Old Is Gold

William Empson is, alongside T. S. Eliot, the greatest genius among twentieth-century critics, and Some Versions of Pastoral is widely recognised as one of the most extraordinary works of the golden age of English literary criticism. Ranging with astonishing virtuosity between works of several...

The death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey has baffled scholars and armchair detectives for centuries; this book offers compelling new evidence and, at last, a solution to the mystery. On a cold October afternoon in 1678, the Westminster justice of the peace Sir Edmund...

At the outbreak of the First World War, Great Britain quickly took steps to initiate a naval blockade against Germany. In addition to military goods and other contraband, foodstuffs and fertilizer were also added to the list of forbidden exports to Germany. As the...

This study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive examinations ever devoted to a critical transformation in the material substance of the printed page; it carries out this exploration in the history of the book, moreover, by embedding these typographical changes in the...

In The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making Joseph Masco examines the strange American intimacy with and commitment to existential danger. Tracking the simultaneous production of nuclear emergency and climate disruption since 1945, he focuses on the psychosocial accommodations as well...

By emphasising the role of nuclear issues, After Hiroshima, published in 2010, provides an original history of American policy in Asia between the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Drawing on a wide range of documentary...

The Indian Imagination focuses on literary developments in English both in the colonial and postcolonial periods of Indian history. Six divergent writers-Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo), Mulk Raj Anand, Balachandra Rajan, Nissim Ezekiel, Anita Desai, and Arun Joshi-represent a consciousness that has emerged from the...

This book shows how Latin American writers and artists in the crisis-decades of the 1920s and 1930s used modernist techniques to explore national issues in relation to global capitalism. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary archive of novels, poetry, essays, photography, and architecture, it includes...

Wallace Stevens's musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various interlocking perspectives....

This book reinterprets British dramas of the early-nineteenth century through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. Unlike most playwrights of previous generations, the writers of British Romantic dramas generally did not work in the theatre themselves. However, they closely...

1. Introduction2. Hospitals and Nursing Before the Great War3. Nurses and the Military Medical Services in the Great War4. Women and War Work (1): Debates and Issues5. Women and War Work (2): Nursing6. The Nurse Memoirs (1)7. The Nurse Memoirs (2)8. The Nurse Memoirs...

Samuel Beckett's work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett's own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have...

This book analyses the gender roles and political contexts of spy fiction narratives published during the years of the Cold War. It offers an introduction to the development of spy fiction both in England and in the United States and explores the ways in...

Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanity's place in nature, but it is also more cognitively demanding and less emotionally satisfying than any myth. From the publication of the...

A Vindication of the Redhead investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide...

The first full length treatment of ethnic and national identity in early Twentieth-century China, Leibold traces the political and cultural strategies employed by Han Chinese elites in the process of incorporating, both discursively and physically, the diverse inhabitants of the last Qing dynasty into...

The Multiverse of Office Fiction liberates Herman Melville's 1853 classic, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," from a microcosm of Melville studies, namely the so-called Bartleby Industry. This book aims to illuminate office fiction--fiction featuring office workers such as clerks, civil servants, and company employees--as an underexplored...

This book explores Darwinism in modern Italian literature. In the years between Italy's unification (1861) and the rise of fascism, many writers gave voice to anxieties connected with the ideas of evolution and progress. This study shows how Italian authors borrowed and reworked a...

Navigating Urban Soundscapes: Dublin and Los Angeles in Fiction offers an innovative analytical framework to explore sound in different media and across two distinct urban soundscapes. Studying a wide range of novels, films, and radio dramas, using Dublin and Los Angeles as case studies,...

After 1979, Switzerland became increasingly involved in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a provider of humanitarian aid and good offices. It delivered aid to the region, hosted Soviet prisoners of war and eventually mediated between the Afghan regime and the mujahideen. What is puzzling about this...