Routledge Focus on Literature
Rilke’s Hands: An Essay on Gentleness
1st Edition
By Harold Schweizer
May 27, 2024
This is a book of meditative reading. Each of the sixty-one aphoristic entries aims to interpret Rilke’s poetry as a musician might play Debussy’s Clair de lune, to transpose into the key of language the song, the melody, and the refrain of Rilke’s gentle disposition: his recognition of the ...
Shakespeare and the Theater of Pity: Sinon’s Borrowed Tears
1st Edition
By Shawn Smith
May 27, 2024
This volume explores Shakespeare’s interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience’s most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning ...
Shakespeare in the Present: Political Lessons under Biden
1st Edition
By Philip Goldfarb Styrt
May 27, 2024
Shakespeare in the Present: Political Lessons under Biden is the first case study in applying the lessons of Shakespeare’s plays to post-Trump America. It looks at American politics through the lens of Shakespeare, not simply equating figures in the contemporary world to Shakespearean characters, ...
Speech Acts in Blake’s Milton
1st Edition
By Brian Russell Graham
May 27, 2024
Using a framework based on J. L. Austin’s understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer’s work on how things are done with words in Milton’s and Blake’s poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake’s epic poem Milton. With the ...
Masculinities in Post-Millennial Popular Romance
1st Edition
By Eirini Arvanitaki
January 29, 2024
This book focuses on the projection of the hero’s masculinity in a selection of post-millennial popular romance narratives and attempts to discover if, and to what extent, this projection reinforces or challenges patriarchal ideas about gender. In the majority of these narratives the hero is often ...
Dialogue in the Digital Age: Why it Matters How We Read and What We Say
1st Edition
By Patrick Grant
September 25, 2023
Combining literary criticism and theory with anthropology and cognitive science, this highly relevant book argues that we are fundamentally shaped by dialogue. Patrick Grant looks at the manner in which dialogue informs and connects the personal, political, and religious dimensions of human ...
On Lingering and Literature
1st Edition
By Harold Schweizer
September 25, 2023
Lingering and its decried equivalents, such as dawdling, idling, loafing, or lolling about, are both shunned and coveted in our culture where time is money and where there is never quite enough of either. Is lingering lazy? Is it childish? Boring? Do poets linger? (Is that why poetry is boring?) Is...
Sham Ruins: A User's Guide
1st Edition
By Brian Willems
September 25, 2023
In the middle of the eigtheenth century, a new fad found its way into the gardens of England's well-to-do: building fake Gothic ruins. Newly constructed castle towers and walls looked like they were already falling apart, even on the first day of their creation. Made of stone, plaster, or even ...
Wanderers: Literature, Culture and the Open Road
1st Edition
By David Brown Morris
September 25, 2023
This book introduces the idea and experience of wandering, as reflected in cultural texts from popular songs to philosophical analysis, providing both a fascinating informal history and a necessary vantage point for understanding - in our era - the emergence of new wanderers. Wanderers offers a ...
Biofictions: Literary and Visual Imagination in the Age of Biotechnology
1st Edition
By Lejla Kucukalic
May 31, 2023
Biofictions introduces three novel concepts: ‘biofiction,’ ‘bioimagination,’ and ‘biodiscourse’ to talk about intersections of literary and visual texts and biotechnology. The book proposes a new interdisciplinary area of research that correlates processes of genetics and literature, based on two ...
Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture
1st Edition
By Margaret Jay Jessee
May 31, 2023
Female Physicians in American Literature traces the woman physician character throughout her varying depictions in 19th-century literature, from her appearance in sensational fiction as an evil abortionist to her more well-known idyllic, feminine presence in novels of realism and regionalism. "...
Mapping the Origins of Figurative Language in Comparative Literature
1st Edition
By Richard Trim
May 31, 2023
This book investigates the origins of figurative language in literary discourse within a cognitive framework. It represents an interface between linguistics and literature and develops a 6-tier theoretical model which analyses the different factors contributing to the creation of figurative words ...