Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England

Cambridge University Press, 2007

Matthew Giancarlo

Focusing on the major poets of the late fourteenth century such as Chaucer and Langland, this study investigates the close relationship between artistic and political developments at a time when poets and parliamentarians were very close to one another in practices, concerns, and themes.

Cities of Affluence And Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness

University of Virginia Press, 2006

Peter J. Kalliney

Providing a compact literary history of the twentieth century in England, Cities of Affluence and Anger studies the problematic terms of national identity during England's transition from an imperial power to its integration in the global cultural marketplace. While the countryside had been the dominant symbol of Englishness throughout the previous century, modern literature began to turn more and more to the city to redraw the boundaries of a contemporary cultural polity. The urban class system, paradoxically, still functioned as a marker of wealth, status, and hierarchy throughout this long period of self-examination, but it also became a way to project a common culture and mitigate other forms of difference. Local class politics were transformed in such a way that enabled the English to reframe a highly provisional national unity in the context of imperial disintegration, postcolonial immigration, and, later, globalization.

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Joyce Green MacDonald

Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke and Aphra Behn.

Poetry and Contemporary Culture: The Question of Value

Edinburgh University Press & Columbia University Press, 2002.

Andrew Michael Roberts
and Jonathan Allison, eds.

A collection of new essays by leading American and British scholars on the subject of how poetry is valued, represented, and mediated in contemporary culture both American and British. Includes essays on the use of poetry on television, film, and the internet, and essays on nationalism, race, democracy, and the Avant-Garde.

Poetry for Young People: William Butler Yeats

Sterling Publishing, 2002.

Jonathan Allison, ed.
Glenn Harrington, ill.

Part of a popular series by Sterling Books, "Poetry for Young People", this is a lavishly illustrated, lightly annotated edition of twenty-five lyric poems by William Butler Yeats, chosen by the editor, and designed specifically for the younger reader (9-12). Matching Yeats' s written images are a series of exquisite and evocative paintings by American artist Glenn Harrington, which range from panoramic natural landscapes to compelling portraits of characters, both human and fantastic. As always, this acclaimed series features a biographical sketch of the author, brief introductions to each poem, and glosses that define difficult or unfamiliar vocabulary.

Yeats's Political Identities

University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Jonathan Allison, ed.

A collection of 18 essays by various hands on the subject of W.B.Yeats's political involvement, and the political contexts of his poetry. Includes sections on Fascism, Nationalism & Revolution, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, etc. Contributors include Seamus Heaney, Roy Foster, Declan Kiberd, Elizabeth Cullingford, and others.

Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries

Border Crossings Series

Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.

Lisa Zunshine

This volume represents an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of contemporary Nabokov scholarship by addressing several themes hitherto unexplored and even considered off-limits by students of fiction. Although Nabokov's strongly expressed aesthetic preferences seem to have effectively forestalled certain venues of scholarly investigation, this collection seeks to demonstrate that it is possible to open up formerly proscribed venues of inquiry without violating the personal and aesthetic integrity of the writer.

Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience

Cornell University Press, 2003.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman

Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. This engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.

The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship

Lousiana State University Press, 1986.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman

In both theme and technique, Woolf's writing reflects an ambivalent, obsessive relationship with her remarkable mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Rosenman employs psychoanalytic perspectives that focus on the mother-daughter relationship as the source and center of female identity, and feminist literary criticism that explores the role of the woman writer in a male-dominated culture. The mother-daughter relationship informed many aspects of her work, including narrative structure and characterization as well as the thematic issues of sexual politics, romantic and familial love, literary inheritance, and the role of the woman writer.

A Room of One's Own: A Reader's Companion

Twayne's Masterwork Studies: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity
Twayne Publishers, 1995.

In a broad sense, Rosenman points out, A Room of One's Own analyzes the constraints on women's achievement--the hostile environment in which they write--and the responses, both creative and self-defeating, that this environment provokes. As she follows the essay's analysis of patriarchy and feminism, she also pays special attention to the essay as a novel, showing how the twists and turns of Woolf's narrative resemble experimental literary techniques.

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Modern Language Association

Lisa Zunshine and Jocelyn Harris

This volume in the Approaches to Teaching series turns the challenges of his novels into opportunities for inventive pedagogy. Part 1, “Materials” surveys available editions of Richardson’s works, including letters and published commentary and evaluates background material. Part 2, “Approaches,” is divided into four sections, one on the background of Richardson’s novels and one each on Clarissa, Pamela, and Sir Charles.

Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England

Ohio State University Press

Lisa Zunshine

Bastards and Foundlings pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law; it reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital; and it examines a wide array of novels and plays written in response to the same concerns that informed the emergence and functioning of such institutions.

The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare’s Tragedies

The University of Kentucky Press

Walter C. Foreman, Jr.

Bound for the 1890s: Essays on Writing and Publishing in Honor of James G. Nelson

Rivendale Press

Jonathan Allison, Philip K. Cohen, et al.

This volume of new essays by some of today’s most important scholars of the British 1890s is inspired by the groundbreaking work in publishing history of James G. Nelson. Based on original research using primary resources and full of insights and discoveries, these reinterpretations focus on figures that shaped fin-de-siècle literature, book illustration, and aesthetic publishing.

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel

Ohio State University Press

Lisa Zunshine