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        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2025

        Invasions

        Fears and fantasies of imagined wars in Britain, 1871-1918

        by Christian K. Melby

        Invasions is an ambitious, new and authoritative study of one of the defining cultural products of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the outbreak of war in 1914 invasion-scare fiction had profoundly changed British society, becoming not just a vibrant part of popular culture, but a reference point among military planners, advertisers, and politicians. This intersection between politics and culture, between entertainment and war planning, sets invasion-scare stories apart as one of the most versatile and interesting fictional products in modern British history. Building on recent work in both history and literature studies, Invasions is the first study of invasion-scare fiction to examine both the form (that is, fiction) and the function (the political argument) of the genre.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2017

        Imperialism and juvenile literature

        by Jeffrey Richards

        Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this truer than in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. It both reflects popular attitudes, ideas and preconceptions and it generates support for selected views and opinions. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times: in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. It seeks to examine in detail the articulation and diffusion of imperialism in the field of juvenile literature by stressing its pervasiveness across boundaries of class, nation and gender. It analyses the production, distribution and marketing of imperially-charged juvenile fiction, stressing the significance of the Victorians' discovery of adolescence, technological advance and educational reforms as the context of the great expansion of such literature. An overview of the phenomenon of Robinson Crusoe follows, tracing the process of its transformation into a classic text of imperialism and imperial masculinity for boys. The imperial commitment took to the air in the form of the heroic airmen of inter-war fiction. The book highlights that athleticism, imperialism and militarism become enmeshed at the public schools. It also explores the promotion of imperialism and imperialist role models in fiction for girls, particularly Girl Guide stories.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

        Emotions, ethics, dreams

        by Megan Leitch

        Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2009

        Intertextuality in modern Arabic literature since 1967

        by Luc Deheuvels, Mike Thompson, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, Paul Starkey

        This volume of essays is the first to be dedicated to the subject of intertextuality in modern Arabic literature. Beginning with a general overview of the topic by Roger Allen, it brings together essays on a range of writers from all parts of the Arab world, including, among others, Edwar al-Kharrat, Sa'd Allah Wannus, Najib Mahfuz, Rabi' Jabir, Salim Matar and the recently deceased Sudanese writer al-Tayyib Salih, whose seminal work Season of Migration to the North heralded a new phase in the modern Arabic literary tradition. The volume, which also includes two essays on aspects of intertextuality in Gulf literature, also discusses transformations of popular medieval literature such as the Alf Layla wa-Layla (the Thousand and One Nights) in modern Arabic literature. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2002

        The question of literature

        The place of the literary in contemporary theory

        by Gerard Greenway, Elizabeth Beaumont-Bissell

        As literary theory has grown more influential, interdisciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. It now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics and the media. Addressing a central and fundamental, but relatively neglected, issue in literary theory, this title seeks to recontextualise how theory has changed our understanding of literature and its questions by relating literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology and the nature of representative democracy. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        European Empires and the People

        Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy

        by John M. MacKenzie

        This is the first book to survey in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters, focusing on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, provide parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The international group of contributors, who are all scholars working at the cutting edge of these fields, place their work in the context of governmental policies, the economic bases of imperial expansion, major events such as wars of conquest, the emergence of myths of heroic action in exotic contexts, religious and missionary impulses, as well as the new media which facilitated such popular dissemination. Among these media were the press, international exhibitions, popular literature, educational institutions and methods, ceremonies, church sermons and lectures, monuments, paintings and much else.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2020

        Incest in contemporary literature

        by Miles Leeson

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        February 2010

        Essays in later medieval French literature

        The legacy of Jane H. M. Taylor

        by Mike Thompson, Rebecca Dixon

        Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Jane Taylor has shown a commitment to the rehabilitation of the more neglected aspects of later medieval French literature. This volume brings together original contributions from scholars who have worked alongside Taylor and directly or indirectly benefitted from her example. The chapters demonstrate their authors' link to this legacy, and concomitantly underline the vibrancy and breadth of approach which is the hallmark of current later medieval studies. The essays in the collection centre on a number of key issues in the field: notions of literary self-consciousness and what it means to come after an avatar; issues of intertextuality and the appeal to past models in the creation of a new literary aesthetic (or a new literary criticism); and interdisciplinary questions of translation, reworking, and continuation. Essays in later medieval French literature seeks not only to illustrate the buoyant state of later medieval French literary studies but also, in so doing, to show how in broader terms responding to the legacy of an illustrious predecessor has not pejorative but positive consequences. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2011

        Catholicism and children's literature in France

        The comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874)

        by Sophie Heywood, Maire Cross, David Hopkin

        This is the first book-length history of the classic French children's author, the comtesse de Ségur. Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, in France Ségur is a national icon and a cultural phenomenon. Generations of children have grown up reading her stories. This book combines a discussion of her life, her works, and their reception with a broader analysis of the cultural context of the mid-nineteenth century. It offers a unique insight into the political engagement of Catholic women through the medium of children's literature and education, and brings out new aspects of the history of publishing aimed at children, with particular reference to the market for books for girls. With its lively subject matter and accessible style, this book will appeal not only to scholars of nineteenth-century France, but also to specialists and students interested in the fields of children's literature, gender studies, and religious history. ;

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2026

        Myth and (mis)information

        by Allan Ingram, Helen Williams, Clark Lawlor

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2025

        Entertaining the empire

        London music hall and the export of Britishness

        by Andrew Horrall

        The stage entertainments known as music hall emerged in mid-Victorian London just as the British began colonising large parts of the world.Settlers recreated this metropolitan popular culture throughout the empire and in places under foreign control. They erected music halls resembling those at home, imported songs and sketches, performed inamateur shows and watched touring professionals. London originals were rewritten as commentaries on local conditions. This activity transformed music hall into a marker of an exclusionary British identity overseas and made colonies look and sound more like Britain. The result was that settlers separated by vast distances were linked by a shared popular culture. The touring circuits and cultural affinities the Victorians created endure to this day.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2013

        Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

        Italy, France and Flanders

        by Samuel Kline Cohn

        The documents in this stimulating volume span from 1245 to 1424 but focus on the 'contagion of rebellion' from 1355 to 1382 that followed in the wake of the plague. They comprise a diversity of sources and cover a variety of forms of popular protest in different social, political and economic settings. Their authors range across a wide political and intellectual horizon and include revolutionaries, the artistocracy, merchants and representatives from the church. They tell gripping and often gruesome stories of personal and collective violence, anguish, anger, terror, bravery, and foolishness. Of over 200 documents presented here, most have been translated into English for the first time, providing students and scholars with a new opportunity to compare social movements across Europe over two centuries, allowing a re-evaluation of pre-industrial revolts, the Black Death and its consequences for political culture and action. This book will be essential reading for those seeking to better understand popular attitudes and protest in medieval Europe.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2021

        The Victorian aquarium

        by Silvia Granata, Andrew Smith

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