence. Rank’s book is primarily a study of the double as it appeared in striking examples in German, French, Russian, English, and American literature from Goethe to Oscar Wilde.Originally published in 1971.A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make av...

Sir Frank Kermode is acknowledged as one of the greatest critics of our time, renowned for the wit humanity and good sense of his writing. Pleasing Myself brings together the very best of his shorter pieces, on topics ranging from Donne and Yeats to modern art and money.