Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate—or undermine—romance and happy endings?
How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen ......
On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume-newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction-display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. ......
Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book Prize Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, ......
"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and ......
A landmark collection of early English books, with many gorgeous illustrations.English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton examines the history of early English books, exploring the concept of putting the English language into print with close study of the texts, the formats, the audiences, and the functions of English books. Lavishly ......
The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain. In ......
New avenues for teaching Macbeth Shakespeare's Macbeth combines the themes of ambition, assassination, guilt, and the supernatural in ways that continue to provoke questions about political legitimacy, the construction of national and personal identities, and the role of violence in defining masculinity. This insightful and ......
New avenues for teaching Macbeth Shakespeare's Macbeth combines the themes of ambition, assassination, guilt, and the supernatural in ways that continue to provoke questions about political legitimacy, the construction of national and personal identities, and the role of violence in defining masculinity. This insightful and ......
Derived from the Latin abiectus, literally meaning "thrown or cast down," "abjection" names the condition of being servile, wretched, or contemptible. In Western religious tradition, to be abject is to submit to bodily suffering or psychological mortification for the good of the soul. In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller ......