Shakespeare produced his works during a media shift that was unmatched – until our own.

Mediatic Shakespeare by media theorist Richard Cavell examines how Shakespeare’s writing engaged with the cultural upheaval of an era shifting rapidly from spoken traditions towards print materials. Cavell argues that print was an active cultural force that was in the process of reshaping Shakespeare’s world and work. Nostalgic for oral communality, Shakespeare engaged guardedly with print, producing a media dynamic that resonates throughout his work.

Drawing on media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert, Cavell traces Shakespeare’s engagement with the effects of a media ecology in which knowing and being were aggressively in flux. Structured across four chapters, Mediatic Shakespeare explores Shakespeare’s media ecology, the unsettling interfaces of orality and literacy, the breakdown of the sensus communis, and the implications for his work of the printing involution.

Facsimiles are, or claim to be, exact copies of objects, and medieval manuscripts have long been a focus for this kind of reproduction. Today, digitization delivers complete, high-resolution, full-color digital copies of thousands of medieval manuscripts to anyone with an internet connection. But for centuries, scholars in fields like art history, or paleography, or textual editing had to travel to see the manuscripts their work depended on. When they couldn’t, they relied on copies—drawings, engravings, lithographs, and eventually monochrome photographs, usually of parts of a manuscript rather than the whole thing.

Facsimile explores the prehistory of our digital present, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that witnessed rapid technological change; a renewal of interest in the Middle Ages in the public at large; the consolidation and emergence of scholarly disciplines; and the increase in institutions that cared for medieval manuscripts. Siân Echard shows how facsimiles of medieval manuscripts were central to all these developments. Focusing on Britain, Echard traces how predigital technologies of reproduction were viewed by their practitioners and consumers, and how they helped to form the ways people related to the medieval past. Facsimile users were scholarly and popular, with interests in text, or image, or books, or all these things at once. Four chapters—Letter, Figure, Color, Catastrophe—show how the human hand, the human eye, and the human imagination intertwined with technology, creating modern-medieval hybrids that sit at the intersection of past and present.

From the rise of paleography and diplomatics as disciplines to the emergence of calligraphy as a craft and hobby, from the use of facsimiles in shaping narratives of national identity to the substitution of facsimiles for destroyed or damaged manuscripts in the development of preservation practices, Facsimile offers an unprecedented cultural history of reproductions of medieval manuscripts.

Canadian Literatures in English reflects the editors’ commitment to historical contextualization, cultural inclusion, and a nuanced understanding of critical debates over the long literary history of what is now Canada. The second edition has been updated throughout to include recent scholarship and fresh literary works. New to the second edition are works by Catharine Parr Traill, Edith Maude Eaton, L.M. Montgomery, Marjorie Pickthall, and others.

The second edition of Volume 2 of Canadian Literatures in English, which begins with Emily Carr and modernism, will be published in Spring 2026.

“As Canada—its histories, cultures, literatures, values, identities, and viability—is once again explored and debated with renewed intensity and urgency, this revised and updated anthology, edited by two eminent scholars, is a timely, welcome event. In this unique collection, well-known and previously too-little-known writers appear alongside maps, posters, paintings, journalism, legislation, and more, allowing texts and contexts to achieve a rich dialogue. Outstanding headnotes and footnotes guide and inform the reader expertly at every stage.” — Adam Carter, University of Lethbridge

“This highly anticipated second edition of Canadian Literatures in English, Volume I, is a thrilling compendium of early Canadian writing and storytelling in all its provocative, mind-bending variety. Accessible yet thorough introductions relay the complex history that the peoples of Canada have lived through and contemporary Canadians continue to confront. The topics the editors address, the range of voices they include, and the debates they highlight explain why this literature is as exciting today as at the times of its creation.” — Shelley Hulan, University of Waterloo

“The texts gathered in this anthology usher us into the recognition of the incomplete work of early Canada. Sugars and Moss do a remarkable job of expanding the literary archives of the nation; the contextual essays that frame each entry are attentive to the shifting conversations in the field and do beautiful work of both situating the authors and showing the intertextual and interdisciplinary project of Canadian literature. This anthology is a gift to students and teachers of Canadian writing; it invites all of us to grapple with the complex ongoing formation of the nation. I look forward to learning with it for years to come.” — Phanuel Antwi, University of British Columbia

John Gerard’s natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classical poetry, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that delight and instruct. It is little wonder that early modern poets, like Shakespeare and Milton, gathered inspiration from this storehouse of plants.

In Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance, Vin Nardizzi offers a reparative reading of Gerard’s “failed” text, particularly its chapters on leeks, laurels, tulips, and potatoes. Through a series of experiments in speculative natural history, which require an analysis of both word and image, Nardizzi distills The Herball’s logic and poetics, its distinctions and infelicities, and demonstrates the entanglements of humans and plants at the core of Shakespeare’s plays. Exploring these “cross-kingdom” encounters, Nardizzi contributes to the burgeoning field of queer ecologies by treating plant natural history as a serious intellectual resource for writing a counter-history of embodiment at the turn of the seventeenth century. All we need do, Nardizzi proposes, is smell the flowers.

The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660–1800 offers a fresh interpretation of how the novel in Britain evolved from the Civil War to the end of the eighteenth century. It argues that we must examine the entirety of this period in order to understand the development of the realist novel in its modern form. According to Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) and many subsequent critics, the first realist novel was Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). This book argues instead that the realist novel began to emerge long before in the 1670s and 1680s among novelists such as Alexander Oldys and Richard Gibbs who were influenced by the French counter-romance works of Paul Scarron and Antoine Furtière. Nonetheless, the true founder of modern realist fiction was Frances Burney, particularly in Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796). Burney's achievement was to combine the subjectivity of Samuel Richardson with the social purview of Henry Fielding, creating a fictional style that set individuals in a fully imagined social context. Heralded by her contemporaries as founding a "new era" in novel writing, Burney's only acknowledged peer was Charlotte Smith, who was widely admired during her career as Burney's co-creator of "the new species of writing." This volume argues that Smith's contribution to the development of the realist novel has been underrated, for her fiction established the basic form of the Condition of England novel of the Victorian period. Unfortunately, Burney's and Smith's importance as co-creators of the realist novel was eclipsed by the “great forgetting” of woman novelists during the nineteenth century. Only Jane Austen was spared from this great forgetting, yet she was indebted to the work of Burney and Smith.

The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660–1800 traces the emergence of realist fiction decade by decade across the long eighteenth century through the lens of contemporary commentary in literary journals and other sources. The book concludes with discussion of how the techniques of the realist novel, as pioneered in the late eighteenth century, were carried on by major novelists from the Victorian period to the present.

Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times launched the career of one of nineteenth-century America’s most influential writers and activists. Set during the first years of Puritan settlement, Lydia Maria Child’s debut novel centers the experiences of women under the strain of transatlantic migration, dramatizes the religious disputes that roiled the early colonies, and mythologizes settler-Indigenous relations—especially with its depiction of a marriage between its Wampanoag title character and the fictional English colonist Mary Conant, a plotline that astonished readers in 1824. Today, Hobomok commands interest both as a crucial contribution to the project of national mythmaking in early nineteenth-century American literature, and as the first work by a major but still often underappreciated nineteenth-century woman writer. This first new edition of Hobomok in nearly four decades includes an annotated text, a robust introduction to Child and her novel, and a rich array of contextual materials.

“Hobomok is a fascinating read, both visionary and problematic in its depiction of the explosive effects of European settlement on Indigenous peoples of North America. Tiffany Potter’s new edition provides reviews, maps, historical documents, and—crucially—Indigenous perspectives that enable readers to appreciate the novel’s significance and moral complexity. It confirms Child as one of the foremost intellectuals of her generation, seen here at the beginning of her lifetime of political engagement. A wonderful resource for a captivating book.” — Lydia L. Moland, Colby College

While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan's (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Ranging across fields as diverse as art history, biotechnology, and beyond, this collection of essays considers McLuhan's ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.

This book encounters the figure of the royal woman in the early modern period and explores how she enables and complicates the key moment at which England was emerging as an ideology, a nation, and an empire. Queens and queens consort, historical and fictional, played crucial roles in Renaissance England’s shifting ideologies of nationalist identity. This collection considers how a series of royal women particularly embodied and complicated these many self-constructions of England and complex renditions of “the other.”

The period’s influential female monarchs certainly made the queen’s political body more visibly politicized, repatriated, and racialized; these same historical royals were represented as icons of nationalism in many forms and functions. In fictional incarnations, royal women created by the English imagination symbolized and structured those same nation-building narratives. This volume studies royal women’s writings alongside such depictions of royal women, especially as such works collectively enable emergent English ideologies of nationalism and racialization.

Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies chronicles Wilde’s lifelong relationship with the French capital, the city he called “the most wonderful city in the world,” and the site of his rise to literary fame, self-imposed exile, and eventual death.

Focused on the 1880s to the 1940s, editors Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie shed light on this vibrant, transnational chapter of Wilde’s life and legacy. Contributors document how his relationship with the city developed in literature, journalism, and the visual arts, as well as in the city’s famous cafés, bars, restaurants, hotels, and cemeteries.

This collection highlights three touchstones in the relationship between Wilde and Paris: his Parisian self-fashioning, the impact of the city’s cultural scene on his career, and his legacy’s absorption into the myth of Paris as a place of artistic and sexual freedom.

Whether Wilde is viewed as ambitious aesthete, Francophile flâneur, or disreputable expatriate, Oscar Wilde’s Paris tells the story of how one man’s life became intertwined with the cultural imagination of a city, and how that city, in turn, claimed him as its own.

The twentieth-anniversary edition of the path-clearing study of Cherokee writing in English, with an emphatic refocus on voices from the three Cherokee tribal nations.

This Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm is a thoroughly updated, nationhood-focused, twentieth-anniversary revision of Daniel Heath Justice’s influential study of Cherokee writing in English. Through politically astute and historically grounded readings of diverse texts by citizens of the Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Justice connects Cherokee literature to Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and collective futurity.

Guided by a reparative vision that directly contends with the outdated literary legacies of the book’s first edition, this revision confronts the ongoing harms of unsubstantiated and false Cherokee heritage claims on literary studies, replacing readings of primary texts by unverified claimants with those of Cherokee citizen writers. As Justice addresses issues of accountability, he engages with the past two decades of Indigenous scholarship, fully updating terminology, concepts, and scholarly resources. He expands and deepens the intellectual and historical context for Cherokee literary production introduced in the first edition, and he discusses Cherokee writing and community in the mid-twentieth century, the Cherokee Freedmen’s long struggle for justice, and the future of Cherokee nationhood.

Highlighting the work of authors who illustrate the transformative collective discourses of what it means to be Cherokee, Justice examines the richness of Cherokee literary expression through motifs of roots, removal, and nationhood in traditional stories, speeches, legal and governance documents, memoirs, short stories, novels, and plays. An invitation to reflective criticism, this new edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm is grounded in the belief that Indigenous nationhood is a necessary ethical response to the violence of the settler imaginary.

Internet memes have been studied widely for their role in establishing and maintaining social relationships, and shaping public opinion, online. However, they are also a prominent and fast evolving multimodal genre, one which calls for an in-depth linguistic analysis. This book, the first of its kind, develops the analytical tools necessary to describe and understand contemporary 'image-plus-text' communication. It demonstrates how memes achieve meaning as multimodal artifacts, how they are governed by specific rules of composition and interpretation, and how such processes are driven by stance networks. It also defines a family of multimodal constructions in which images become structural components, while making language forms adjust to the emerging multimodal rules. Through analysis of several meme types, this approach defines the specificity of the memetic genre, describing established types, but also accounting for creative forms. In describing the 'grammar of memes', it provides a new model to approach multimodal genres.

Dieses beschwingt und pointiert geschriebene Buch beschreibt die 300-jährige Romanze der Österreicher mit „ihrem“ Standarddeutsch. Das österreichische Hochdeutsch, so das Argument, ist der passende Standard für Österreich, der leider andernorts nicht immer als solcher gesehen wird. Der Bogen wird gespannt, oft überspitzt illustriert, von Maria Theresia (der damals deutschen Kaiserin), über Ludwig Wittgenstein (dessen unbekanntes Wörterbuch des österreichischen Hochdeutsch), der Nazizeit (als Deutsch als Waffe benutzt wurde), bis zum Germanistenstreit der Jetztzeit.

Der Fokus ist konsequent auf das oft totgesagte österreichische Hochdeutsch gerichtet, das sich durch die „Liebe“ seiner Sprecher gegen viel Druck erhalten hat. Dollinger, Rieger-Roschitz und Schwaighofer zeigen auf, wie die Germanisten der Nazizeit den Diskurs wesentlich prägten und wie heutige Skeptiker zwar nichts mehr mit diesem Gedankengut zu tun haben, aber oft unreflektiert die selben Argumente ins Treffen führen. Sie ermutigen die Sprecher, sich weiterhin nicht einschüchtern zu lassen und das Wort zu erheben für Anrainer, Pickerl, Sackerl und König mit g (nicht als ch ausgesprochen), etcetera. Gerade weil die Welt immer vernetzter wird.

As the era of high globalization has given way to a time of resurgent nationalisms, the discourse of travel has undergone significant change. The previous era’s keywords of freedom, mobility, and connection increasingly vie with a language of borders, security, and national identity. In this study of the politics of modern travel and migration, John Culbert shows how today’s contradictions of global mobility are an abiding feature of modernity and an outgrowth of coloniality as an ongoing practice of land theft, displacement, and dispossession.

Focussing on English, American, and Anglophone literary writing on travel, and spanning early twentieth-century tourism to present-day refugee narratives, Proximities examines contexts and situations in which travellers of discrepant rights and privileges meet, arguing that such scenes of 'proximity' yield unforeseen prospects for ethical rapports and political solidarity. In so doing, Culbert makes a strong case for humanistic and interdisciplinary critical study at a time when research on mobility and migration is dominated by social-scientific knowledge. Pointing out that the contradictions of global mobility are reflected in the academy itself, Culbert advocates for a reflexive, decolonial critique of the conditions of knowledge production today. Proximities is a vital contribution to current debates on citizenship, human rights, decoloniality, and the right to move.

In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.

In the tumultuous decade following World War II, the civil rights movement began transforming Black lives and American society. The era also proved momentous for African American popular music: new record labels, new styles, and exciting new sounds in the form of electrified blues combos, rhythm and blues shouters and balladeers, gospel and doo wop quartets. By the late 1950s, with rock ’n’ roll dominating the American soundscape, much of the phenomenal Black music of the postwar decade began to drift into relative obscurity.

This book brings a remarkable body of African American music, excluding jazz, back into sharp focus, and explores its connections to the socio-political dreams of Black America during that period of frustrated hopes and great expectations. With close attention to the singers, musicians, and lyrics in hundreds of recordings from 1946 to 1956, it offers for the first time a detailed examination of four musical genres along the blues continuum: blues, rhythm & blues, gospel, and secular harmony (better known as doo wop). Meet the artists and listen to the sounds and themes of Black America in a musically explosive decade.

Racial Virtuality contends that racialization not only occurs through representation in media, but also through our very interactions with media technologies and their unseen operations. The racialization of Asians, who appeared to embody the model minority success story in the first decade of social media, is now implicated more in the racial logics of algorithms, interfaces, gestures, circulations, and affects, rather than individual representations of Asianness.

Racial Virtuality intervenes in existing new media discourses to approach race as virtual relation, following a rich methodology of Asian American materialist critique to investigate gendered, racial form and mediated life. Danielle Wong theorizes “racial virtuality” as the suggestive materiality of non-representational new media processes and argues that these non-figurative images, affects, textures, sounds, and gestures constitute racializing calibrations within the context of information capitalism. Extending the archive of Asianness into everyday interactions with the virtual, such as Instagram skincare stories, memes of sleeping Asians, and algorithmic choreography on TikTok, Wong considers race as a capacity for labor and capital and argues that Asianness is a specific racial form of informational capital and a mode of relational critique. She reveals the ways in which Asianness moves beyond a politics of recuperation and recognition to yield modes of fugitivity, illicit knowledge, and resistance, all of which threaten existing relationships between capital, labor and information that govern human capital.

By putting memes, social media apps, and digital platforms in conversation with more traditional cultural productions like film, literature, and theatre, Racial Virtuality broadens our understanding of racialization in the digital age and challenges traditional notions of cultural production and subject formation. In doing so, it demonstrates how Asianness circulates as a new media form in a digital marketplace of commodified affects, senses, gestures, and tastes.