Written by an editorial team whose members are all actively engaged in teaching and in current scholarship, Masters of British Literature is a concise, but comprehensive survey of the key writers whose classic works have shaped British literature. Featuring major works by the most influential authors in the British literary tradition-from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Swift to Wollstonecraft, Keats, Joyce, and Rushdie-the two compact anthologies in this package offer comprehensive coverage of the enduring works of the British literary tradition from the Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, then from the Romantics through the twentieth century. Core texts are complemented by contextual materials that help students understand the literary, historical, and cultural environments out which these texts arose, and within which they find their richest meaning.
The importance of the rich corpus of “Masters Literature” that developed in early China since the fifth century BCE has long been recognized. But just what are these texts? Scholars have often approached them as philosophy, but these writings have also been studied as literature, history, and anthropological, religious, and paleographic records. How should we translate these texts for our times? This book explores these questions through close readings of seven examples of Masters Literature and asks what proponents of a “Chinese philosophy” gained by creating a Chinese equivalent of philosophy and what we might gain by approaching these texts through other disciplines, questions, and concerns. What happens when we remove the accrued disciplinary and conceptual baggage from the Masters Texts? What neglected problems, concepts, and strategies come to light? And can those concepts and strategies help us see the history of philosophy in a different light and engender new approaches to philosophical and intellectual inquiry? By historicizing the notion of Chinese philosophy, we can, the author contends, answer not only the question of whether there is a Chinese philosophy but also the more interesting question of the future of philosophical thought around the world.
Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on plantations; and at sea. This collection presents the first integrated comparative account of employment law, its enforcement, and its importance throughout the British Empire. Sweeping in its geographic and temporal scope, this volume tests the relationship between enacted law and enforced law in varied settings, with different social and racial structures, different economies, and different constitutional relationships to Britain. Investigations of the enforcement of master and servant law in England, the British Caribbean, India, Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and colonial America shed new light on the nature of law and legal institutions, the role of inferior courts in compelling performance, and the definition of "free labor" within a multiracial empire. Contributors: David M. Anderson, St. Antony's College, Oxford Michael Anderson, London School of Economics Jerry Bannister, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia M. K. Banton, National Archives of the United Kingdom, London Martin Chanock, La Trobe University, Australia Paul Craven, York University Juanita De Barros, McMaster University Christopher Frank, University of Manitoba Douglas Hay, York University Prabhu P. Mohapatra, Delhi University, India Christopher Munn, University of Hong Kong Michael Quinlan, University of New South Wales Richard Rathbone, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Christopher Tomlins, American Bar Foundation, Chicago Mary Turner, London University
Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, Masters of All They Surveyed tells the fascinating story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's unique South American colony, Guyana. How did nineteenth-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean? In answering these questions, D. Graham Burnett brings to light the work of several such explorers, particularly Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, the man who claimed to be the first to reach the site of Ralegh's El Dorado. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society and later by the British Crown, Schomburgk explored and mapped regions in modern Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, always in close contact with Amerindian communities. Drawing heavily on the maps, reports, and letters that Schomburgk sent back to England, and especially on the luxuriant images of survey landmarks in his Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (reproduced in color in this book), Burnett shows how a vast network of traverse surveys, illustrations, and travel narratives not only laid out the official boundaries of British Guiana but also marked out a symbolic landscape that fired the British imperial imagination. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Masters of All They Surveyed will interest anyone who wants to understand the histories of colonialism and science.
Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 1652–1771 demonstrates how British travel narratives of the long eighteenth century distinguished between Mughal and American “Indians.” Through a New Historical and postcolonial lens, it argues that the distinction between East and West “Indians” was widely recognized and shaped British people’s tendency to view Mughal Indians as similar and in some ways even superior to Europeans while they disdained native populations in the Americas. Drawing on representations of “Indians” in Peter Heylyn’s critically neglected 1652 Cosmographie as well as representations in the works of canonical literary authors such as John Dryden, Richard Steele, and Henry Mackenzie, this monograph provides a more nuanced account of the origins and (d)evolution of “Indian” stereotypes than scholars have to date. A text committed to the exposure and eradication of colonial rhetoric and violence, Peter Craft’s Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 1652–1771 proposes a modification of Saidian postcolonial theory that better applies to texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Story of M is a solo performance that integrates visual projections and poetic language to portray autobiographical stories of racism, poverty and sacrifice. While sitting in a white screened hospital ward and as slides of family photographs flash all around her, SuAndi travels from the multi-racial Liverpool of the 1920s to life in Britain in the mid-nineties. Commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary Arts in 1995, The Story of M has received great critical acclaim in both the United States and Great Britain. The Story of M is SuAndi's moving tribute to the life and death of her mother who raised her children in the face of frequent racism 1960s but never let them forget they were of African descent and to be proud of their heritages. The Story of 'M' is on the new A-levels English Literature syllabus - with a Black British list – offered by EdExcel Examination Board (2017).
In 1972, in an attempt to elevate the stature of the "crime novel," influential crime writer and critic Julian Symons cast numerous Golden Age detective fiction writers into literary perdition as "Humdrums," condemning their focus on puzzle plots over stylish writing and explorations of character, setting and theme. This volume explores the works of three prominent British "Humdrums"--Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Alfred Walter Stewart--revealing their work to be more complex, as puzzles and as social documents, than Symons allowed. By championing the intrinsic merit of these mystery writers, the study demonstrates that reintegrating the "Humdrums" into mystery genre studies provides a fuller understanding of the Golden Age of detective fiction and its aftermath.
