Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities – serie

A substantial reference work that supersedes existing studies, the Companion, explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to a wide range of artistic practices and activities, past and present. The 'arts' are defined broadly as cultural processes that take in publishing, exhibiting, performing, reconstructing and disseminating. The 30 newly commissioned chapters are divided into 6 sections: Shakespeare and the Book; Shakespeare and Music; Shakespeare on Stage and in Performance; Shakespeare and Youth Culture; Shakespeare, Visual and Material Culture; and Shakespeare, Media and Culture. Each chapter provides both a synthesis and a discussion of a topic, informed by current thinking and theoretical reflection. Key Features* Addresses Shakespeare in terms of a global frame of reference* Chapters consider chronology and overview, critical history and analysis* Responds to a growing critical and pedagogical interest in the relations between Shakespeare, the arts, film, performance and mass media more generally.

The first reference to literary and cultural representations of war in 20th-century English & US literature and film.Covering the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the War on Terror, this Companion reveals the influence of modern wars on the imagination.These newly researched and innovative essays connect 'high' literary studies to the engagement of film and theatre with warfare, extensively covers the literary and cultural evaluation of the technologies of war and open the literary field to genre fiction.Divided into 5 sections: 20th-Century Wars and Their Literatures; Bodies, Behaviours, Cultures; The Cultural Impact of the Technologies of Modern War; The Spaces of Modern War & Genres of War Culture.Key Features: * All-new original essays commissioned from major critics and cultural historians.* Reflects the way war studies are currently being taught and researched: in the volume's approach, structure and breadth of coverage.* For scholars: core arguments and detailed research topics.* For students: Historically grounded topic- and genre-based essays, useful forstudying the modern period and war modules.

An authoritative assessment of the changing relationship between the Bible and the artsIn this unique Companion, 35 scholars, from world-famous to just beginning, explore the role of the Bible in art and of artistic motifs in the Bible. The specially commissioned chapters demonstrate that just as the arts have portrayed biblical stories in a variety of ways and media over the centuries, so what we call ‘the’ Bible is not actually a single entity but has been composed of fiercely contested translations of texts in many languages, whose selection has depended historically on a variety of cultural pressures, theological, social, and, not least, aesthetic.

Provides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fictionThis collection of essays represents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together essays covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction. Moreover, it complicates all these terms, emphasising the porousness between different national traditions and moving beyond traditional definitions of Jewishness. For the sake of structural clarity, the volume is divided into three parts – ‘American Jewish Fiction’, ‘British Jewish Fiction’ and ‘International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction’ – but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work. The Edinburgh Companion is a paradigm-changing event, and nothing in Jewish literary studies that follows can fail to pay close attention to it. Key Features:Highlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and ZionismAnalyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical contextDiscusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish Studies. With a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume contains 28 essays by contributors including Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University, Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) andSandra Singer (University of Guelph).David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at The University of Reading.Axel Stähler is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writingThis comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field—the history of letters and letter writing—is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a  crucial site for the exploration  of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by  presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and  poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.Key FeaturesDraws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others

Provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuriesOffers research essays by literary specialists and musicologists that provides access to the best current interdisciplinary scholarship on connections between literature and musicIncludes five historical sections from the Middle Ages to the present, with editorial introductions to enhance understanding of relationships between literature and music in each periodCharts and extends work in this expanding interdisciplinary field to provide an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other mediaBringing together seventy-one newly commissioned original chapters by literary specialists and musicologists, this book presents the most recent interdisciplinary research into literature and music. In five parts, the chapters cover the Middle Ages to the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of these two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture.This trailblazing companion charts and extends the work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.

Featuring an international team of specialists on the subject, The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing role of critical theory in the new century. Taking note of the many new theoretical and socio-political developments in recent years, the volume conclusively demonstrates critical theory's continuing relevance across disciplines ranging from the arts and social sciences through to the hard sciences. Being theoretically informed is not an optional part of study any more, it is a necessary, central part, and The Companion will bring you up to date with what is happening across the spectrum of critical theory.The volume consists of eleven sections comprising twenty-eight chapters, each covering a particular branch of critical theory from Marxism through to present-day developments such as Cognitive Theory. Every chapter considers the historical development of the theory in question, explaining the main concepts and thinkers involved, before proceeding to assess where it stands in relation to current academic and socio-political concerns and debates. Outlining recent advances in each area, and the emergence of new voices, The Companion offers readers a welcome opportunity to reorient themselves within the history and role of critical theory in its many forms.

Women's creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women's diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women's contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures. With an international, intergenerational set of contributors using diverse methodologies, essays explore women working in publishing transatlantically, on the continent, and beyond the Anglosphere. The book combines new work on high-profile women publishers and editors alongside analysis of women's work as translators, illustrators, booksellers, advertisers, patrons, and publisher's readers; complemented by new oral histories and interviews with leading women in publishing today. The first collection of its kind, the companion helps establish and shape a thriving new research field.

Jane Austen was a keen consumer of the arts throughout her lifetime. The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts considers how Austen represents the arts in her writing, from her juvenilia to her mature novels. The thirty-three original chapters in this Companion cover the full range of Austen's engagement with the arts, including the silhouette and the caricature, crafts, theatre, fashion, music and dance, together with the artistic potential of both interior and exterior spaces. This volume also explores her artistic afterlives in creative re-imaginings across different media, including adaptations and transpositions in film, television, theatre, digital platforms and games.

This Companion showcases the latest research into British colonial periodicals by leading scholars in the field. The first ever large-scale attempt to gather into one volume research on British colonial periodicals, the chapters in this volume analyse the fundamental role played by colonial periodicals in sustaining as well as contesting the economic, political and cultural hegemony of the British Empire from its inception to its fall. The volume considers both periodicals published in Britain for colonial consumption and those published in British colonies and dominions.

Collections on sound studies have seldom explored the vexed relationship between literature a medium largely defined by its silence and the dynamics and technologies of sound. This Companion is designed to help sound studies scholars grapple with the auditory capacities of text and encourage literary scholars to take full cognisance of the rich soundscapes mapped, or created, by texts read quietly. The essays assembled here consider a broad range of sound studies topics, including music in writing; the inscription of listening; worlding through sound; military and industrial noise; the gender of sound; racialised soundscapes; theatrical sounds; literature and sound media; and sonic epistemology. Helen Groth and Julian Murphet present a comprehensive set of new research on the relationship between sound and writing over time from a range of eminent, established and emerging sound studies scholars.

A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fictionCelebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author’s career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop’s work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers. Key FeaturesProvides a companion to Bishop’s entire artistic oeuvre, including letter writing, literary criticism and short story writingOffers a sustained consideration of Bishop’s identity politics, including the role of raceStudies Bishop’s influence on contemporary culture

The eighteenth century witnessed an explosion in new literary and creative forms that rapidly expanded, and the relations between which became more complex. This has typically been described as a period that ushered in the novel form: the malleability of the concept of the novel genre and its history opens up intriguing possibilities for its role within wider networks of interartistic relationships in the period. This Companion is concerned with how the fertile conversations that different artforms enjoyed in the long eighteenth century intersected fruitfully with the emergent shapes of prose fiction. The essays comprising this volume range from the important overview to the case study, providing readers with a unique opportunity to navigate a vast and sprawling terrain through engaging scholarly insights.

In a so-called post-neoliberal world, it can seem like culture is stuck in a perpetual presentism where history and the future are but mere data points for speculative calculations of gains, and culture seems all but a string of endlessly repeating commodities. In such an environment, can we rescue the future for art, for curating and the curatorial, and for culture more generally? Do we need to? What function do concepts like the future and futurity play in the field of curating and the curatorial? What use is 'the future' to curators and others working within the field of the curatorial? The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures is the first curatorial studies volume to engage with the increasingly ubiquitous concept of 'the future' and its exponential growth in the fields of artistic research, curating, art and academia. What is it we need to know as we think towards the future?

Time has passed since 'having a PhD in children's literature' was a funny joke in You've Got Mail. Children's literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and has a bright future ahead as children's writers and publishers invent yet more forms of literature for young people, and researchers find yet more sophisticated ways of exploring them. This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children's literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children's poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature. It offers a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, including a mixture of empirical and theoretical research at the intersection of education and literary studies.

This Companion offers a critical overview of the diverse and dynamic field of Atlantic literary studies, with contributions by distinguished scholars on a series of topics that define the area. The essays focus on literature and culture from first contact to the present, exploring fruitful Atlantic connections across space and time, across national cultures, and embracing literature, culture and society. This research collection proposes that the analysis of literature and culture does not depend solely upon geographical setting to uncover textual meaning. Instead, it offers Atlantic perspectives on migration, race, gender and sexuality, ecologies, and other significant ideological crossovers in the Atlantic world. The result is an exciting new critical map created by leading international researchers of a lively and expanding field. Key Features-- Offers an introduction to the growing field of Atlantic literary studies by showcasing current work engaged in debate around historical, cultural and literary issues in the Atlantic World.-- Includes 26 newly-commissioned scholarly essays by leading experts in Atlantic literary studies.-- Fuses breadth of historical knowledge with depth of literary scholarship.-- Considers the full range of intercultural encounters around and across the Atlantic Ocean.

This collection of essays represents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together 28 chapters covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction.The volume is divided into 3 parts American Jewish Fiction; British Jewish Fiction; and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work.

Featuring an international team of specialists on the subject, The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing role of critical theory in the new century. Taking note of the many new theoretical and socio-political developments in recent years, the volume conclusively demonstrates critical theory's continuing relevance across disciplines ranging from the arts and social sciences through to the hard sciences. Being theoretically informed is not an optional part of study any more, it is a necessary, central part, and The Companion will bring you up to date with what is happening across the spectrum of critical theory.The volume consists of eleven sections comprising twenty-eight chapters, each covering a particular branch of critical theory from Marxism through to present-day developments such as Cognitive Theory. Every chapter considers the historical development of the theory in question, explaining the main concepts and thinkers involved, before proceeding to assess where it stands in relation to current academic and socio-political concerns and debates. Outlining recent advances in each area, and the emergence of new voices, The Companion offers readers a welcome opportunity to reorient themselves within the history and role of critical theory in its many forms.

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writingThis comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field—the history of letters and letter writing—is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a  crucial site for the exploration  of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by  presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and  poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.Key FeaturesDraws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others

Substantially reworks accounts of gothic and globalisation, to examine located gothic engagements with global histories and phenomenaProvides a comprehensive theorisation of globalgothic in the age of planetary crisisIncludes analyses of gothic fiction from six continentsOffers a range of new globalgothic approaches, modalities and regional permutationsThe Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic is the most substantial exploration to date of gothic fiction in the international context. Examining texts from across six continents, the volume considers how gothic imagines, colludes with or interrogates relationships and phenomena that are planetary in scale. Accordingly, chapters address gothic engagements with among others resource imperialism, (ongoing) colonial history, diasporic identity, buckling economic unions, the rise of the internet, enthnonationalism, and entangled systems of gendered, racialised and ecocidal power. In this way, the collection moves decisively beyond the framework of globalisation to identify a range of new globalgothic approaches and modes, overall demonstrating that gothic is a key though sometimes complicit register for negotiating the challenges and histories of our uneven global present.

From propaganda posters to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, images of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) reemerge across the globe wherever fratricidal conflicts and crimes against humanity occur. The War’s iconic visual language continues to shape contemporary painting, propaganda and advertising – a surprisingly long afterlife for a conflict lasting less than three years. This richly illustrated Companion explains this phenomenon, examining new sources and initiating fresh approaches to studying the visuality of the War and its legacies. The thirty-three essays collected here reveal the extent to which images helped – and still help – construct meaning around the War and other civil conflicts. Drawing on disciplines including art history, anthropology, history, art therapy, memory studies and forensic archaeology, the contributors’ case studies show how visual representation united or divided wartime and postwar communities in Spain and beyond.

The 'millennial novel' is a term and genre that is at once over-debated and under-examined. As the first major book to survey and map out the millennial novel across multiple countries, this Companion offers a global framework for thinking about the dominant forms and preoccupations of writing by millennial authors. Scholars of contemporary literature will benefit from its breadth of investigation across issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, family, social structures, nationhood and literary form as well as its detailed studies of particular novels and authors, including Brit Bennett, Ocean Vuong, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani and Ling Ma. Overall, The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel shows that millennial fiction is neither homogeneous nor impervious to previous socio-literary movements. In turn, it complicates our understanding of the genre, attempts to define the contours of contemporary literary production and reflects on twenty-first-century sociality.

What does it mean to read queerly? The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading upholds intersectional thinking to recognise the wide currency and appeal of queer studies for a new generation of scholars, activists, students and interested allies. Its four interconnecting parts 'transing queer readings', 'reading queer ecologies', 'queer reading as practice' and 'reading queer futures' speak to, and help to critique and foreground, expansive queer epistemologies. Contributors evocatively explore the relationships between queerness and genders, embodiments, race, narrative, methodology, history, literature, media and art. Bringing together emerging and established queer theorists, this timely collection demonstrates how germane queer readings, theories and companions are to the livelihood of interdisciplinary research and humanistic inquiry in the 2020s.

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives considers the many steps of cultural mediation that have produced the varied versions of Woolf that readers and viewers encounter in national and transnational contexts. Organised in three parts, this international, multi-authored collection explores how these many Woolfs emerge in countries beyond Western Europe and North America, including Brazil, Lithuania, Japan, Turkey and the Philippines. The chapters in the first part explore how Woolf's works are edited, translated, produced and read in many languages, media, platforms and disciplines, both historically and contemporarily. The second part focuses on Woolf's legacy and on how Woolf lives on in the works of contemporary artists and cultural creatives. Given the importance of academics in mediating this reception, the third and final section reads Woolf through new critical perspectives, also focusing on the more recent reception she is enjoying on the web.

This Companion examines James Joyce’s interactions with the arts during his lifetime and the many ways that Joyce’s writing has been inspiring and transformational to artists since. As a landmark volume in Joyce studies as well as the study of Modernist intermediality more broadly, it brings together a wide range of artforms, aesthetics and media engaged by Joyce’s work, including painting, theatre, architecture, photography, cinema, broadcasting, animation, comics, music, song, dance, fashion and digital forms. It investigates Joyce’s creative practice and subsequent responses to it from a plethora of perspectives: archival and genetic, linguistic, aesthetic, theoretical, stylistic, creative- and performance-based. Featuring an introductory overview and thirty-six original chapters by artists, curators and established and emerging scholars from across the world, it creates a comprehensive ‘collideorscape’ of views on Joyce’s relationship with the arts.

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion makes exciting interventions into debates about the beliefs and spiritual commitments of one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Although critics and readers have often assumed that Virginia Woolf is hostile or indifferent to religion, her work is, in fact, from early to late, traversed with reflections about religious, spiritual and sacred meaning and experience. Featuring twenty-eight new essays by established and emerging scholars, this Companion is the first to consider Woolf’s perspectives on global religious traditions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Quakerism within the context of literary and cultural modernisms. The volume draws on a diverse range of theoretical and critical methods to showcase the multi-layered complexities of Woolf’s approaches to the sacred. Together the contributors provide a thorough re-assessment of the assumption that Woolf was an atheist and illuminate insights about her work in relation to twenty-first century critical discourse about religion, ethics, spirituality and mysticism while giving new attention to feminist perspectives, queer desire, sacred ecologies and narrative poetics.

This Companion examines the manifold interactions between Irish literature and the periodical press since the nineteenth century. The thirty original contributions map a highly diverse Irish and international magazine landscape that has played a crucial role in fostering, mediating, circulating and translating Irish poetry and prose. By bringing new archival material to bear on canonical writers such as Emily Lawless, Mary Lavin, John McGahern and James Joyce, this book showcases cutting-edge research situated at the crossroads of Irish studies, periodical criticism and the digital humanities. It offers a variegated view of the different agents in transnational periodical networks, investigating the role of authors, editors, publishers and readers in Ireland, as well as considering the circulation of Irish writers in British and American publications. It also recovers forgotten voices by providing the first comprehensive critical accounts of little magazines including A Celtic Christmas, Honest Ulsterman, Kilkenny Magazine, Broadsheet, The Dubliner and Surge. Altogether, The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Literature and Periodical Culture demonstrates the pivotal role of periodicals in the codification of genres and the formation of an Irish literary canon.

From his early “Curtain Raiser” to the late Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot took an interest in all the arts, drawing on them for poetic inspiration and for analysis in his prose. T. S. Eliot and the Arts provides extensive, high quality research about his many-sided engagement with painting, sculpture, museum artefacts, architecture, music, drama, music hall, opera and dance, as well as the emerging media of recorded sound, film and radio. Building on the newly published editions of Eliot’s prose and poetry, this contemporary research collection opens avenues for understanding Eliot both in his own right as a poet and critic and as a foremost exemplar of interarts modernism.