This book aims at study and analysis of the poetry of the first four major poets of the postcolonial trend in the Indian context. It examines and explores the various aspects and characteristics of their poetry which can qualify them on the double standards of both being Indian and modern at the same time in a justifiable manner.

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comp...

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of ob...

Elizabeth Cary (c.1585-1639) was an accomplished scholar of languages and theology. Her considerable strength of character was demonstrated by her public conversion to Catholicism in 1625 thereby creating an irrevocable rift in her marriage and her family. Her biography, written by her daughter, says she wrote ’for her private recreation’ and mentions various works, now lost, including the lives of saints, and poems to the Virgin Mary. She is best known today, however, for the works reprod...

The sixth and last queen of Henry VIII, and friend of Anne Askew, Katherine Parr (c.1513-1548) has a threefold claim to recognition for her contribution to the literary culture of her time. First, as a loving and adept stepmother to the royal children, who took a directive role in their education; second, as the patroness of a circle of Protestant humanist intellectuals who spearheaded the translation of Erasmus’s Latin Paraphrase upon the newe testamente; and third, as the author of the t...

Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries between domestic and fine art production, they crafted subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and contested nature of the female artistic professiona...

Offering a profound re-assessment of the conceptual, rhetorical, and cultural intersections among sexuality, race and religion in English Renaissance texts, this study argues that antisemitism is a by-product of tensions between received Classical conceptions of masculinity and Christianity's strident critique of that ideal. Utilizing works by Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe and others, Biberman illustrates how modern antisemitism develops as a way to stigmatize hypermasculine behavior, thus ...

Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism - along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text - the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on early modern English drama. The volume focuses strongly on Shakespeare but also includes contributions on Marston, Middleton, Ford, Brome, Aretino, and other early modern dramatis...

A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in whic...

New editions and facsimiles of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works are changing the landscape of Shelley studies by making complete compositions and fragments that have received only limited critical attention readily available to scholars. Building on the work begun in Weinberg and Webb's 2009 volume, The Unfamiliar Shelley, The Neglected Shelley sheds light on the breadth and depth of Shelley's oeuvre, including the poet's earliest work, written when he was not yet twenty and was experimenting ...

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and con...

The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, includi...