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Telephone: +44(0)1524 68765
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Email: sales@gazellebooks.co.uk
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 |
AGE OF MILTON & THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
[Angelica Duran]
Angelica Duran reveals the way in which Milton's works interacted with the revolutionary work of his contemporaries in science to participate in the dynamic "advancement of learning" of the time period. Bringing together primary materials by early modern scientists, including Robert Boyle, William Gilbert, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, John Ray, and John Wilkins as well as educational reformers such as Samuel Hartlib and Henry Oldenburg, "The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution" positions Milton's literature as a coequal partner with the new cosmological theories, mathematical developments, telescopes, and scientific tracts that so thoroughly affected every aspect of recorded life in seventeenth century England. Duran shows, for example, how new developments in ornithology worked to shape the Lady’s power in the young Milton’s celebratory 'A Mask', how mathematics informed the sexual relationship of Adam and Eve in his mature epic Paradise Lost, and how developments in optics transformed the blinded hero of the blind author’s moving tragedy Samson Agonistes. While this study is indebted to the work of historians of science -- from C. P. Snow and Thomas Kuhn to Stephen Shapin and Stephen Jay Gould -- it is not a history of science per se, but rather a cultural study that appreciates poetry as a unique lens through which early modern England’s large-scale developments in education and science are clarified and reflected. What emerges is an intimate sense of how the enormous changes of the English Scientific Revolution affected individual lives and found their ways into Milton’s enduring poetry and prose.
{
349pp,
160x235mm,
November 2006;
HB,
£38.99,
0820703869:9780820703862
, Duquesne University Press
} |
 |
ALDEN NOWLAN -- ESSAYS ON HIS WORKS
[Edited by Gregory M Cook]
Alden Nowlan, born near Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1933, was a poet, journalist, novelist, and playwright who overcame the disadvantages of poverty and a mere four grades of education, to publish more than twenty books and three plays in his fifty years. His writing earned him two honorary degrees, a Guggenheim fellowship and Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1968. That same year he was appointed writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, a position he held until his death in 1983. This book examines Nowlan's bravery in accepting the limitations of his class and his art, as well as the myopia of the critical milieu in which his work was measured. Here is a glimpse of his Künstlerroman - the elements of his art and his humanity, which sees his reputation steadily developing internationally. Robert Bly says, "Alden Nowlan is the greatest Canadian poet of the twentieth century." Contributors include Geoffrey Cook, John Metcalfe, Paul Milton, Thomas R. Smith, David Adams Richards and Gregory M. Cook. Gregory M. Cook's latest book is Songs of the Wounded: New and Selected Poems (Black Moss, 2004). He resides in Saint John, New Brunswick.
{
144pp,
November 2006;
PB,
£8.99,
1550712543:9781550712544
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
APOLLODORUS' LIBRARY & HYGINUS' FABULAE
: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology
[Apollodorus & Hyginus; Translated by Stephen Trzaskoma & R Scott Smith]
By offering, for the first time in a single edition, complete English translations of Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae -- the two most important surviving "handbooks" of classical mythography -- this volume enables readers to compare the two’s versions of the most important Greek and Roman myths. A General Introduction sets the Library and Fabulae into the wider context of ancient mythography; introductions to each text discuss in greater detail issues of authorship, aim, and influence. A general index, an index of people and geographic locations, and an index of authors and works cited by the mythographers are also included.
{
247pp,
155x230mm,
April 2007;
PB,
£8.95,
0872208206:9780872208209
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
ARISTOTLE & MODERNISM
: Aesthetic Affinities of T S Eliot, Wallace Stevens & Virginia Woolf
[Edna Rosenthal]
Examines literary modernism in its relation to the history of criticism by analysing the role of Aristotelian principles, primarily the notion of formal affectivism, in the critical writings of these three modernists who have invariably been thought to uphold incompatible aesthetic beliefs: whereas Eliot saw himself as a classicist modernist, Stevens and Woolf shared a marked anti-classicist stance. Despite their initially incompatible attitudes to literary history and criticism, this study discloses their convergence on the Aristotelian notion of formal affectivism, demonstrated through specific conceptual shifts. The main feature of the book is its originality of approach, which seeks a 'diachronic' solution to a 'synchronic' problem -- the debate about the Modern, reflected in the claims and counterclaims made by the modernists themselves and by subsequent literary critics and theorists. This methodology was largely dictated by the nature of the subject: the adversarial critical orientation of three modernists, who have never been studied as a group before, and the attempt to reconcile their differences by reconfiguring them in terms of the Aristotelian critical tradition. The author demonstrates conclusively how Eliot incorporated central Aristotelian dramatic principles into his view of literary history and criticism, and, similarly, how both Stevens and Woolf, through historically determined conceptual shifts, endorse and use formal affectivism and dramatic criteria, which, as may be expected, they almost never refer back to Aristotle or to his foremost modernist defender, Eliot.
{
152pp,
152x229mm,
May 2008;
HB,
£55.00,
1845191714:9781845191719
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
ARTHUR MERVYN; OR, MEMOIRS OF THE YEAR 1793
: With Related Texts
[Charles Brockden Brown; Edited, with an Introduction, by Philip Barnard & Stephen Shapiro]
An influential classic of American gothic and urban literature, Charles Brockden Brown's "Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793" (1799-1800) memorialises the epic Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 and connects it to the upheavals of the revolutionary era and the murderous financial networks of Atlantic slavery. This edition of Brown's widely-read novel offers selections from key contemporary texts -- including Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' Narrative (1794) defending the city's Free Black community, Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768), 1790s abolitionist tracts by members of Brown's circle, and popular poetry on the slave trade and imperial commerce -- as well as excerpts from Brown's own writings on slavery, race, and the uses of history in fiction.
{
442pp,
155x230mm,
April 2008;
HB,
£35.00,
0872209229:9780872209220
/
PB,
£12.95,
0872209210:9780872209213
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
ASIA LITERARY REVIEW
: Summer 2008
[Chris Wood (ed)]
The "Asia Literary Review" is a new quarterly literary journal offering a window to the world on the best of Asian writing with short fiction, reportage, memoir, poetry, essays and photography. In this edition: Has the Yellow River run its course? Rob Gifford travels the length of China's troubled Mother River and lays bare its plight; Duncan Hewitt mourns the death of old Shanghai under the wrecker's hammer; Korea's former "comfort women" in poetry and photography; Nepal at the polls: Inside Asia's newest republic; Salman Rushdie on history, storytelling and his new novel "The Enchantress of Florence"; Booker Prize winner Anne Enright reflects on the writer's life; New fiction by Fan Wu, Yu Hua, Nam Le, Xu Xi, Kumkum Amin, Justin Hill, Nicholas Jose and Justin Hill; New poetry by Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, Zheng Danyi, Jeongshik Min, Shirley Lee, Viki Holmes, Jerome Kugan and Jerome Kugan.
{
224pp,
145x210mm,
June 2008;
PB,
£9.99,
9889966956:9789889966959
, Creative Work Ltd
} |
 |
BARRY CALLAGHAN -- ESSAYS ON HIS WORKS
[Priscila Uppal (ed)]
A great story teller, Barry Callaghan is one of the most distinctive man of letters Canada has ever produced. He is fascinated by the no-man's land that stands between fiction and journalism. Politically and culturally engaged, he is a public scholar and acute critic in the tradition of Edmund Wilson. Barry Callaghan's fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages. Among the contributors are Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Marie-Claire Blais, William Kennedy, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dennis Lee, Hayden Carruth, Patrick Lane, Seán Virgo, Robert Marteau, James Hart, David Lampe, Joe Rosenblatt, Leon Rooke, Brunella Antomarini, John Montague, Ray Robertson, Ray Ellenwood, Kathleen McCracken, Alexender Amprimoz, Michel Deguy, Branko Gorjup, Michael Keefer, Gale Zoë Garnett, Joyce Carol Oates, and Noah Richler.
{
524pp,
140x215mm,
December 2006;
PB,
£11.99,
1550712535:9781550712537
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
BEDELIA
[Vera Caspary]
Long before Desperate Housewives, there was Bedelia: pretty, ultra femme, and 'adoring as a kitten'. A perfect housekeeper and lover, she wants nothing more than to please her insecure new husband, who can't believe his luck. But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbour turns out to be a detective on the trail of a 'kitten with claws of steel' -- a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake. Caspary builds this tale to a peak of psychological suspense as her characters are trapped together by a blizzard. The true Bedelia, the woman who chose murder over a life on the street, reveals how she turns male fantasies of superiority into a deadly con.
{
213pp,
140x215mm,
March 2006;
HB,
£32.99,
1558615083:9781558615083
/
PB,
£9.50,
1558615075:9781558615076
, Feminist Press
} |
 |
BUTTERFLY MOTHER
: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou, China
[Translated by Mark Bender; Compiled by Jin Dan & Ma Xueliang]
A collection of epics from the Miao (Hmong) ethnic group of southwest China. The poetic narratives, traditionally performed by two groups of singers, relate the creation of the world and the peoples and creatures in it. One of the major figures in one series of the songs is Butterfly Mother (Mai Bang), a personified butterfly who lays the eggs that eventually lead to the creation of the local peoples. Rich in cultural lore, these mythic narratives are virtual encyclopedias of traditional myths, legends, and folk customs of the Miao people.
{
214pp,
140x215mm,
October 2006;
PB,
£9.95,
0872208494:9780872208490
/
HB,
£29.95,
0872208508:9780872208506
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
CASTLE RACKRENT
[Maria Edgeworth; Edited by Susan Kubica Howard]
An edition of Maria Edgeworth's first novel, 'Castle Rackrent', originally published in 1800, with annotations, an Introduction and a bibliography. 'Castle Rackrent' tells the story of three generations of the Rackrent family from the perspective of their servant, Thady Quirk, during the middle of the eighteenth century in Ireland.
{
87pp,
140x215mm,
April 2007;
PB,
£5.95,
087220877X:9780872208773
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
CLASSICA ET MEDIAEVALIA, VOLUME 57
: Revue Danoise de Philologie et d'Histoire
[Jesper Carlsen, Karsten Friis-Jensen, Vincent Gabrielsen, Marianne Pade, Minna Skafte Jensen, Birger Munk Olsen & Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen (eds)]
Classica et Mediaevalia is an international periodical, published annually, with articles written by Danish and International scholars. The articles are mainly written in English, but also in French and German. The periodical deals from a philological point of view with Classical Antiquity in general and topics such as history of law and philosophy and the medieval ecclesiastic history. It covers the period from the Greco-Roman Antiquity until the Late Middle Ages.
{
281pp,
155x230mm,
November 2006;
PB,
£40.00,
8763505126:9788763505123
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
COLONIAL DIVIDE IN PERUVIAN NARRATIVE
: Social Conflict & Transculturation
[Misha Kokotovic]
Peru is a nation built on the still extant colonial divide between indigenous peoples and the descendants of their Spanish conquerors, a divide that finds expression in the short stories, novels, and essays by renowned Peruvian writers such as José María Arguedas and Mario Vargas Llosa. The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative explores debates over Peru's modernisation and cultural identity in post-1940 literature, exploring how Arguedas, Vargas Llosa, and others confronted challenges of language, style, and narrative form in their attempt to write across their nation's cultural divisions. It examines how modernisation affected the relationship between Peru's white elite and its indigenous majority, how historical change stimulated the emergence of new narrative techniques, and how these in turn made possible an understanding of the historical contexts in which they arose. Though Peru is its principal focus, the text engages with current studies of modernity at the postcolonial margins of the Western world by contributing to an understanding of the class and ethnic conflicts generated by rapid modernisation in culturally heterogeneous nations. The Colonial Divide will add to the growing body of critical literature on the ways in which modernity in formerly colonised nations such as Peru is inflected by the enduring legacies of colonialism.
REVIEW: "Kokotovic has provided a comprehensive review of contemporary Peruvian literature -- a remarkable analysis and discussion of literary theories in the field of Latin American studies and beyond. The theoretical discussions he pursues will allow his readers a better understanding of how intellectuals and cultural subjects perform within and outside academic institutions." -- Professor Guido Podestá, Department of Spanish and Portuguese; and Director, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS), University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative strikes me as potentially the most concise and yet also the most clarifying, forthright and plainspoken study of modern Peruvian fiction in English... Kokotovic has clearly mastered the critical literature he seeks to reform. By valuing coherence over novelty, he has written an intellectually satisfying, useful and informative piece of literary history and criticism." -- Neil Larsen, Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Davis.
{
290pp,
152x229mm,
March 2007;
PB,
£19.95,
1845191846:9781845191849
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
CREATOR AS CRITIC
: And Other Writings by E M Forster
[Jeffrey Heath]
E M Forster, the author of Howards End, A Passage to India, and A Room with a View, is recognised as one of the 20th century's most distinguished novelists. The Creator as Critic contains over 40 hitherto-unpublished essays, lectures, and memoirs, spanning the period 1898-1960; they reflect Forster's views on a wide range of authors: Coleridge, Tolstoy, Pater, Wilde, Henry James, Samuel Butler, Housman, Kipling, James Joyce, Proust, Cavafy, and others. The Creator as Critic presents the original texts of some 30 broadcasts made by Forster for the BBC during the years 1928-1959. These radio talks, uncollected until now, are the thought-provoking products of Forster's engagement with the literary, political, and social events of his time.
{
500pp,
150x230mm,
February 2008;
HB,
£45.00,
1550025228:9781550025224
, Dundurn Press
} |
 |
DANESHVAR'S PLAYHOUSE
: A Collection of Stories
[Simin Daneshvar]
These stories not only portray, with incomparable perception, humour, and compassion, women from the various strata of Iranian society, but they also capture the essence of a rich traditional culture undergoing change. A nanny lets go of a little girl's hand in Shiraz's exotic and crowded Vakil Bazaar, and goes off to flirt with the nutseller -- the child is lost. In The Accident, the author portrays, in hilarious parody, a young woman who forsakes husband, children, and home just to own a car. The Playhouse is a traditional Persian theatre where the play and the players act on many levels both real and fantastic. The Traitor's Intrigue lets you into the life of a middle-class couple and brilliantly shows how a colonel's allegiance passed from Shah to Khomeini. To Whom Can I Say Hello? tells of an old woman's memories, her life, love, tragic outcome, and eventual hope. Loss of Jalal is a moving chronicle of the final days of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of Iran's great writers and the author's husband. Simin Daneshvar draws from over a thousand years of Persian storytelling tradition and combines this with modern techniques of short fiction and cinema. The result is both entertaining and a key of uncompromising honesty, rich detail, and a dazzling range of voices that guides the reader into the centre of a complex society and its concerns.
{
184pp,
140x215mm,
April 2008;
PB,
£13.50,
1933823194:9781933823195
, Mage Publishers
} |
 |
DAVID DAICHES
: A Celebration of His Life & Work
[William Baker & Michael Lister (eds)]
David Daiches (1912-2005) was the first Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His distinguished career over more than half a century encompassed Universities on both sides of the Atlantic. His publications were prolific, extending to over one hundred books, three hundred articles, media and television, plus recordings. This Celebration of His Life and Work will include essays on his literary achievements in the areas of Scottish Literature, the Novel, Poetry and New/Historical Criticism and the American connection, and the academic as populariser, by distinguished scholars and critics. The book will appeal to historians of twentieth century literary and cultural criticism, the History of twentieth-century Universities, students of Scottish and American Literature, and the relationship between the academic and journalism in the twentieth century.
{
295pp,
152x229mm,
September 2007;
HB,
£55.00,
1845191595:9781845191597
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
DEFENDING THE WEST
: A Critique of Edward Said's 'Orientalism'
[Ibn Warraq]
This is the first systematic critique of Edward Said's influential work, "Orientalism", a book that for almost three decades has received wide acclaim, voluminous commentary, and translation into more than fifteen languages. Said's main thesis was that the Western image of the East was heavily biased by colonialist attitudes, racism, and more than two centuries of political exploitation. Although Said's critique was controversial, the impact of his ideas has been a pervasive rethinking of Western perceptions of Eastern cultures, plus a tendency to view all scholarship in Oriental Studies as tainted by considerations of power and prejudice. In this thorough reconsideration of Said's famous work, Ibn Warraq argues that Said's case against the West is seriously flawed. Warraq accuses Said of not only wilfully misinterpreting the work of many scholars, but also of systematically misrepresenting Western civilisation as a whole. With example after example, he shows that ever since the Greeks Western civilisation has always had a strand in its very makeup that has accepted non-Westerners with open arms and has ever been open to foreign ideas. The author also criticises Said for inadequate methodology, incoherent arguments, and a faulty historical understanding. He points out, not only Said's tendentious interpretations, but historical howlers that would make a sophomore blush. Warraq further looks at the destructive influence of Said's study on the history of Western painting, especially of the 19th century, and shows how, once again, the epigones of Said have succeeded in relegating thousands of first-class paintings to the lofts and storage rooms of major museums. An extended appendix reconsiders the value of 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist scholars and artists, whose work fell into disrepute as a result of Said's work.
REVIEW: "...the immensely erudite and clear-minded Ibn Warraq...refutes every point that Said made in his most famous book, Orientalism...Defending the West is...a book of great learning...No one, except cultural historians, need ever read, let alone refute, Said again." -- National Review, April 7, 2008 vol. LX, No. 6
{
556pp,
160x240mm,
September 2007;
HB,
£19.99,
1591024846:9781591024842
, Prometheus Books
} |
 |
DENNIS COOPER
: Writing at the Edge
[Paul Hegarty & Danny Kennedy (eds)]
Dennis Cooper's writing has acquired a ferocious reputation for its bold experimentation, its transgressive content, and its emotional content, which is both Romantic and touching, whilst cold and hard-edged. For over twenty years Cooper has explored the boundaries of human living, and sexuality's centrality to that living. The extreme situations he develops in his writing bring out parts of gay experience that a consensual 'community' often shies away from, likewise the heterosexual mainstream. His most important genre is undoubtedly fiction, but Cooper has also written poetry, large quantities of journalistic works, notably for 'Artforum' and 'Spin', and, recently has had great success and recognition with theatrical works. The book enters deep into the worlds Cooper fabricates -- and into the coolness of his expression. This challenging work is addressed by a group of mostly young and new critical writers and academics who provide creative responses to Cooper's artistry. The contributions, which cover the breadth of Cooper's work, develop themes and devices that advance his profound and disturbing world view. In addition to the artistic responses, the topics in the critical pieces range from sexuality in the suburbs, to neurological responses to the work, via the limits and possibilities of bodies. Others look at the implications of contemporary electronic communication as outlined in Cooper's recent work, or the use of space. Cooper's writing receives a multi-faceted contextualisation, and his literary ideas are made accessible to any reader interested in learning why Cooper is today regarded as one of the foremost writers in expressing the psychological point behind the centrality of sexual expression.
{
217pp,
152x229mm,
May 2008;
HB,
£55.00,
1845191870:9781845191870
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
DISCOURSE & COMMUNITY
: Multidisciplinary Studies of Canadian Culture
[Howard A Doughty & Marino Tuzi]
This book provides a range of essays dealing with political, social, cultural and literary themes, such as the shift from pioneer life to the connection to empire, as well as technological developments, the domination of nature, and the social power of the internet. These critical essays examine various, interconnected aspects of contemporary Canadian society. Using the analytical tools of their particular fields, such as political science and cultural and literary studies, the writers of these essays concentrate on many of the crucial factors that have shaped current social, cultural reality in Canada. These writers have contributed to this collection of essays: Susan Ellis, Ches Skinner, Douglas Bailie, Gordon Hatt, Brian Flack, Michael Welton, Diane Meaghan, Howard A. Doughty.
{
178pp,
125x205mm,
December 2006;
PB,
£11.99,
155071256X:9781550712568
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
EARTHLY PAGES
: The Poetry of Don Domanski
[Don Domanski; Edited by Brian Bartlett]
With "The Cape Breton Book of the Dead", Don Domanski emerged as a remarkable new voice in Canadian poetry, combining formal conciseness with broad cosmic allusions, constant surprise with brooding atmospherics, and innovative syntax with delicate phrasings. In subsequent collections, Domanski's poetry has deepened and expanded, with longer lines and more complex structures that journey into the far reaches of metaphor. Now, with "Earthly Pages", the long-awaited first selection from his books, readers have a chance to experience the full range of his work in one volume. Editor Brian Bartlett, in his introduction discusses Domanski's engagement with nature and the transformative power of his metaphors; his poetic bestiary and mythical underpinnings; and his kinship to poets like Stevens, Whitman, and Rumi. Like these poets, Domanski is drawn to borderlands between the physical and the spiritual, the unconscious and the conscious. His poetry finds a home for demons and angels, spiders and wolves -- and for kitchens and back alleys, forests and stars. In language both fluent and hypnotic, Domanski maintains an awareness of both the magnitudes and the minutiae that live beyond language. In "Flying Over Language", an essay written specifically for this volume, the poet explains that for him metaphor is one way to suggest the wealth of being that poetry can only point toward.
{
60pp,
155x230mm,
August 2007;
PB,
£8.99,
1554580080:9781554580088
, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
} |
 |
EDGAR HUNTLY; OR, MEMOIRS OF A SLEEP-WALKER, WITH RELATED TEXTS
[Charles Brockden Brown; Edited by Philip Barnard & Stephen Shapiro]
In addition to the definitive UVA text of Brown's seminal novel, this edition includes an introduction setting the work in its historical, literary, and intellectual contexts. Selections from William Godwin's 'Inquiry Concerning Political Justice' (1793), Erasmus Darwin's 'Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life' (1794), Benjamin Franklin's 'A Narrative of the Late Massacres' (1764), and Thomas Barton's 'The conduct of the Paxton-men' (1764) are included here, as are several of Brown's lesser-known but revealing writings on such subjects as somnambulism and the uses of history in fiction.
{
267pp,
155x230mm,
October 2006;
PB,
£9.95,
0872208532:9780872208537
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
ENGLISH QUESTION
: or Academic Freedoms
[Thomas Docherty; John Schad, Series Editor]
To be or not to be free, that is the question, the English question, the question of what is academic English at the beginning of the 21st century. So argues Thomas Docherty in this new and important new study, a study that begins with the claim that the fundamental idea governing the institution of the University is a will to freedom. Tracing a history of the modern European University from Vico onwards and including Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Newman, Alain, Benda and Jaspers, the author argues the academy’s will to freedom is grounded in study of the ‘eloquence’ that has shaped literate and humane values. He goes on to explore the current condition of English as a literary discipline, arguing that literary studies is (or should be) a search for the unknown; and that in only that search can the academy establish the real meaning -- or meanings -- of social, political and ethical freedom.
{
182pp,
152x229mm,
January 2008;
PB,
£15.95,
1845191331:9781845191337
/
HB,
£39.50,
1845191323:9781845191320
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
FIVE LORDS, YET NONE A PROTECTOR & WORDS SWEET & TIMELESS
: Two Plays
[Saoli Mitra]
Both are based on the Mahabharata. The first one narrates the story of Draupadi. She was married to the five royal Pandava brothers and her humiliation at the hands of the Kauravas, the cousins of her husbands and rivals for the throne, is depicted. The second play reveals the tragedy of the royal women, Satyavati, the three abducted princesses, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika, the queens Kunti and Gandhari, and the daughters-in-law, Draupadi, Subhadra and Uttara. Both the plays are one-woman performances in the tradition of kathakatha, dramatised storytelling that uses live music. By subverting traditional theatre and the gendering of the stories, Mitra's plays challenge the audience's views of 'decorum'.
{
224pp,
140x220mm,
April 2006;
HB,
£12.00,
8185604495:9788185604497
, Stree
} |
 |
FLAUBERT & DON QUIJOTE
: The Influence of Cervantes on Madame Bovary
[Soledad Fox]
This book tells the story of how Flaubert’s admiration for Cervantes’ Don Quijote unfolded, and how profoundly it shaped and influenced Flaubert’s ambition and his approach to all his major works, beginning with his breakthrough novel Madame Bovary. It thus fills a major gap in the history of the novel and explores, for the first time, just what Flaubert meant when he said, while writing Bovary: "Je retrouve toutes mes origins dans le livre que je savais par coeur avant de savoir lire, Don Quichotte" (I can trace all my origins back to the book I knew by heart... ). Several cultural and personal factors converged to establish the prominent place of Don Quijote in Flaubert’s imagination, and these are dealt with in depth in the book. But it is the profound parallels between the two novels that clearly illustrate how Don Quijote permeates Madame Bovary in both subject and approach. One such parallel is Alonso Quijano and Emma Bovary’s desire to imitate fiction, which reflects a kind of literary madness in which the attempt to impose the narrative conventions of romances on life only leads hero and heroine, respectively, to destruction, disappointment, and ultimately death. The borrowings and the transpositions are substantial and endless; and indeed the influence did not stop at Bovary, for Flaubert’s later grands romans, including the rewritten Education Sentimentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet, also display the quixotic hallmark. This study situates each author in his respective historical and aesthetic context, and provides key examples from Don Quijote and Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s Correspondence, as well as his earlier novels. Flaubert’s letters and novels show how the French author penetrated deeply into Cervantes’ novelistic approach and how his relationship to Don Quijote directly shaped his success at the crux of his career.
{
224pp,
152x229mm,
November 2008;
HB,
£44.95,
1845192575:9781845192570
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
GERMAINE DE STAËL, DAUGHTER OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
: The Writer & Her Turbulent Era
[Sergine Dixon]
One of the most fascinating and influential women in French history was Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). Raised in a stimulating intellectual environment by parents connected to the court of Louis XVI, she became an internationally known writer, intellectual, and political activist. As the engaging, intelligent host of a popular salon in Paris and through frequent travels, she met some of the leading Enlightenment figures of the day, many of whom became her friends and confidants: William Pitt the Younger, Benjamin Constant, Lord Byron, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Czar Alexander I, to name a few. Later in life she gained much notoriety and had to flee the country because of her outspoken opposition to the tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte. In this engrossing biography, Sergine Dixon traces both the personal and public life of this very accomplished woman. She recounts her early years in the waning years of the French royal court, the turbulent period of the French Revolution, her exiles to Switzerland and England, and her unwavering defence of republicanism during the reign of Napoleon. Analysing her novels, correspondence, and writings on politics and the intellectual trends of the time, Dixon presents an appealing portrait of the woman whose life and career bridged the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism.
{
304pp,
135x210mm,
October 2007;
PB,
£25.99,
1591025605:9781591025603
, Prometheus Books (Humanity Books)
} |
 |
GIVEN -- 1° ART 2° CRIME
: Modernity, Murder & Mass Culture
[Jean-Michel Rabaté; John Schad, Series Editor]
Investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematised by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout Jean-Michel Rabate is concerned with two key questions: what is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? and what has modern art to say about murder? Indeed, Rabate compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp’s fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the centre of his final work, ‘Etant Donnés’, and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. The text moves onward to Steven Hodel, the 'Black Dahlia' murder; Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugene Atget’s famous photographs of deserted Paris streets as presenting ‘the scene of the crime’; and Ralph Roff’s 1997 exhibition, which implied that modern art is indissociable from forensic gaze and a detective’s outlook, a view first advanced by Edgar Allan Poe.
{
228pp,
152x229mm,
September 2006;
PB,
£16.95,
1845191129:9781845191122
/
HB,
£47.50,
1845191110:9781845191115
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
GRAPH OF ROADS
: Selected Poems, 1968-1999
[Gilles Cyr; Translated by Patrick Williamson, Gerald Mangan, Patrick Boran, & Yann Lovelock]
"Though Gilles Cyr's work is rooted in the act of seeing, it is not content merely to remain with what is seen; it is not nature poetry, but goes on to encompass the nature of seeing. While nature poetry exploits its material, Gilles Cyr's expresses wholeness, it makes the necessary connection between what is seen and what is seeing. Ultimately sight manifests itself, at the human level, in speech, and that is where the poetry comes from. Cyr, however, sees it as his job to send us back to where it all began." -- Yann Love-lock.
{
104pp,
130x205mm,
October 2007;
PB,
£8.99,
1550712373:9781550712377
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
HANDBOOK OF CZECH PROSE WRITINGS, 1940-2005
[Bohuslava Bradbrook]
The turbulent events of World War II and the subsequent communist regime in Czechoslovakia strongly restricted Czech writers’ freedom of expression. Many sought and found literary freedom in exile. As Czech literature was developing in two very different locations and conditions, writers on both sides created diverse, yet extraordinarily interesting and commendable works; all were united in their wish to see their homeland liberated from the totalitarian regime. The suffering and generally adverse conditions of those who stayed at home are reflected in the works written both at home and in exile, especially after the two parties found secret ways of communicating between themselves. Many works abound in wit and humour, despite the difficult circumstances. After the fall of communism had brought the desired freedom of expression for all writers, the recent past still occasionally echoes in Czech literary works, but is written and read from new perspectives. As the dark age now seems to be gradually falling into oblivion, it is important to be reminded that even in the darkest times talented writers were alert to Czech national and literary undertones, and produced works which English-speaking readers would find new, fresh and captivating. While the availability of books in English may be still in a minority, synoptic interpretations of prose writings not yet translated to English provided in this Handbook add integral features that help to complete the picture of life at a time when cultural links between two parts of Europe were painfully severed.
{
156pp,
152x229mm,
December 2006;
HB,
£32.50,
1845191730:9781845191733
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
: Between Children's Literature & Adult Literature
[Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen & Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen (eds)]
On the occasion of Hans Christian Andersen's bicentenary the theme chosen was Hans Christian Andersen between Children's Literature and Adult Literature. At previous conferences focus had been exclusively on Andersen as poet and writer for adults, in which capacity he wrote novels, theatre plays, poems, and travel books, just as his fairy tales and stories were meant for all ages. But faced with the world-wide celebration in 2005 it seemed proper to include the child aspects of his works in the scholarly discussion. In its wide range of themes dealing with both adult and child aspects of Andersen's texts, this volume, consisting of papers read at the Odense Conference in 2005, endeavours to do justice to the whole of Andersen, whose immortal genius has a message for young and old all over the world.
{
639pp,
175x255mm,
January 2008;
HB,
£31.00,
8776742563:9788776742560
, University Press of Southern Denmark
} |
 |
HEIDEGGER’S BICYCLE
: Interfering with Victorian Texts
[Roger Ebbatson; John Schad, Series Editor]
In the 1990s it was the French theorists such as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault who, with their stress on linguistic play and undecidability, took Victorian Studies by storm; now, it seems, it is the Germans who are coming. In Roger Ebbatson’s new book, Marx, Simmel, Benjamin and, above all, Heidegger are unleashed on a range of Victorian texts -- some unsuspecting, some all too suspecting. The results are alarming: Ebbatson begins with Tennyson overshadowed by empire and homosocial tensions and ends with Conan Doyle writing about a bicycle belonging to a character called Heidegger. In between, he makes bone-shaking progress over a Victorian terrain marked out by Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson; along the way, Ebbatson considers shipwrecks, money, nature, the South Seas Mission, and ‘final solutions’. Tennyson, we discover, was afraid of his own shadow, Hopkins’s greatest poem was created by erratic compasses, Hardy wrote like Kafka, Stevenson was drawn to murderous missionaries, and Conan Doyle applauded the concentration camp. Ebbatson shows us that what the Germans bring to our understanding of the nineteenth century is a terrible awareness of the darkest moments of the darkest moments of the twentieth century.
REVIEW: "This is a richly rewarding bookwhose stringent analysis of Hardy is matched by its subtle ability to tease out the difference and disjunction inhabiting the Victorian text generally. Recommended." -- Andrew Radford, Hardy Society Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 2007.
{
172pp,
152x229mm,
October 2006;
PB,
£16.95,
1845191056:9781845191054
/
HB,
£49.50,
1845191048:9781845191047
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
HERE & SOMEWHERE ELSE
: Stories & Poems
[Grace Paley & Robert Nichols]
Husband and wife, parents and grandparents, Grace Paley and Robert Nichols are also two writers and activists who constantly engage the world. This collection, juxtaposing stories and poems by each of them, yields revealing comparisons while validating the truth that artists can write politically in many different ways. 'Here and Somewhere Else' is redolent with implications about the settings and themes in the collection. The stories are rooted in New York City and rural Vermont, yet the world outside constantly intrudes with its problems, its demands, its crises. Includes previously uncollected or unpublished fiction by each author.
{
147pp,
125x180mm,
March 2007;
PB,
£8.99,
1558615377:9781558615373
, Feminist Press
} |
 |
JINN FROM HYPERSPACE
: & Other Scribblings -- Both Serious & Whimsical
[Martin Gardner]
This new collection of Gardner gems takes its name from an essay on a mathematical theme, about a jinn (or genie) trapped in a 'Klein Bottle' -- an amusing tale that also teaches the maths phobic something interesting about a theoretical one-sided object with no distinction between inside and outside. Other topics in maths and physics include speculations about universes where time runs in reverse; the Banach-Tarski paradox (whereby a sphere, after being deconstructed, can be reassembled at twice its size); and a vigorous defence of the objective reality of mathematical theorems independent of human culture. On the literary side, Gardner discusses two neglected works by G K Chesterton, one of which concerns an imaginary but now very topical war between Islam and Christianity. He also considers the fantasies of L Frank Baum that don't take place in Oz, Clement Moore's ever-popular 'The Night Before Christmas', and the many fascinating books by Lewis Carroll that are sometimes overshadowed by his famous 'Alice in Wonderland'. A treat for longtime Gardner readers or the perfect introduction for newcomers, THE JINN FROM HYPERSPACE offers a rich selection of stimulating intellectual wonders.
{
307pp,
155x230mm,
December 2007;
HB,
£17.50,
1591025656:9781591025658
, Prometheus Books
} |
 |
LANDFALL 211
: Borderline
[Tze Ming Mok (ed)]
Savvy Auckland ethnoblogger, fiction-writer, poet, essayist and activist Ming Mok edits this book which rolls in the cultural muddle of present-day Aotearoa New Zealand. It features a diverse range of contemporary writers. Topics include a father's incarceration as an interned enemy alien in Somes Island; a move towards poetry; eating towards cultural authenticity.
{
200pp,
215x165mm,
May 2006;
PB,
£14.50,
1877372900:9781877372902
, University of Otago Press
} |
 |
LAST EFFORT OF DREAMS
: Essays on the Poetry of Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
[Francesco Loriggio (ed)]
When Pier Giorgio Di Cicco first appeared on the Canadian literary scene in the early 198os, he was immediately recognized as one of the most compelling voices of his generation. This is the first critical collection on Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and traces the steps of his career from different perspectives. The contributors, fellow poets and aca-demics alike, ponder Di Cicco's poetry in diverse ways: through remin-iscence, by taking stock, and by focusing on individual texts and specific themes. What emerges is an intriguing composite picture of Di Cicco's complex and unique identikit. The volume includes both scholarly analy-sis and testimonials by individuals who lived the literary history of which Di Cicco is a part. The inclusion of a bibliography of Di Cicco's publi-cations and of those about him makes this book a valuable tool for anyone approaching his works for the first time and anyone interested in contem-porary North American minority literatures or contemporary Canadian literature.
{
207pp,
155x230mm,
September 2007;
HB,
£38.50,
1554580196:9781554580194
, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
} |
 |
LAST WOMAN
: Selected Poems, 1991-2001
[Claudine Bertrand; Translated by Antonio D'Alfonso]
"The Last Woman", a selection from twenty years of poetry, is a voyage into being and living, into the country where a woman reveals herself without fear. This lyricism of survival emerges directly from an intimacy of words spoken by one in search of roots, loving and spiritual. French critic, Jean-Pierre Faye, says: "Claudine Bertrand stands between Gaston Miron and Tristan Tzara: a Quebec poet who invents her own new language." This selection includes poems from La dernière femme (1991), L'amoureuse intérieure (1997), Tomber du jour (1999), Le corps en tête (2001), and Jardin des Vertiges (2002).
{
72pp,
130x205mm,
December 2006;
PB,
£8.99,
1550712365:9781550712360
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
LETTERS & OTHER WRITINGS
: Selected Songs & Poems Translated by Stanley Lombardo & by Barbara Thorburn
[Abelard & Heloise; Translated, with Introduction by William Levitan]
A new translation of the complete correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, this volume also includes a new translation of The Calamities of Abelard, of the letters of Heloise and Peter the Venerable, and of selected songs, hymns, and laments of Abelard. Among the verse selections are translations by Stanley Lombardo and a translation by Barbara Thorburn of a recently discovered 'shaped' poem. A chronology, map, and index are also included.
{
356pp,
140x215mm,
April 2007;
PB,
£9.95,
0872208753:9780872208759
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
LITERARY GENIUS
: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature
[Joseph Epstein & Barry Moser]
What constitutes literary genius? This collection of essays focuses on twenty-five English-language writers whose original and enduring works enrich our lives. Renowned portraitist Barry Moser provides a handsome engraving of each writer, together with illustrations based upon their texts.
{
256pp,
190x235mm,
October 2007;
PB,
£12.99,
1589880358:9781589880351
, Paul Dry Books
} |
 |
MAN & BEAST
[Eric Cole]
For Irish-born poet and zookeeper Eric Cole the fourteen lines and rhythmic patterns of the sonnet echo the very building blocks of life. Within the basic structure of simple genetic material lies the limitless potential for the existence of all living things, be they man or beast. So, too, within the simple structure of the sonnet, there is a similar universe of untold possibilities. Now, in these robust and stylish poems, the mysteries of the animal kingdom are explored with genuine scientific curiosity and rendered with tenderness, stimulating language, and unmistakable Irish wit. From the reviled Portuguese man o’ war to the glorious hyacinth macaw, from the elusive snow leopard to the bizarre pangolin, and even to the human animal itself, Cole demonstrates how life exists in inexplicable but nonetheless indispensable variety, and this collection serves to remind us what we stand to lose if we fail to appreciate the small states of grace that befall us in the disappearing natural wonders of our world.
{
106pp,
140x215mm,
September 2006;
PB,
£5.99,
1897178042:9781897178041
, Insomniac Press
} |
 |
MARGARET ATWOOD
: A Psychoanalytical Study
[Rama Gupta]
The psychology and interactions of the characters in some of Margaret Atwood's most famous works (Cat's Eye; The Edible Woman; Surfacing) are examined in this insightful study. Revealing both the author’s preoccupation with the psychological underpinnings of human behaviour and the fallibility of her characters, each chapter explores Atwood's successful use of the troubled psyche to depict the conflicts of her protagonists.
{
166pp,
150x225mm,
October 2006;
HB,
£14.99,
1932705635:9781932705638
, Sterling Publishers PVT Ltd (New Dawn Press)
} |
 |
MARGARET LAURENCE -- A GIFT OF GRACE
: A Spiritual Biography
[Noelle Boughton]
A stunning book that captures the spirituality and talent of one of Canada's most celebrated writers, Noelle Boughton's biography of Margaret Laurence communicates a great deal about the decency and complexity of both the author and Canadian culture. Like most authors, Margaret Laurence's work drew on the community in which she lived, and the culture of the area informed the tone and content of her work. This original work traces the spiritual core and growth of one of Canada's most powerful artists. Starting from her roots in a middle-class, United Church, small-town prairie milieu, this beautifully wrought book traces Laurence's connection with her home town and its people and explores the themes of community, spirituality and social justice as they were expressed in her life and work. This is an indispensable guide to the life and development of one of Canada's most treasured writers.
{
208pp,
125x180mm,
October 2006;
PB,
£9.99,
0889614598:9780889614598
, Canadian Scholars' Press (Women's Press)
} |
 |
MARGARET LAURENCE'S EPIC IMAGINATION
[Paul Comeau]
Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) instinctively turned to the epic mode to create archetypal narratives of loss, exile, and redemption. Drawing on the Bible, Dante, and Milton, Laurence absorbed the epic structure and populated it with the Manawaka world of Hagar Shipley, Rachel Cameron, Stacey MacAindra, and Morag Gunn. Paul Comeau traces the development of Margaret Laurence's voice from its tentative beginnings in her African fiction to its culmination in the Manawaka Cycle. According to Comeau, Laurence's ability to illustrate the epic dimension in her characters' strengths and weaknesses has ensured her a lasting place among great Canadian writers.
{
186pp,
150x230mm,
January 2006;
PB,
£20.99,
0888644515:9780888644510
, University of Alberta Press
} |
 |
MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN
: Essays on Her Works
[Sean Thomas Dougherty (ed)]
Cultural activist, teacher and editor Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of the leaders of the multicultural turn in North American poetry. This volume of essays is the first to critically examine the poetry of this important writer and editor. In a personal yet critical essay, daughter Jennifer Gillan exhumes the role of kin and kinship networks in her mother's poetry. Tony Vallone explicitly examines the Italian- Americanness of Gillan's prosody and childhood, while Joe Weil attempts to place Gillan's work in relation to a number of schools of American poetics, political- ideologies, and autobiography. Rachel Guido DeVries articulates the Italian-American feminist ingredients of Gillan's poems, and editor Sean Thomas Dougherty reads her work through contemporary theories of Whiteness, class formation and resistance.
{
113pp,
115x180mm,
December 2006;
PB,
£10.99,
1550712500:9781550712506
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
MARY DI MICHELE
: Essays on Her Works
[Edited by Joseph Pivato]
Mary di Michele is an extraordinary voice in Canadian poetry. From the award-wining Mimosa and Other Poems, to her recent novel, Tenor of Love, di Michele explores the human experience with frankness and sensitivity. She has also chronicled the experiences of ethnic minority women with sharp images and memorable poetic lines. She is considered one of the founders of Italian-Canadian literature. The essays in this volume examine the full range of her works, especially 'Luminous Emergencies' and 'Debriefing the Rose'. The essays are by Nathalie Cooke, Lisa Bonato, Barbara Godard, Vera Golini, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Ian Williams, Richard Harrison, Debra Muchnik, and Joseph Pivato. The bibliography and interview are by the editor.
{
214pp,
110x180mm,
December 2006;
PB,
£10.99,
1550712497:9781550712490
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
MARY MELFI
: Essays on Her Works
[William Anselmi (ed)]
Let us introduce Mary Melfi, an accomplished writer, by way of a simple question: in Canada, who establishes the literary canon? Is it a simple exercise of power? For as the essays in this collection will demonstrate, Melfi's work is not only - to use those hanging definitions -- a work of excellence, it is so remarkably well developed in all genres from poetry to the novel, to the play, to the modern fairy tale that it deserves a recognition that has been late in coming. Melfi's work achieves importance by bringing into play displacement, irony, ethnicity, class and gender -- for being both of the times and outside of time. This is what we ask of our artists -- not to be ideologically compatible, but to be critically endowed. That Melfi is not more widely known in the Canadian literary field causes us to muse about the sociopolitical diktats that still marginalise a body of work of international stature. The contributors are Domenico D'Alessandro, William Anselmi, Lise Hogan, Francesco Loriggio, Eva Karpinski, and Marino Tuzi.
{
192pp,
140x215mm,
June 2007;
PB,
£10.99,
1550712519:9781550712513
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
MEDEA
[Euripides, Translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien]
Introduction and Notes by Robin Mitchell-Boyask.
REVIEW: "The excellent Introduction by Robin Mitchell-Boyask displays an admirable command of up-to-date scholarship and judiciously leaves controversial matters open to one's own interpretation. Arnson Svarlien's verse translation has both elegance and power -- it reads well, not just to the eye, but (happily for the director and actors) also to the ear." -- Ian Storey, Department of Classics, Trent University
{
71pp,
140x215mm,
April 2008;
PB,
£4.45,
0872209237:9780872209237
/
HB,
£14.95,
0872209245:9780872209244
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
MEMOIRS OF VICTOR HUGO
[Victor Hugo]
Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 26 1802 -- 22 May 1885) is recognised as the most influential Romantic writer of the 19th century and is often identified as the greatest French poet. His best-known works are the novels "Les Misérables" and "Notre-Dame de Paris" (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Poetry was another of his vocations: among many volumes, "Les Contemplations" and "La Légende des siècles" stand particularly high in critical esteem. Victor Hugo’s long and chequered life was filled with experiences of the most diverse character -- literature and politics, the court and the street, parliament and the theatre, labour, struggles, disappointments, exile and triumphs. This is a completely retyped and indexed version of the 1899 book with the same title.
{
164pp,
180x260mm,
July 2007;
HB,
£39.50,
1600212522:9781600212529
, Nova Science Publishers
} |
 |
MIDDLE ENGLISH POETRY IN MODERN VERSE
[Translated & Edited by Joseph Glaser]
This rich and lively anthology offers a broad selection of Middle English poetry from about 1200 to 1500 C.E., including more than 150 secular and religious lyrics and nine complete or extracted longer works, all translated into Modern English verse that closely resembles the original forms. Five complete satires and narratives illustrate important conventions of the period: Athelston, a historical romance; The Cock and the Fox, a beast fable by Robert Henryson; Sir Orfeo, a Breton lai; Saint Erkenwald, an alliterative saint’s life; and The Land of Cockayne, a fantasy. The book concludes with substantial excerpts from longer narratives such as Piers Plowman and Confessio Amantis. The poems are accompanied by introductions, notes, marginal glosses, source notes, and appendixes, including a bibliography and a list to help readers locate the lyrics in current original-language editions.
{
230pp,
140x215mm,
April 2007;
PB,
£9.95,
0872208796:9780872208797
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
MILTON IN THE AGE OF FISH
: Essays on Authorship, Text & Terrorism
[Michael Lieb & Albert C Labriola (eds)]
This multi-author collection by some of today’s most pre-eminent Miltonists highlights the paramount importance of Stanley Fish to Milton studies and, at the same time, provides major insights into the nature of Milton’s works. As a force to be reckoned with, Stanley Fish is among the most frequently cited commentators on Milton, testimony to his indelible imprint on the field. Of significance not only to Miltonists but also to critical and cultural theorists, this volume explains and exemplifies how many of the lines of inquiry that distinguish present-day scholarship were initiated by Stanley Fish. Fish validated the role of the reader as a major participant, if not a "character", in the works of Milton and struck a balance between historical study and explication of the text, thereby emphasising the interplay of the text and its context. His writings on Milton have also led to the ongoing controversy over Milton and terrorism and promoted intensive analysis of Milton's language and its connotative richness and tonal range. By fostering critical and cultural theories in the study of Milton’s works, Fish has heightened awareness of the aesthetics of literary achievement.
{
320pp,
155x230mm,
October 2006;
HB,
£39.99,
0820703842:9780820703848
, Duquesne University Press
} |
 |
MILTON THE DRAMATIST
[Timothy J Burbery]
This book-length study of Milton as a dramatist fills a longstanding gap in Milton scholarship. Combining author-contextual criticism, historicised reader-response theory, and new historicism, Timothy Burbery begins by answering common objections to the claim that the poet is a dramatist, including the putatively static natures of Comus and Samson Agonistes, Milton’s egoism, and his Puritanism. Further, Burbery asserts, recent biographical evidence of Milton’s consumption of drama, such as his father’s trusteeship of the Blackfriars Theater, suggests that the future poet viewed commercial plays and thus probably alludes to these experiences in his early poetry. Exposure to the public theatre may also have influenced major episodes of his own dramas, including the debate between the Lady and Comus, and Dalila’s stunning entrance in Samson. The study then examines Milton as a practitioner of drama by analysing Arcades and the Ludlow masque. Having mastered the conventions of masque in the former work, Milton stretched himself in Comus by composing a work that was far more play-like than any court masque. It is possible that his success with these dramas encouraged Milton to regard himself as a budding dramatist in the 1630s, for late in that decade he began sketching out ideas for tragedies on biblical subjects including the Fall, Sodom, and Abraham and Isaac. This material, found in the Trinity Manuscript, shows him working through practical problems of staging and presentation, and sets the foundation for Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. While Samson was "never intended for the stage", it nonetheless embeds numerous "stage" directions in its dialogue, including information about the characters’ appearances, gestures, and blocking. Awareness of these cues sheds light on some of the current critical debates, including the terrorist reading of the tragedy and Dalila’s role. Burbery surveys the surprisingly extensive stage history of Samson, a history that tends to confirm its theatrical viability. "Milton the Dramatist" emphasises Milton’s dramatic achievements and thus restores a more equitable balance to our appreciation of his total literary achievement.
{
206pp,
155x230mm,
February 2007;
HB,
£38.99,
0820703877:9780820703879
, Duquesne University Press
} |
 |
NAHANNI JOURNALS
: R M Patterson's 1927-1929 Journals
[Raymond Murray Patterson; Edited by Richard C Davis]
When you cross an Oxford graduate with a young man seeking gold and adventure in the remote wilderness, the result is "Nahanni Journals". In this fascinating account of Raymond Patterson, a Londoner who finds his destiny in the Nahanni and Flat Rivers region of the Northwest Territories, Richard C. Davis reveals to us an extraordinary life. Patterson's adventures are as swift and unpredictable as the river he canoes. Outdoor enthusiasts, historians, lovers of travel, and anyone interested in captivating stories will enjoy accompanying Patterson for the ride.
{
225pp,
155x230mm,
February 2008;
PB,
£17.99,
0888644779:9780888644770
, University of Alberta Press
} |
 |
NARCISSISM OF EMPIRE
: Loss, Rage & Revenge in the Works of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling & Isak Dinesen
[Diane Simmons]
Widely read in the age of British imperialism and still popular today, the five writers studied here have allowed millions to participate vicariously in the imperial project. Yet all of these writers, so instrumental in popularising the imperial agenda of power and dominance, bore deep emotional scars and as adults bolstered their fragile psychic states through fantasies of empire. While soldiers and politicians may know to bury or at least camouflage their fears and desires, inner fantasy is the necessary ingredient of literature, and popular fiction often offers the opportunity to probe the mind of an age. The connection between childhood loss and the desire for imperial escape, power and dominance is illuminated by De Quincey’s mad screeds against the Chinese as both terrifyingly powerful and laughably weak, while Stevenson’s romances, though written from an invalid’s bed, are credited with 'selling' the idea of empire as manly adventure. Conan Doyle’s tales of a Britain menaced at home by imperial blowback are models of Great Power paranoia that resonate today, and Kipling’s stories of imperial Britain grow increasingly grandiose as childhood’s psychic wounds are re-opened. Finally, Dinesen portrays plantation life in British East Africa as a gentle romance in which displaced African "squatters" serve as loyal and adoring retainers, providing the aristocratic aura for which the author yearns. It is sometimes said that, "Love’s loss is empire’s gain", and for these writers, Simmons shows, empire presented a magnificent opportunity to compensate for childhood calamity.
{
148pp,
152x229mm,
November 2006;
HB,
£55.00,
1845191560:9781845191566
/
PB,
£17.95,
1845191579:9781845191573
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
NARRATIVES OF LOVING RESISTANCE
: Two Stories
[Erich Hackl; Translated by Edward T Larkin]
The two stories contained in this edition -- 'Love at First Sight: A Recollection' and 'History of a Promise' -- reveal Erich Hackl's unique and luminous perspective on the relationship between historical reality and literary representation. Drawing on historical documents and authentic individuals, Hackl portrays the inspiring lives of those who have suffered the terror and injustice of twentieth-century fascism. Recovering from a wound sustained as a result of his involvement with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the Austrian Karl Sequens falls in love with Herminia Roudière Perpiñá, a strong and scrupulous Spanish woman who cared for him in the hospital. The story of their brief but enduring love both for each other and for social justice is narrated through the memory of their daughter Rosa María in 'Love at First Sight: A Recollection'. In his touching portrait of the fate of these non-fictional individuals, Erich Hackl illuminates an alternate perspective on Austria's position in the frenzied social and political configurations that mark Europe from the 1920s to the 1990s. In "History of a Promise," the mind of the septuagenarian protagonist Willi retraces a path from his poverty in the Vienna of the First Republic through his internment in the concentration camps to his entrepreneurial success in his chosen South American exile as he reveals for the first time a promise that he had made.
{
106pp,
140x215mm,
October 2006;
PB,
£8.99,
1572411384:9781572411388
, Ariadne Press
} |
 |
NORDIC LIGHT
[Thomas Bredsdorff, Søren Peter Hansen & Anne-Marie Mai]
"Nordic Light" mainly comprises Scandinavian contributions to two conferences convened by The International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ISECS) at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003, and at the Research Center on European Enlightenment at the Martin Luther University of Halle, Germany, in 2005. The theme of the former conference was the Global Eighteenth Century, that of the second one, Religion and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was nothing if not an age of networking. People travelled in real or imaginary worlds in order to connect, deride, improve, and learn. This was the age when the notion of universality took shape; ideas travelled because if rights and wrongs are universal, sound ideas must be accessible to all and unsound ones challenged by being exposed to foreign scrutiny. The various contributions show facets of Scandinavian research into the 18th century. The need to see Danish, Norwegian and Swedish culture and literature in a larger context is a characteristic of recent research, as the included essays will demonstrate.
{
198pp,
150x220mm,
December 2007;
PB,
£20.45,
8776742709:9788776742706
, University Press of Southern Denmark
} |
 |
ORAL ART FORMS & THEIR PASSAGE INTO WRITING
[Else Mundal & Jonas Wellendorf (eds)]
What happens when oral texts are removed from their original medium and written down? This collection examines the complex interrelationship between the oral and the written and the problems of textualisation. Taking their point of departure in the theories of orality and literalisation as well as the preserved texts and their transmission the individual contributors, experts from the fields of Old Norse, Old English, Latin and Homeric studies as well as from later Serbian and Norwegian folklore, set out to explore the commonalities and differences in the process of literalisation.
{
241pp,
155x230mm,
January 2008;
HB,
£30.00,
8763505045:9788763505048
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
OSCAR WILDE
: The Happy Prince & Other Fairy Tales
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, the son of a physician and writer; his mother wrote poems and was an authority on Celtic folklore. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a student, already an enthusiastic follower of Walter Pater, he began to lead a life completely shaped by aesthetic premises. Typical of this attitude is Pater's statement: 'To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.' In 1884, after a lecture tour in Canada and the United States, where he caused a sensation as a dandy who had 'nothing to declare but his genius ', Wilde married the daughter of a prominent Irish barrister. At the same time, the marriage marked the beginning of a peak creative period for him. During this time, in addition to his fairytale collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1892) and numerous poems and plays, he also wrote his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), whose hero's life rises above all morality and ends in the morass of a sinful existence, anticipating the author's own fate. Wilde's most successful works, in his lifetime, were his plays. Among them, Salome (1891) occupies a special place because of the congenial illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Wilde's homoerotic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas caused him to be sued by the young man's father, resulting in a two-year prison sentence. A social pariah, he tried with little success to begin a new career as a writer in France after he had served his sentence. On 30 November 1900, he died, completely impoverished, in Paris. The two collections of fairy tales do not go back to folktales that have come down to us anonymously, but belong to the genre of 'literary fairy tales', which, as the creation of a particular writer, represent a separate literary genre with a long tradition that goes back to antiquity.
{
87pp,
245x290mm,
April 2007;
HB,
£22.00,
3936681139:9783936681130
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
OUTLINE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
[Maurice Baring]
Russian literature begins with the nineteenth century, that is to say with the reign of Alexander I. It was then that the literary fruits on which Russia has since fed were born. The seeds were sown, of course, centuries earlier; but the history of Russian literature up to the nineteenth century is not a history of literature, it is the history of Russia. It may well be objected that it is difficult to separate Russian literature from Russian history; that for the understanding of Russian literature an understanding of Russian history is indispensable. This is probably true; but, in a sketch of this dimension, it would be quite impossible to give even an adequate outline of all the vicissitudes in the life of the Russian people which have helped and hindered, blighted and fostered the growth of the Russian tree of letters. All that one can do is to mention some of the chief landmarks amongst the events which directly affected the growth of Russian literature until the dawn of that epoch when its fruits became palpable to Russia and to the world. This book has been completely retyped and indexed from the 1914 version with the same title.
{
131pp,
140x215mm,
August 2006;
PB,
£25.99,
1594549419:9781594549410
, Nova Science Publishers
} |
 |
PERSIAN TALES
[D L R Lorimer (ed)]
Included in this collection of traditional tales are such titles as: The prince and the peri; The sad tale of the mouse's tail; The seven daughters; and The baker and the grateful fish.
{
360pp,
155x230mm,
October 2008;
PB,
£18.99,
0936347910:9780936347912
, IBEX Publishers
} |
 |
PHILIP PULLMAN'S 'HIS DARK MATERIALS', A MULTIPLE ALLEGORY
: Attacking Religious Superstition in 'The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe' & ' Paradise Lost'
[Leonard F Wheat]
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is one of the most popular fantasy works of our time. Both the trilogy and a new movie based on it are being marketed chiefly as YA (young adult) fare. But Leonard F Wheat shows in this fascinating analysis that 'His Dark Materials' is far more than a YA tale. At a deeper level it is a complex triple allegory -- a surface story that uses 231 symbols to tell three hidden stories. As such, it is among the most profound, intellectually challenging, and thoroughly adult works ever written. Wheat brings the hidden stories to light. He demonstrates how Pullman retells two prominent works of British literature -- C S Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' and John Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. Pullman's aim is to counter Lewis' pro-Christian allegory with his own anti-Christian allegory. Pullman does this in his second allegory by turning 'Paradise Lost' upside down. Satan and his daughter, Sin, along with Adam's murderous son Cain, become heroes; God and Jesus become villains. This retold story depicts our society's warfare between knowledge (symbolised by Dust) and religious superstitions (symbolised by Spectres). Pullman adds an original third hidden story featuring Christian missionaries, Charles Darwin, agnostics, and atheists. Wheat's intriguing interpretation of Pullman's work is the first to point out the many allegorical features of 'His Dark Materials' and to highlight the ingenious ways in which Pullman subtly attacks religious institutions and superstitions. Pullman fans as well as readers interested in fantasy or concerned about religious coercion will find Wheat's book not only stimulating but overflowing with surprises.
{
338pp,
155x230mm,
December 2007;
PB,
£13.50,
1591025893:9781591025894
, Prometheus Books
} |
 |
PLACE OF LIGHT
[Mary Bucci Bush]
Each of these impeccably crafted and sensitive stories is built around the outstanding ordinary individuals, the eccentrics of the rural working class of Mary Bush's native upstate New York. These are gritty depictions of the day-to-day lives of the hardworking poor, carrying with them their secret burdens. At the cores of these wide-ranging narratives are moments of surprise, illuminations that stun the thoughtful central personalities themselves.
{
242pp,
110x180mm,
December 2006;
PB,
£10.99,
1550712195:9781550712193
, Guernica Editions
} |
 |
POWER OF WEAKNESS
: Stories of the Chinese Revolution
[Ding Ling & Lu Hsun; Afterword by Tani Barlow]
Take the riveting social criticisms and literary wit of Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll House' and transplant them to Chinese soil: what emerges is this unique collection juxtaposing the works of the Chinese writing master Lu Xun with his literary successor Ding Ling. Each of the works by these two astute authors carries a biting social commentary on the hypocrisies of the burgeoning Chinese state in regards to women during the first half of the twentieth century. Containing six works in total, this fascinating collection reveals the force tradition and social expectation wield in historical moments where they are being renegotiated. In his speech 'What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?' and his short stories 'New Year's Sacrifice' and 'Regret for the Past', Lu Xun exposes how the anti-Confucian nationalist movement of the 1920s liberated women's thoughts beyond the constraints of tradition only to leave them the victims of social expectation and financial dependency. Ding Ling, writing in response to the clash between the nationalist and communist movements during the late twenties into the mid-forties, echoes Lu Xun's sentiments in her speech 'Thoughts on March 8 (Women's Day)' and the short stories 'New Faith' and 'When I Was in Xia Village'. The result is a compelling collection that questions the options created for empowered, intelligent women living in a nation still clinging to tradition.
{
156pp,
125x170mm,
June 2007;
PB,
£8.99,
1558615482:9781558615489
, Feminist Press
} |
 |
PRINCE
[Niccolo Machiavelli; Edited & Translated by James B Atkinson]
The best-annotated translation of The Prince available.
REVIEW: "This edition of the The Prince has three distinct and disparate objectives: to provide a fresh and accurate translation; to analyze and find the roots of Machiavelli's thought; and to collect relevant extracts from other works by Machiavelli and some contemporaries, to be used to illuminate and explicate the text. The objectives are all reached with considerable and admirable skill. Professor Atkinson has done a great service to students and teachers of Machiavelli, who should certainly welcome this as the most useful edition of The Prince in English." -- Mario Domandi, Vassar College.
{
426pp,
140x215mm,
April 2008;
PB,
£11.95,
0872209199:9780872209190
/
HB,
£29.95,
0872209202:9780872209206
, Hackett Publishing
} |
 |
PURSUING GIRAFFE
: A 1950s Adventure
[Anne Innis Dagg]
In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realisation of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. One of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa (before Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey), her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journey, as well as her naiveté about the complex social and political issues in Africa. Once in the field, she recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa. Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author’s response to an 'exotic' world far removed from the Toronto where she grew up, the book records her visits to Zanzibar, Victoria Falls, and her climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Pursuing Giraffe is a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century.
{
276pp,
155x230mm,
February 2006;
PB,
£17.50,
0889204632:9780889204638
, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
} |
 |
QUARRELING WITH GOD
: Mystic Rebel Poems of the Dervishes of Turkey
[Jennifer Ferraro; With Latif Bolat]
For the first time in English, this collection presents a compilation of seven centuries of the mystic hymns of Turkey's rebellious Sufi poets, the popular folk counterparts to Rumi whose poems are characterised by a passionate and unorthodox commitment to Truth. At the time Rumi was writing in ancient Anatolia, many other great mystics in the region were also composing wild, ecstatic and controversial poems which were circulated among the people as spiritual songs (called 'nefes' and 'illahis') still played and sung today in sacred dervish ceremonies and gatherings. These poems were meant to swiftly and easily penetrate the heart of the spiritual aspirant whether educated or uneducated, and awaken the human heart to its divine inheritance. These poems present a spiritual tradition from the Islamic world which bravely challenged orthodox religion and emphasised universal mystic love and tolerance.
{
120pp,
150x230mm,
September 2006;
PB,
£13.50,
1883991684:9781883991685
, Caveat Press (White Cloud Press)
} |
 |
QUEEN IS IN THE GARBAGE
[Lila Karp; Afterword by Sharon Holland]
A startling stream-of-consciousness novel that engages questions of feminism which are as relevant today as when the novel was first published in 1969. Shifting beautifully between past and present, consciousness and dreams, Lila Karp explores the complex psyche of thirty-two year old Harriet Battenberg as she painfully reflects on her life while in the midst of a fourteen hour labour. Unmarried and entering premature labour during a holiday in her native New York, Harriet meditates on questions of motherhood, marriage and identity. Vividly told scenes of her past reveal how her history, marked by an embittered relationship with her mother; a series of unfulfilling relationships with men; a miscarriage and an abortion; and an ongoing struggle to understand what being a woman means for her, has brought Harriet to this moment. It is difficult to find authors who deal as candidly with a woman's experience of childbirth as Karp, who writes with a rare, disquieting honesty of its physical and emotional trauma without having her characters dip into self-pity. Karp's wit and unique literary style make her a distinct voice amongst writers from the 1960s US feminist movement, a voice which still resounds today for everyone desperately fighting to find themselves and write their own histories, and futures. This is a shocking and absorbing story which magnificently applies a feminist perspective to deconstruct the fundamental questions of womanhood, autonomy, and the very essence of human existence.
{
170pp,
140x210mm,
May 2007;
PB,
£10.99,
1558615385:9781558615380
, Feminist Press
} |
 |
READING WRITERS READING
: Canadian Authors' Reflections
[Danielle Schaub (ed)]
Over 160 Canadian writers, in English and French, write about their experiences of reading. With striking photographs of each writer, Reading Writers Reading offers a sublime voyage into the heart of literary creation. Co-published with The Hebrew University Magnes Press.
{
346pp,
280x260mm,
October 2006;
HB,
£35.50,
0888644590:9780888644596
, University of Alberta Press
} |
 |
RED EARTH, WHITE EARTH
: A Novel
[Will Weaver]
Having fled his family's farm at eighteen with a promise never to return, Guy Pehrsson is drawn back into his past when he receives his grandfather’s ominous letter, "Trouble here. Come home when you can." He returns to discover a place both wholly familiar and barely recognisable and is cast into the centre of an interracial land dispute with the exigencies of war. Widely acclaimed when first published in the eighties, the timeless novel "Red Earth, White Earth" showcases Will Weaver’s rough ease with language and storytelling, frankly depicting life’s uneven terrain and crooked paths.
{
356pp,
140x215mm,
November 2006;
PB,
£12.99,
0873515552:9780873515559
, Minnesota Historical Society Press (Borealis Books)
} |
 |
RENAISSANCE ECOLOGY
: Imagining Eden in Milton's England
[Ken Hiltner (ed)]
The essays in Renaissance Ecology consider how writers and artists such as John Milton imagined, by way of Eden, a future where human beings would live in greater peace with the natural world. This impressive collection, which includes contributions by such eminent scholars as Barbara Lewalski and Diane McColley, takes an exciting, new, 'green' approach to representations of Eden, while also considering the role of gender, politics, and poetics, discussing relevant issues of both literature and culture.
{
May 2008;
HB,
£41.50,
0820704024:9780820704029
, Duquesne University Press
} |
 |
RIDDLE OF LIFE & DEATH
: Tell Me a Riddle/The Death of Ivan Ilych
[Tillie Olsen & Leo Tolstoy; Introduction by Jules Chametzky]
On the surface, these two stories have seemingly little in common, apart from the facts that the marriages portrayed are quarrelsome, a main character in each dies at its close, and the Americans in Olsen's story came originally from a village in Russia. Most profoundly, of course, these two literary classics dare to pose difficult existential questions: What is the meaning of life? Was my life of value? Why am I dying? The narrative employed in Tolstoy's novella is linear and realistically detailed. The style of Olsen's story, set in the United States about a century later, is allusive, moving in psychological time, from the senses, voices, and scenes in the present to memories of the past. Other differences are sharper still: Tolstoy's Ilych is a self-satisfied Czarist official; Olsen's protagonist Eva, is a 69 year-old dissatisfied working-class housewife, mother, and grandmother. Tolstoy focuses entirely on the life of a 'model' man of his generation, who is successful professionally, though less so in his private life. Olsen often freeze-frames the views of various family members as each considers the grandparents Eva and David, whose quarrels send out concentric emotional ripples. Unlike the ending of Tolstoy's story, in which only the dying Ilych comes to a moment of illumination, the denouement of Olsen's story is shared by those around the dying Eva, especially her husband David and her nurse/granddaughter Jeannie.
{
158pp,
125x180mm,
March 2007;
PB,
£8.99,
1558615369:9781558615366
, Feminist Press
} |
 |
RITES OF COMPASSION
: 'Old Mrs Harris' & 'A Simple Heart'
[Willa Cather & Gustave Flaubert; Introduced by Mary Gordon]
Personally selected by award-winning writer Mary Gordon, these two stories by Willa Cather and Gustave Flaubert render subtle portraits of characters who achieve nobility as they willingly serve people who take them for granted. Set in a house Cather modelled on her own childhood home, 'Old Mrs. Harris' depicts the staunch matriarch of a busy household; her tale and her life revolve around her ineffectual son-in-law, her displaced southern debutante daughter, and a bevy of grandchildren whose dreams seem out of reach. In 'A Simple Heart', written by Flaubert at the request of George Sand, Félicité is a faithful servant first to a family fallen on hard times and then, shockingly, to a stuffed parrot she confuses with the Holy Spirit. Cruel and honest, these two stories explore the ways in which families treat their ageing members, the harsh impatience of the young, and the patient compassion of women who make their family's everyday lives possible.
{
152pp,
125x180mm,
December 2007;
PB,
£8.99,
1558615628:9781558615625
, Feminist Press
} |
 |
ROMANTIC HOSPITALITY & THE RESISTANCE TO ACCOMMODATION
[Peter Melville]
What does hospitality have to do with Romanticism? What are the conditions of a Romantic welcome? Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation traces the curious passage of strangers through representative texts of English Romanticism, while also considering some European philosophical 'pre-texts' of this tradition. From Rousseau’s invocation of the cot-less Carib to Coleridge’s reception of his Porlockian caller, Romanticisms encounters with the 'strange' remind us that the hospitable relation between subject and Other is invariably fraught with problems. Drawing on recent theories of accommodation and estrangement, Peter Melville argues that the texts of Romantic hospitality (including those of Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley) are often troubled by the subject’s failure to welcome the Other without also exposing the stranger to some form of hostility or violence. Far from convincing Romantic writers to abandon the figure of hospitality, this failure invites them instead to articulate and theorise a paradoxical imperative governing the subject’s encounters with strangers: if the obligation to welcome the Other is ultimately impossible to fulfil, then it is also impossible to ignore. This paradox is precisely what makes Romantic hospitality an act of responsibility. This book brings together the wide-ranging interests of hospitality theory, diet studies, and literary ethics within a single investigation of visitation and accommodation in the Romantic period. As re-visionary as it is interdisciplinary, the book demonstrates not only the extent to which we continue to be influenced by Romantic views of the stranger but also, more importantly, what Romanticism has to teach us about our own hospitable obligations within this heritage.
{
199pp,
155x230mm,
March 2007;
HB,
£38.50,
0889205175:9780889205178
, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
} |
 |
ROSTAM
: Tales of Love & War from Persia's Book of Kings
[Abolqasem Ferdowsi; Translated with an Introduction by Dick Davis]
Rostam is Iran's greatest mythological hero, a Persian Hercules, magnificent in strength and courage. As recounted in the tenth-century Book of Kings (Shahnameh) by the poet Ferdowsi, he was an indomitable force in ancient Persia for 500 years, undergoing many trials of combat, cunning and endurance. Although Rostam served a series of often-fickle kings, he was always his own man, committed to the greater good of Iran. His adventures are some of the best-loved of all Persian narratives and remain deeply resonant in Iranian culture. This book begins with the birth of Rostam’s father Zal and ends with Rostam’s death. The tales tell of the love between Zal and Rostam’s mother, the Kaboli princess Rudabeh; of Rostam’s miraculous birth, aided by the magical bird Simorgh; of Rostam’s youth and the selection of his trusty horse Rakhsh; of his affair with Princess Tahmineh, the birth of their son Sohrab, and, after Sohrab grows into a mighty warrior himself, the tragic confrontation between father and son. The tales conclude with Rostam’s war against demons, his seven trials, his rescue of Prince Bizhan, and finally his battle, both intellectual and physical, with the ambitious and religiously-driven prince Esfandyar.
{
320pp,
120x185mm,
March 2007;
PB,
£16.99,
1933823119:9781933823119
, Mage Publishers
} |
 |
SCIENCE & OMNISCIENCE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE
[Jonathan Taylor]
This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace's much-cited dream in 1812 of 'a vast intelligence' which can 'embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom' and for which the future and the past are equally calculable. Laplace sets out THE echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience and the classic statement of a deterministic universe. The author investigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. In particular, it aims to retrace some of the ways in which Laplacian–Newtonian models of scientific 'in |
