'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.
Arthur Fenn is an ordinary young professor with an esoteric specialty, Comparative Mythology. He is in financial trouble and suddenly finds himself in possession of a magical spell that allows him access to the realm of the gods. He may be a professor, but he's got no common sense--so when he goes there, he makes the mistake of inviting a con-man god and his companions back to Earth. What develops is a fantastic mess full of rich opportunities for humor, satire, and surprise. Arthur's mistake unbalances his own life, life on Earth, and the lives of the gods in their realm...and universal darkness threatens to cover all. Chaos spreads on a greater and greater scale until all creation is threatened. It's a good thing that Arthur is able to find the courage and self-confidence to save the day, even if the universe has to die and be reborn. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
"I am particularly impressed with Bloomberg's insights about the ways in which women writers' urge to harness the power of women's myths has to some extent been aroused by historical forces. . . . She explains that women's desire to reinvent their identities requires that women writers take over the narrative tools (such as mythic allusions) provided them by male writers and use those tools to build their own textual 'house.'"--Mary Lowe-Evans, University of West Florida Tracing Arachne's Web examines the use of myth in works by American women novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showing how both classical allusions and ethnic folk myth liberated these writers and enabled them to understand and experience their social and economic worlds. Using the metaphor of Demeter and Persephone as her framework, Kristin Mapel Bloomberg identifies a cycle in women's fiction that moves from the utopian world of Demeter's garden in the late 19th century to the experience of isolated women in the patriarchal underworld of literary modernism. Examining the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Emma D. Kelley-Hawkins, Onoto Watanna (aka Winnifred Eaton), Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Djuna Barnes, she develops a model of women's writing that ties these writers' fascination with the occult and Greek mythology to T. S. Eliot's notion of the "mythical method." Drawing from history and popular culture, she demonstrates how women of color responded to many of the same cultural currents as white writers. She does this, moreover, by analyzing the coded strategies followed by women of color to get their books into print, without collapsing race into gender issues. Invariably provocative, Bloomberg's writing creates a picture of female power in turn-of-the-century American fiction in which women writers turned to alternative spiritual ideologies and occult philosophies to investigate tensions between racism, sexism, and classicism. This book will appeal to scholars in American studies, literary criticism, women's studies, and cultural studies. Kristin M. Mapel Bloomberg, associate professor of English and women's studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, holds the Hamline University Chair in the Humanities and is also Director of the Women's Studies Program.
Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods—methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others.
Covent Garden, January 1708. Widow Trotter has big plans for her recently-inherited coffee house, not suspecting that within days her little kingdom will be caught up in a national drama involving scandal, conspiracy and murder... Queen Anne’s new “Great Britain” is in crisis. The Queen is mired in a sexual scandal, spies are everywhere, and political disputes are bringing violence and division. The treasonous satirist “Bufo” is public enemy number one and the Ministry is determined to silence him. Drawn into a web of intrigue that reaches from the brothels of Drury Lane to the Court of St James’s, Mary Trotter and her young friends Tom and Will race against time to unravel the political plots, solve two murders, and prevent another.
Itineraries, perambulations, and surveys : the intersections of chorography and cartography in the sixteenth century / John M. Adrian -- To serve my purpose : interpretive agency in George Wither's A collection of emblemes / Rob Browning -- The three noble kinsmen : Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher / Kathryn L. Lynch -- Ovid and the question of politics in early modern England / Heather James -- Parodies lost : Aretino reads Raimondi /Helen M. Whall -- Accepting the flesh : George Herbert and the sacrament of Holy Communion / Jeannie Sargent Judge -- Twixt treason and convenience : some images of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford / Julia B. Griffin -- Backbiters, flatterers, and monarchs : domestic politics in The tragedy of Mariam / Heather E. Ostman -- Gender and the market in Henry VI, I / Jennifer A. Rich -- Hrethel's heirloom : kinship, succession, and weaponry in Beowulf / Erin Mullally -- Shylock : Shakespeare's bad Jew / Jay L. Halio -- Coping with providentialism : trauma, identity, and the failure of the English Reformation / Scott Lucas.
This book examines the revival of antique philosophy in the Renaissance as a literary preoccupation informed by wit. Humanists were more inspired by the fictionalized characters of certain wise fools, including Diogenes the Cynic, Socrates, Aesop, Democritus, and Heraclitus, than by codified systems of thought. Rich in detail, this study offers a systematic treatment of wide-ranging Renaissance imagery and metaphors and presents a detailed iconography of certain classical philosophers. Ultimately, the problems of Renaissance humanism are revealed to reflect the concerns of humanists in the twenty-first century.
