The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.
This book examines social and medical responses to the disfigured face in early medieval Europe, arguing that the study of head and facial injuries can offer a new contribution to the history of early medieval medicine and culture, as well as exploring the language of violence and social interactions. Despite the prevalence of warfare and conflict in early medieval society, and a veritable indu…
"Freedom of the printed word is a defining feature of the modern world. Yet censorship and the suppression of literature never cease, and remain topical issues even in the most liberal of democracies. Today just as in the past, advances in media technology are followed by new regulatory mechanisms. Similarly, any attempt to control cultural expression inevitably spurs fresh discussions about fr…
"[W]e have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant… G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued the quest, so aptly described by G. K. Chesterton in 1906, to ‘find’ Charles Dickens and recapture the characteristically Dickensian. From research attempting to classify and categorise the nature of his popularity to a century …
All books have long histories. The ideas and early versions of this book stretch back to my doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, to Kurt Heinzelman’s scholarship on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and to Richard Sha’s unfailing friendship and encouragement through the years since we were students together. Librarians at t…
"Nandita Dinesh places Kipling’s ""six honest serving-men"" (who, what, when, where, why, how) in productive conversation with her own experiences in conflict zones across the world to offer a theoretical and practical reflection on making theatre in times of war. This timely and important book weaves together Dinesh’s personal narrative with the public story of modern conflict, illustratin…
What is practice-based literary research? While literature as a discipline is currently not represented in the artistic research discourse, individual writers and scholars have ties to a variety of institutional constellations in which overlaps between literature, art, and research become manifest. 16 of them expand on their methodological approaches as well as their practice, and they analyse …
As records of the link between a manuscript and the texts it contains, paratexts document many aspects of a manuscript’s life: production, transmission, usage, and reception. Comprehensive studies of paratexts are still rare in the field of manuscript studies, and the universal categories of time and space are used to create a common frame for research and comparisons. Contributions in this v…
The volume contains a critical review of data, results and open problems concerning the principal Greek and Coptic majuscule bookhands, based on previous research of the author, revised and updated to offer an overview of the different graphic phenomena. Although the various chapters address the history of different types of scripts (i.e. biblical majuscule, sloping poitend majuscule, liturgica…
The universal practice of selecting and excerpting, summarizing and canonizing, arranging and organizing texts and visual signs, either in carefully dedicated types of manuscripts or not, is common to all manuscript cultures. Determined by intellectual or practical needs, this process is never neutral in itself. The resulting proximity and juxtaposition of previously distant contents, challenge…
The essays in this volume are concerned with early printed narrative texts in Western Europe. The aim of this book is to consider to what extent the shift from hand-written to printed books left its mark on narrative literature in a number of vernacular languages. Did the advent of printing bring about changes in the corpus of narrative texts when compared with the corpus extant in manuscript c…
This book is about Tangut translations of Chinese literary texts. Although most of the extant Tangut material comprises Buddhist texts, there are also many non-religious texts, which are mostly translations from Chinese. The central concern is how the Tanguts appropriated Chinese written culture through translation and what their reasons for this were. Of the seven chapters, the first three pro…
This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide a…
The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture. Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonst…
Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice combines a critical survey of the most important concepts in Masculinity Studies with a historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed within British Literature and a special focus on developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. Readership: This book is of key interest to students, university teachers, and researchers in the f…
Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice combines a critical survey of the most important concepts in Masculinity Studies with a historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed within British Literature and a special focus on developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. Readership: This book is of key interest to students, university teachers, and researchers in the f…
Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field’ is the first book to use digital humanities strategies to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By mining, visualising and modelling data from ‘AustLit’ – an online bibliography of Australian literature that leads the world in its comprehensiveness and scope – th…
Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kāvya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was …
The purpose of this book is to combine perspectives of scholars from Africa on Child Theologies from a variety of theological sub-disciplines to provide some theological and ministerial perspectives on this topic. The book disseminates original research and new developments in this study field, especially as relevant to the African context. In the process it addresses also the global need to he…