This interdisciplinary volume analyzes previously understudied sources from nineteenth- and twentieth- century France and the Francophone world and situates them in their social, cultural and political contexts.
This book argues that recent materialist approaches to Defoe are insufficiently attentive to the dominant preoccupations of his fictional oeuvre, which center on moral accountability and self-definition, and addresses Defoe's characters, narration, aesthetic, and ethical experiments that constitute his innovative achievements in the novel form.
New Essays on Samuel Johnson is a collection of the best thinking and writing currently available on the great English writer Samuel Johnson. It presents a primer of criticism that revaluates him within our current cultural moment while also serving as a parliament of explorations that offers a point of departure for future critical inquiry.
This book examines the sub-genre of prehistoric-themed paintings and how it captured the imagination of French academic painters from the 1880s to early 1900s. Its primary focus is the oeuvre of Fernand Cormon (1845-1924), one of the foremost history painters during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
This collection focuses on the connections between the cultural, material, and aesthetic aspects of later medieval English literature. Essays address texts such as Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Confessio Amantis, and the Canterbury Tales in their material and cultural contexts.
Marble Halls is written for the intelligent layperson, rather than for the specialist in the history of architecture, who is interested in the architecture and interiors of America's Gilded Age as an expression of that era's quest for cultural equality with European nations, even as it paralleled the rise of the architectural style of Modernism.
During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, two evolving dance-historical realms intersected-theory and practice. While the French produced works on notation, choreography, and repertoire, German dance writers responded with an important body of work on dance theory. This book examines the reception of French dance in Germany.
Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin
The Rise of Animals analyzes the intellectual origins of our changing attitudes about animals and illuminates major currents of eighteenth-century British literary culture. It offers new readings of works by Margaret Cavendish, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, and others.
Narrative Faith engages with the faith and doubt dynamic to explore the moral visions expressed by Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer in their works and their use of doubt-generating narrative techniques to portray characters struggling with faith.
