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In examining early modern women and the poem, this book explores how women use poetry, and how poems use women, in England and Scotland in the period 1550–1680. Several decades of critical writing on 'women's poetry', 'gender and poetry', and the representation of women, or gender, in poetry have produced a rich and complex critical and scholarly field. The book looks at the primary and secondary evidence concerning two key elements in the analysis of early modern women's writing, namely, women and the poem. It first explores the way women understood the poem in terms of the reception, influence and adaptation of past models and examples, working from the reception of classical texts. It focuses on the resources women writing poetry knew and encountered in chapters on classical inheritance, the religious sonnet sequence and the secular sonnet sequence. The book then examines the world of reading and readers, and looks at poems in terms of friendships, quarrels, competitions, coteries, networks and critical reception, both then and later. It also emphasises the tales that poems tell, and how those stories both register and shape the understanding of women and the poem in the world of potential readers. In examining women and the poem, the use of women as signifiers and bearers of meaning in poetry is as significant as women's literary production.
of different contexts. Many analyses viewed the text as coinciding with a moment in feminist studies and feminist literary production when the mother/daughter dyad became a focus of particular interest. In Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990), Amy Ling reads The Woman Warrior alongside Amy Tan’s work in order to explore the ‘problematic Chinese mother–American daughter relationship’ (p. 130). More recently, Wendy Ho’s 1999 study, In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother–Daughter Writing , views Kingston’s writing as an
tropes of aestheticism, for example, or with modernism’s preoccupation with city space – as well as a marked degree of self-consciousness about the aesthetic debates of the period. 2 Introduction Marsh’s centrality to the literary production of the era has to do with his popularity, influence and longevity. It is difficult to think of a contemporary author of similar stature who possessed his versatility and sustained prolificacy. For over twenty-five years, he entranced late Victorian and Edwardian readers with popular tales of horror, humour, romance and crime. He
history, Maturin is very much a Derridean spectre haunting literary production in Romantic Ireland and beyond. Frequently called upon by contemporary and later authors, both consciously and unconsciously, Maturin’s presence is continuously conjured and Maturin himself continually revived, so that he comes to occupy the strangely ambivalent but also extremely telling space of everywhere and nowhere, here and
argues, ‘to understand (not to denounce) and to foster a dialogue (not to accuse)’ (2014: 26). In particular, they participate in the creation of collective memories, strive to heal the wounds of the past, and contest the reductive national scripts that assign them predetermined roles. In this sense, their work can be described as a form of counter-narrative that has much in common with counter-heritage cinema as defined by Higbee. The presence of harkis in films made before 2000 reflects the different phases of harki activism and literary production and presents
public and the political and critical establishments that redefine modern literary production. Within a broad Western tradition, works such as Bely’s Петербург (Petersburg), Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Time Past), Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude), Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Kafka’s Der Prozes (The Trial), Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, and Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) chronicle the pressures of the modern city in cultural crisis. Their doubly inward turn, into the mind and the margins of the
provides, I argue, a new perspective on his literary production. Humphrey’s manuscript materials give us privileged insight into the functions of writing, reading and sharing literature for himself and his community. Bestiary parrots The characteristics of courtly parrots derive much from bestiary traditions. Humphrey’s popinjay’s ‘coloures byn bothe
The gothic novel in Ireland, 1760–1830 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Against traditional scholarly understandings of Irish gothic fiction as a largely late-nineteenth century development, this study recovers to view a whole body of Irish literary production too often overlooked today. Its robust examination of primary texts, the contexts in which they were produced, and the critical perspectives from which they have been analysed yields a rigorous account of the largely retrospective formal and generic classifications that have worked to eliminate eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Irish fiction from the history of gothic literature. The works assessed here powerfully demonstrate that what we now understand as typical of ‘the gothic novel’– medieval, Catholic Continental settings; supernatural figures and events; an interest in the assertion of British modernity – is not necessarily what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers or writers would have identified as ‘gothic’. They moreover point to the manner in which scholarly focus on the national tale and allied genres has effected an erasure of the continued production and influence of gothic literature in Romantic Ireland. Combining quantitative analysis with meticulous qualitative readings of a selection of representative texts, this book sketches a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period. As it does so, it persuasively positions Irish works and authors at the centre of a newly understood paradigm of the development of the literary gothic across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1830.
From its Nobel laureates to its literary festivals, modern-day Dublin lives up to its role as a literary capital. The question of whether Ireland experienced a cultural and literary Renaissance has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. This book extends the discussion by engaging with the specific literary culture of its capital city. It begins with an argument for the internationalised literary culture of late medieval Dublin by an analysis of James Yonge's 'Memoriale'. The citizens of Dublin engaged with and actively read texts imported from London, as Dublin's own printing was limited. The book presents case studies that establish Dublin as an emerging city of Renaissance literature by focusing on Edmund Spenser's political and social connections and by examining the literature of complaint emanating from late Elizabethan Dublin. It analyses the constructed authorial personae of Richard Bellings, James Shirley and Henry Burnell residing in Dublin, and discusses the concepts of literary friendship. Sir James Ware's scholarly achievements are analysed and his extensive intellectual community are investigated, revealing an open-minded Dublin community. In addition to being a representative Renaissance activity, translation was harnessed in the country as an 'instrument of state', as shown by translations of Gaelic poetry. The Renaissance literary production in Dublin had a multi-linguistic character with Latin orations taking place in the Trinity College Dublin. The book also addresses the question of whether the English-language drama composed and staged in Restoration Dublin is most accurately described as Anglo-Irish drama or 'English drama written in Ireland'.
This first book-length study of Kate Atkinson’s multifaceted œuvre is a comprehensive introductory overview of her novels, play and stories. It situates Atkinson’s literary production in terms of an aesthetics of hydridity that appropriates and re-combines well-known genres (coming-of-age novel, detective fiction, historical novel) and narrative techniques. This book explores the singularity and significance of Atkinson’s complex narratives that engage the reader in contemporary issues and insight into human concerns through a study of the major aspects and themes that tie in her work (the combination of tradition and innovation, the relationship to the collective and personal past, to history and memory, all impregnated with humour and a feminist standpoint). It pursues a broadly chronological line through Atkinson’s literary career from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war. Alongside the well-known novels, the book includes a discussion of her less-studied play and collection of short stories. Chapters combine the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses.