Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd
Judith Paltin Cambridge University Press 2020 This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity’s expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of […]
Oroonoko
Tiffany Potter, Editor Broadview Press 2020 The best-known work by Aphra Behn, Oroonoko is an important contribution to the development of the novel in English. Though it predates the British abolition movement by more than a century, it is also an early depiction of the dehumanizing racial violence of slavery; Oroonoko tells of a noble […]
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Eliza Haywood
Tiffany Potter, Editor Modern Language Association 2020 During her long and varied career, Eliza Haywood acted onstage, worked as a publisher and bookseller, and wrote prolifically in many genres, from novels of seduction to essays in periodicals. Her works illuminate the private emotional lives of people in eighteenth-century England, invite readers to consider how women […]
Speechsong – The Gould/Schoenberg Dialogues
Richard Cavell Punctum Books 2020 Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould’s last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg’s […]
Historians on John Gower
Historians on John Gower. Edited by Stephen Rigby, with Siân Echard. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019. [Brewer catalogue] Siân Echard D.S. Brewer 2019 John Gower’s poetry offers an important and immediate response to the turbulent events of his day. The essays here examine his life and his works from an historical angle, bringing out fresh new […]
Ovidian Transversions, ‘Iphis and Ianthe’, 1300-1650
Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, Peggy McCracken, Editors Edinburgh University Press 2019 Medieval and early modern authors engaged with Ovid’s tale of ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ in a number of surprising ways. From Christian translations to secular retellings on the seventeenth-century stage, Ovid’s story of a girl’s miraculous transformation into a boy sparked a diversity of responses […]
Creating Canadian English: The Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English
Stefan Dollinger Cambridge University Press 2019 This lively account of the making of Canadian English traces the variety’s conceptual, social and linguistic developments from the twentieth century to the present. This book is not just another history of Canadian English; it is a history of the variety’s discovery, codification, and eventual acceptance, as well as […]
The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction
Zachary Lesser (Editor), Daniel Allington, David A. Brewer, Stephen Colclough, Siân Echard WILEY Blackwell 2019 Presented as a comprehensive, up-to-date narrative, The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction explores the impact of books, manuscripts, and other kinds of material texts on the cultures and societies of the British Isles. The text clearly explains the technicalities […]
The Pluricentricity Debate
Stefan Dollinger Routledge Press 2019 This book unpacks a 30-year debate about the pluricentricity of German. It examines the concept of pluricentricity, an idea implicit to the study of World Englishes, which expressly allows for national standard varieties, and the notion of “pluri-areality,” which seeks to challenge the former. Looking at the debate from three […]
Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife
Gregory Mackie University of Toronto Press 2019 Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying,” this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde’s early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, […]