Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain's literary culture. As a corrective to literary histories assuming that the dominance of print meant the demise of a vital scribal culture, the book profiles four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each group's depl…
What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our “work reading” overlaps with our “pleasure reading,” and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form. The contributors to this volume share their own histories of reading in order to reveal the…
George Orwell was one of the most significant literary figures on the left in the twentieth century. While titles such as 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia are still rightly regarded as modern classics, his own politics are less well understood. Hope Lies in the Proles offers a sympathetic yet critical account of Orwell's political thinking and its continued significance today. John New…
Shakespeare's History Plays boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way…
Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts rep…
In 1901, R. W. Paul, one of Britain’s first filmmakers, released The Country man and the Cinematograph, a film that reflexively “explains” cinema just five years into this new narrative form. It depicts a country-man at the movies, who mistakes cinematic illusion for real-world phenomena: he attempts to dance with a lovely on-screen dancing girl and fless a filmic train se…
Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today. Observing that it was in the eighteenth century that the divide between science and literature as disciplines first began to be defined, the contributors to this collection probe how authors from that time onwards have assessed and affe…
"This book is the first edited volume focusing on handwritten newspapers as an alternative medium from a wide interdisciplinary and international perspective. Our primary focus is on handwritten newspapers as a social practice. The case studies contextualize the source materials in relation to political, cultural, literary, and economic history. The analysis reveals both continuity and change a…
Archaeologists in Print is a history of popular publishing in archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a pivotal period of expansion and development in both archaeology and publishing. It examines how British archaeologists produced books and popular periodical articles for a non-scholarly audience, and explores the rise in archaeologists’ public visibility. Notably, it analyses…
The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern Indonesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and are under pressure from the local Mala…