University of Delaware Press – serie

Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Novels of Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Vladimir Nabokov investigates the connection between realist fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the psychoanalytic approach of John Bowlby's Attachment Theory. Attachment Theory arises from the guiding principles of realism and the veratist's devotion to long-term, direct observation of subject matter. Additionally, because Attachment Theory originated in the field of child psychoanalysis, this book highlights the detrimental effects of parental obsession and abandonment, industrialism, poverty, alcoholism, religious addiction, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse on child characters. The subject of Monstrous Kinships is timely, as literary critics and theorists as well as creative writers continue to expand their range of inquiry to include the child as primary subject in various treatments of post-colonial and transnational culture.

The Holocaust is an international event, its the brutal crimes happened in specific places and are remembered, to a large degree, in various national discourses. The essays in this book examine the complex and often ambiguous relationship between national identity and the legacy of the Holocaust in countries including Lithuania, Poland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United States, and Israel. Specificity about place and national context matters very much when we talk and write about the Holocaust, and this book takes up important questions about the relationship between the traumatic past and our sense of place, language, and cultural or political identity in the post-Holocaust world.

This book is about an alternative mode of reading, thinking, and representing the intricacies of human experience in Chinese literature of the late twentieth century, which the author calls the aesthetics of the 'beyond.' It investigates how contemporary Chinese writers, by means of dynamic interface of literary practice and cultural philosophical considerations, engage the reader in critical reflection on and aesthetic appreciation of the complexity of human conditions. By studying the 'beyond' in its various manifestations: the semiotics of human embodiment, the discourse of the phantasm, the politics of nostalgia with regard to 'origin' and 'center,' and the metaphysics of death in the writings of some major contemporary Chinese writers, the book explores the ways in which the 'beyond' is constructed as a new paradigm of critical thinking in literary, aesthetic, and philosophical terms. It examines how its discursive strategies, structural features, and aesthetic possibilities are presented and how varied literary tropes are used in an attempt to unravel human experience in all its aspects.

This book builds upon critical reevaluations of modernism and British literature of the 1930s with a simultaneous focus on discourses of race, gender, and empire. The essays direct attention to the complications and ambivalence accumulating around the meanings of Englishness. They reject analyses of texts as chronicles of personal psychological development in favor of analyses that assume texts are shaped by their authors' public intellectual involvement. In addition, they offer detailed, specific explorations of ways in which British women in the 1930s narrativize empire and war. Thus they will resonate with significance for readers in the early twenty-first century for women empire and war, as well as terror and security, are part of the discourse of everyday life.

This is the first comprehensive account of Swift's engagement with the arts in Ireland and England. It both documents and reflects upon his attitudes toward music, gardening, theatre, architecture, and painting, and suggests that, despite his often sceptical attitude towards the non-literary arts, he saw them as a rich source of inspiration and entertainment for both his poetry and prose. This study also opens up a previously neglected part of Swift's biography, showing how his growing awareness of the 'sister-arts' was deeply influenced by his social and political circles in both Ireland and England, especially by the rise of the virtuoso, the connoisseur and the art collector, most notably in the person of his close friend, Alexander Pope. In the wider context of the European Enlightenment, this study tries to account for Swift's attitude toward the changing and expanding world of artistic and aesthetic appreciation.

We are so used to calling the plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries 'poetic drama' that we hardly ever stop to think about the generic meaning of the term. This book is an attempt to explore Shakespeare's artistic achievement as an intricate blend of the dramatic and lyrical modes. In a series of minute textual analyses, it traces the gradual integration of the two from Love's Labour's Lost through Romeo and Juliet and Richard II to As You Like It and Hamlet, with a final glance at the Great Tragedies. How this combination is effected in its details is a question that might help us to understand better the specificity of Shakespeare's innovative work for the theatre and the power of its impact.

his study places Defoe's major fiction squarely in the emerging Whig culture of the early eighteenth century. It offers an alternative to the view that Defoe is essentially a writer of criminal or adventure fiction and to the Marxist judgment that he extols individualism or derives his greatest inspiration from popular print culture. This study reads the novels as reflections of mainstream Whig social and political concerns, the same concerns Defoe revealed in his verse and expository writings before and after his major period of fiction writing, 1719-24.

While previous collections of Emerson essays have tended to be a sort of 'stock-taking' or 'retrospective' look at Emerson scholarship, the present collection follows a more 'prospective' trajectory for Emerson studies based on the recent increase in global perspectives in nearly all fields of humanistic studies. The present collection is divided into four main sections: "Emerson, Europe, and Beyond;" "Emerson and Science;" "Emerson Thinking;" "and "Emerson and Activism." The first category emphasizes the global perspective in Emerson's literary and cultural relations, followed closely by two other "transnational" categories - Emerson's relations in the international arenas of science and philosophy - and concluding with the final category, which addresses the end purpose of Emerson's project: fully realized human beings whose actions, directly and indirectly, help to create a society in which individuals are free to develop their capacities fully.Transnational and global perspectives are becoming more recognized and more commonplace in the academy and the world at large. Evidence for such developing perspectives is not hard to find: national and international conferences, new books, and the increasing university courses and programs in World Literature, all reflect a move toward viewing Emerson and literature in general from broader, more inclusive perspectives. The first four categories that follow - "Emerson, Europe, and Beyond" - gives us seven perspectives on Emerson's international influence, ranging from Stephen L. Tanner's gem-like essay on English Traits, to Steve Adisasmito-Smith's trail-blazing Hindu scholarship, to Jan Stievermann's explication of Emerson's vision of "an American World Literature."In the "Emerson and Science" section, four essays range from Michael P. Branch's examination of Emerson's early lectures on natural science, to Branka Arsic's explorations of science from a broad Emersonian view, to David M. Robinson's and Laura Walls' very specific essays on Emerson's encounters with the cutting-edge science of his mature period.In "Emerson Thinking," five scholars examine Emerson's broad thought, which gives evidence of philosophical influence from all times and places through suck topics as human subjectivity and its expression, while George J. Stack and Mary DiMaria examine Emerson's philosophical similarities to and disparities from the French foundational thinkers of the Postmodern theory revolution in literary studies. Finally, in the "Emerson and Activism" section, David S. Reynolds, Len Gougeon, and T. Gregory Garvey examine Emersonian and Transcendental influences on the abolition movement, and Eduardo Cadava expands activism to include more recent "economic oppression and colonialist and racist exclusions," which ultimately can be seen as part of a worldwide post-colonial literary movement and an awareness of the dark side of globalism. All of these essays to a greater or lesser degree are concerned with influences of literature and thought that are cycled through the individual, the culture, and the global community.

In this work, Rosenberg insists again and again that only the individual reader or actor can determine Shakespeare's design of Hamlet's characterand of the play. To interpret Hamlet's words and actions at the many crises, the reader needs to double in the role of actor, imagining the character from the inside and observing from the outside. Winner of the Theatre Library Association Award for 1993.

Originally undertaken by the author as a Bicentennial project in 1975, and now the standard history of the state, this volume chronicles the history of Delaware from the early 1600s to the present.

This collection of essays features many of the world's leading Herbert scholars and track Herbert's travels: through four centuries, west and east; through the inner spaces of the suffering body and soul; and through modernity into the postmodern. They discover connections between Herbert and dozens of varied writers, from Augustine, Shakespeare, Donne and Dickinson to Bishop, Larkin, Hecht, and Heaney; important reading for all students of British and American poetry, from early modern to postmodern.

The hundreds of biblical references in Shakespeare's plays give ample evidence that he was well acquainted with Scripture. Not only is the range of his biblical references impressive, but also the aptness with which he makes them. Hamlet and Othello each have more than fifty biblical references. No study of Shakespeare's plays is complete that ignores Shakespeare's use of scripture.The Bibles that Shakespeare knew, however, were not those that are in use today. By the time the King James Bible appeared in 1611, Shakespeare's career was all but over, and the Anglican liturgy that is evident in his plays is likewise one that few persons are acquainted with. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the English Bibles of Shakespeare's day, notes their similarities and differences, and indicates which version the playwright knew best. The thorny question of what constitutes a valid biblical reference is also discussed.This study of Shakespeare's biblical references is not based on secondary sources. The author owned one of the world's largest collections of early English bibles, including over one hundred copies of the Geneva bible and numerous editions of other Bibles, prayer books, and books of homilies of Shakespeare's day.To be of real worth, a study of Shakespeare's biblical references should also enable the reader to determine which references Shakespeare borrowed from his plot sources and which he added from his own memory as part of his design for the play. The author studies every source that Shakespeare is known to have read or consulted before writing each play and has examined the biblical references in those sources. Shaheen then points out which biblical references in his literary sources Shakespeare accepted, and how he adapted them in his plays. This information is especially valuable when assessing the theological meanings that are sometimes imposed on his plays, meanings that often go beyond what Shakespeare intended or what his audience must have understood.Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays is considerably broader in scope than any other study of its kind and provides the scholarly checks and balances in dealing with the subject that previous studies lacked.

Stephen Booth has, for over forty years, proposed a distinct understanding of how Shakespeare’s plays and poems work upon us and a unique and rigorous way of reading them. The essays here reflect his insights and method and are meant both to recognize his monumental achievements as a critic and to suggest the enduring value of his work to Shakespeare scholarship. The first chapter explains both the method and the strengths of Booth’s approach to Shakespeare. The next two—on Romeo and Juliet and The Rape of Lucrece—demonstrate Booth’s way of reading Shakespeare. The following four chapters develop Booth’s contention that Shakespeare often sets “audiences to watch—or, rather, to try to watch—a play other than the one he shows them.” The next two chapters look at textual problems from Booth’s perspective and explore the challenges editors face in their attempts to establish authentic texts for modern readers. The last three chapters focus on teaching and include a description of Stephen Booth’s teaching practices and his own renown explanation, through a commentary on Philip D. Eastman’s Go, Dog. Go!, of the way poetry works upon its readers and the reasons they value it highly. The book concludes with a bibliography of Stephen Booth’s work.

Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney’s Arcadia studies cultural ideologies regarding gender and monarchy in early modern England by examining transformations of a single text, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, in their historical contexts. It reveals changing tensions in the ideological struggles over queenship, especially with respect to cultural debates focused on anxieties about gendered reception and interpretation of persuasive rhetoric. The cultural shift between about 1550 and 1650 regarding gendered interpretation and political rule—a shift that was by no means complete or homogenous—reflects the changing position of women and their relationship to language within early modern domestic and political ideological discourses. The book begins by investigating primary cultural, political, and historical sources in order to provide a cultural scaffolding helpful to the interpretation of Sidney’s enormously popular work. These sources include conduct manuals, gynecocratic debates, paintings, poems, diaries, pamphlets, and letters. Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule then considers the initial version of the Arcadia (the Old Arcadia) Sidney authored and argues that Sidney’s involvement in the marriage debate regarding the Duke of Anjou’s courtship of Elizabeth I in the late 1570s shaped his representations of female characters and their questionable ability to interpret persuasive rhetoric. Next, the book turns to Sidney’s expanded and revised version (the New Arcadia), authorized and published by his sister the Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney Herbert. The New Arcadia ultimately provides a more positive representation of women readers and rulers and reveals a shift in cultural understandings of women’s relationship to the persuasive rhetoric that both describes and enacts political power and authority. The penultimate chapter examines paradigms of active reading and their political consequences in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania that demonstrate a need for well-balanced identification with characters. Finally, this book focuses on a little-studied seventeenth-century continuation of Sidney’s work by a young woman, Anna Weamys, who asserts her authority as an interpreter of Sidney’s Arcadia and in the process creates a political commentary about the legitimacy of female authority and influence just after the English Civil War.

Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes presents an account of “the Poets’ Secret,” the quite belated, historically recent, discovery by scholars and critics of something many poets have recognized and employed for ages: the sense expressed by allusively parallel parts within a text—thus expressed intratextually rather than only intertextually.Inferential perception of the implicit sense produced logically and linguistically—by enthymemes, implicatures, and other intratextual features, as well as intertextual ones—can be indispensable for readers’ comprehension of literary as well as other texts, especially their difficult passages. Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes addresses these elusive matters as they have historically been posed by Thomas Gray’s Pindaric odes of 1757, and mainly the first of them, “The Progress of Poesy,” a poem that readers have more or less knowledgeably struggled to understand from the outset. The process of disclosing that ode’s sense can be aided by new further reference to Paradise Lost, in the context of Gray’s largely unpublished Commonplace Book, with its extensive, little-studied, and very pertinent use of Plato and Locke.

Odyssey of a Bombardier is the illustrated Prisoner of War “log” that depicts the experiences of bombardier Richard M. Mason in German prison camps after his B-17 “Flying Fortress” was shot down by the Germans in France in 1944, the final year of World War II. The log follows Mason from the day his plane crashed until his liberation in April, 1945, and his return home to the United States. Included are such topics as medical treatment and rehabilitation for wounded prisoners of the Germans, life in Stalag Luft III, a difficult long march in an arctic winter to another camp, the travails of prisoners in the overcrowded, filthy camp at Moosburg, critical food shortages, and the arrival of General George Patton with the liberating forces. Mason was an amateur artist and illustrated his journal with moving depictions of prison life and comradeship. This book shows U.S. airmen demonstrating grace and courage under pressure and meeting every challenge that their imprisonment presented.

In the wake of the French Revolution, history was no longer imagined as a cyclical process in which the succession of ruling dynasties was as predictable as the change in the seasons. Contemporaries wrestled with the meaning of this historical rupture, which represented both the progress of the Enlightenment and the darkness of the Terreur. French authors discussed the political events in their country, but they were not the only ones to do so. As the effects of the French Revolution became more palpable across the border, German authors pondered their implications in newspapers, political pamphlets, and historiographical treatises. German women also participated in these debates, but they often embedded their political commentary in literary texts because they were discouraged, and sometimes even barred, from publishing in explicitly political and public venues. As such, literature, in the sense of belles lettres, had a compensatory function for women: it allowed them to engage in political discussion without explicitly encroaching on certain domains that were perceived as a male preserve. As women writers explored the uses of literature for political commentary they adapted major literary genres in order to consolidate their position in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary sphere. Those genres included domestic fiction, the historical novel, historical tragedy, autobiography, the Robinsonade,and the Bildungsroman. Women writers challenged the images of women traditionally portrayed in these genres: dutiful daughter, submissive wife, caring mother, tantalizing mistress, angelic figure, and passive victim. Gender and Genre discusses six women writers who replaced these traditional female types with women warriors and emigrants as protagonists in texts published between 1795 and 1821: Therese Huber, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Christine Westphalen, Regula Engel, Sophie von La Roche, and Henriette Frölich. These authors’ protagonists question traditional images of passive femininity, yet their battered bodies also depict the precarious position of women in general, and women writers in particular, during this period. Because women writers were attacked by their male counterparts who attempted to halt their foray into the literary marketplace, these texts are as much about power dynamics in the German literary establishment as they are about French politics.

“Nearly every major figure of his era,” writes his biographer Adrian Frazier, “worked with Moore, tangled with Moore, took his impression from, or left it on, George Moore.” The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852–1933) espoused multiple identities. An agent provocateur whether as an art critic, novelist, short fiction writer or memoirist, always probing and provocative, often deliberately controversial, the personality at the core of this book invented himself as he reinvented his contemporary world. Moore’s key role—as observer-participant and as satirist—within many literary and aesthetic movements at the end of the Victorian period and into the twentieth century owed considerably to the structures and manners of collaboration that he embraced. This book throws into relief the multiple ways in which Moore’s work can serve as a counterbalance to established understandings of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary aesthetics both through innovative scholarly readings of Moore’s work and through illustrative case studies of Moore’s collaborative practice by making available, for the first time, two manuscript plays he co-authored with Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) in 1894. It is this collaborative practice in conjunction with his cosmopolitan outlook that turned Moore into a key player in the fin-de-siècle formation of an international aesthetic community.This book explores the full range of Moore’s collaborations and cultural encounters: from 1870s Paris art exhibitions to turn-of-the-century Dublin and London; from gossip to the culture of the barmaid; from the worship of Balzac to the fraught engagement with Yeats; from music to Celtic cultural translation. Moore’s reputation as a collaborator with the most significant artistic individuals of his time in Britain, Ireland and France in particular, but also in Europe more widely, provides a rich exposition of modes of exchange and influence in the period, and a unique and distinctive perspective on Moore himself.

Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World argues that our most cherished ideas about freedom—being left alone to do as we please, or uncovering the truth—have failed us. They promote the polarized thinking that blights our world. Rooted in literature, political theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of language, this book introduces a new concept: dialogic freedom. This concept combats polarization by inspiring us to feel freer the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others.To say that freedom is dialogic is to apply to it an idea about language. If you and I are talking, I anticipate from you a response that could be friendly, hostile, or indifferent, and this awareness helps determine what I say. If you look bored or give me a blank stare, I might not say anything at all. In this sense language is dialogic. The same can be said of freedom. Our decisions take into account the voices of others to which we feel answerable, and these voices coauthor our choices. In today’s polarized world, prevailing concepts of freedom as autonomy and enlightenment have encouraged us to take refuge in echo chambers among the like-minded. Whether the subject is abortion, terrorism, or gun control, these concepts encourage us to shut out the voices of those who dare to disagree. We need a new way to think about freedom. Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World presents riveting moments of choice from Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Melville’s “Benito Cereno,”Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and Morrison’s Beloved, in order to advocate reading for and with dialogic freedom. It ends with a practical application to the debate about abortion and an invitation to rethink other polarizing issues.For more information, please visit: http://dialogicfreedom.weebly.com/.

This book focuses on the pervasive concern with narrativity and self-construction that marks Defoe’s first-person fictional narratives. Defoe’s fictions focus obsessively and elaborately on the act of storytelling—not only in his creation of idiosyncratic voices preoccupied with the telling (and often the concealing) of their own life stories but also in his narrators’ repeated adversion to other, untold stories that compete for attention with their own.Defoe’s narratives raise profound questions about selfhood and agency (as well as demonstrate competing attitudes about narration) in his fictive worlds. His canon exhibits a broad range of first-person fictional accounts, from pseudo-memoir (A Journal of the Plague Year, Memoirs of a Cavalier) to criminal autobiography (Moll Flanders) to confession (Roxana), and the narrators of these accounts (secretive, compulsive, fractive) exhibit an array of resistances to the telling of their life stories. Such experiments with narration evince Defoe’s deep involvement in projects of self-description and -delineation, as he interrogates the boundaries of the self and dramatizes the arduousness of self-accounting. Defoe’s fictions are emphatically consciousness-centered and the significance of such a focus to the development of the novel is patently as great as is his “realistic” style. Defoe’s narrative project, in fact, challenges current views on the moment at which inwardness and interiority begin, as Lukács argued, to comprise the subject matter of the novel, implicitly attributing to identity and consciousness a place of signal and complex importance in the new genre.

In late nineteenth-century France, when Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had finally begun to permeate French culture and society, several academic artists turned to a relatively new sub-genre of history painting, the prehistoric-themed subject. This artistic interest in Darwin’s theories was manifested as paintings and sculptures of prehistoric humanity engaged in physical conflict with each other or other animals, struggling for food, or hunting—all nineteenth-century popular understandings of “survival of the fittest.” This book examines how this sub-genre captured the imagination of French Salon painters from the 1880s to early 1900s, in particular that of Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), one of the foremost academic painters during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. A central argument of this book concerns the unique interpretation of prehistoric humanity that Cormon visualized in his paintings. While the vast majority of prehistoric-themed images made by his salon colleagues focused on violence, combat, and sexual conquest, Cormon’s paintings depict a conflict-free humanity, in which collaboration and cooperation dominate, rather than physical struggle. This study probes the French intellectual understanding and appropriation of Darwin’s theories and considers how the French (mis)translation of The Origin of Species by Clémence-Auguste Royer, the first French translator of the text—along with Neo-Lamarckism and republican ideology in Third Republic France—may have collectively shaped Cormon’s representation of early humanity. The art press overwhelmingly favored Cormon’s visualization of the prehistoric world over that of his Salon peers. Through extended analysis of the art criticism concerning Cormon’s work, Shalon Parker argues that critics’ very clear preference for Cormon’s paintings was rooted in their awareness that he utilized the sub-genre of the prehistoric as a forum in which to reimagine and revive academic figurative painting at a time when the critical reception of Salon art had reached its nadir. Additionally, this study provides a broad overview of the visual models, in particular the anthropological and ethnographic texts and imagery, most readily available to Cormon as sources for shaping his vision of the prehistoric world.

The essays in this volume consider the ways in which material and intellectual culture both shaped and were shaped by the literature of late medieval England. The first section, “Textual Material,” reflects on cultural and social issues generally referred to as the History of Ideas, and how those ideas manifest in later medieval English texts. Essays address, for example, affect in The Book of Margery Kempe, rhetoric in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anarchy in late medieval political texts, and temporality in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The essays in the second section, “Material Texts,” examine physical objects – from pilgrim badges, to manuscripts, to money, to early printed editions – and the cultural behaviors associated with them, interpreting these objects and exploring their connections to the important literary and political texts of the age such as Piers Plowman, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All of the essays in this collection emerge from the relationships and connections between the issues that characterize Jim Dean’s work: the cultural, material, and aesthetic aspects of later medieval English literature. So too do they reflect a movement in medieval literary studies presaged by Dean’s career of scholarship and teaching, that critical approaches to literary texts are best undertaken with an understanding of the complex cultural and historical milieu that defines both the production of those texts and the production of our own work on those texts.

Notorious Facts examines the sensationalistic confounding of persons and principles in the public life of Romantic England (1780–1830). Its purview is limited to five decades straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its trajectory, moving from a politics rendered in personal terms to a politics of personality, describes a shift still in process today. The study’s chapters draw on a motley body of literature (pamphlets, secret histories, and the like) that at first glance seems uncharacteristic of what literary historians call the English Romantic period. Viewed in the context of something called late Georgian England, these texts seem more indigenous, but if the canonical revisionism of the last few decades should teach us anything, it is that a Romanticism encompassing all romanticisms ideally excludes nothing.In its heroic Enlightenment sense, publicity is concerned with exposing the workings of power for all to see. A good deal may be inferred about publicity in Romantic England from primary texts in which this salutary function is at once espoused and subverted. These texts-the mostly nameless or pseudonymous authors of the age’s pamphlet literature are the heroes and villains of the piece-almost invariably claim to speak from a disinterested conception of publicity while putting its methods of critical exposure to wholly self-interested purposes. This study examines well-known authors of the period like Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt, as well as pamphleteers like John Horne Tooke, Philip Withers, and Nathaniel Jefferys. Other figures include authors of secret history like Thomas Ashe, Mary Anne Clarke, Lewis Goldsmith, and Joseph Haslewood in addition to notorious figures in their own right such as the Prince and Princess of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the Reverend Edward Irving. Among the topics treated are treasonous libel, royal scandal, secret history, and celebrity.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

These essays explore the religious, political, economic and aesthetic values which produce the Western European myth of virginity. The collection includes readings of Icelandic poems, Malory's Morte D'Arthur and Chaucer's works.