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How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? Conspicuous Silences examines the effect of this literary strategy on the reader's experience of a selection of Victorian novels.

Sophie Duncan illuminates iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and careers of the actresses who played them. Duncan draws on a wealth of archival material to explore the vital ways in which fin-de-siecle Shakespeare and Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other.

Stephen J. Ross examines the concept of nature in the work of John Ashbery. Through close readings of Ashbery's poetry and critical prose, he reveals Ashbery's work to be a case study of the dramatic transformation of nature in art and literature since World War II.

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley reappraises the lines of influence said to exist between Joyce's writing and early cinema, and provides an alternative to previous psychoanalytic readings of Joyce and film. By putting Joyce's literary work into dialogue with both early cinema and phenomenology, this book elucidates and enlivens literature, film, and philosophy.

Duncan White draws on previously unpublished and neglected material to tell the story of Nabokov the professional writer; to explore how he balanced his late modernist aesthetics with the demands of a booming American literary marketplace; and to reconceptualise the way we think about one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century.

Modernist Physics studies literary texts and scientific ideas in their historical context to provide an original account of the ways in which Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence engaged with the scientific theories, especially those of Albert Einstein.

This volume examines how literature was central to the debates about royal succession and political culture of the early eighteenth century. It reshapes our understanding of writers such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison, as well as our understanding of political, literary, and material cultures of the time.

The first extended examination of the influence of monasticism on Wordsworth's writing. Covering the poet's development between 1806 and 1822, it considers how a series of sources describing medieval monastic life in the north of England influenced Wordsworth's thinking about regional attachment, trans-historical community, and national cohesion.

Draws on the unpublished writings of Charles Olson and situates his work in the context of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and music to tell the story of how American poets and artists reimagined art and literature for the post-war world.

This book shows how Ashbery's poetry has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange. Through detailed close readings of his poetry, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented.

Focuses on the representation of masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders and comprehensively interrogates the construction, operation, and problematization of masculinities in this genre.

When we think of writers today, we often think of them as thin and poor-as starving artists. This book traces the history of this idea, and asks why hunger has been such a compelling metaphor for thinking about writing in modern times.

Thomas Owens explores exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns which the poets used to express ideas about poetry, religion, criticism, and philosophy, and sets out the importance of analogy in their creative thinking.

This book examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout this career. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics, The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.

What is film criticism for? This book aims to answer this question It argues that art cinema's political effect is the result of indeterminacy and not character-centric meaning.

Reading Veganism focuses on the iteration of the trope 'the monstrous vegan' across two hundred years of Anglophone literature. Through veganism's relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the 'human,' the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted.

Abstraction in Post-War British Literature explores the ways in which writers and thinkers responded to non-representational art in the decades following the Second World War. By offering a chronological overview of the period in Britain, it questions how abstraction came to be discovered, absorbed and reimagined in literature.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan narrates forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and love between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese between 1853 and 1912.

This book shows how prose writers in the Victorian period grappled with the sea as a setting, a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor.

This volume is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. It explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to late medieval manuscripts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose.

This study explores Beckett's representation of physical pain in his theatre plays in the long aftermath of World War II, emphasising how the issues raised by this staging of pain speak directly to matters lying at the heart of his work.

Matthew Day reassesses how the spread of Renaissance humanism in England impacted the reception of Virgil. In emphasizing the very gradual pace of humanist development and the continuous influence of medieval scholarship, a more qualified view is reached of how humanism did and (just as importantly) did not affect Virgilian reading and translation.

Explores the literature of Stevie Smith with particular emphasis on the importance of the aphorism: a short, witty saying which expresses a general truth. It argues that the aphorism offers Smith a means of managing emotional statements in her work, enabling her to make, and make light of, sincere or dramatic communications.

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960.