The Futures of the Present: New Directions in (American) Literature


Book Description

It has become a critical commonplace that postmodernism no longer serves as an adequate designation for contemporary literature. But what comes after postmodernism? What are the tendencies and directions within contemporary American literature that promise to shape its future? The contributions to this book are written in the shadows of ‘new media’, a turn towards the nonhuman in critical thinking, and a surge in environmental and apocalyptic thought. Engaging with such contemporary debates, the authors map the rapidly changing ecosystem of contemporary literary genres and forms and attend to transformations in the production, reception, and circulation of books. This book takes for granted that American literature does have a future, although whatever this future holds, it is unlikely to be what we expect. At this historical juncture, the American novel seems to carve its future though an engagement with issues at the forefront of our present, thereby ensuring its own ongoing contemporaneity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.




The Deorhord


Book Description

An entertaining tour of Old English words for animals, from the author of The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, which Neil Gaiman called “a delightful book” Many of the animals we encounter in everyday life, from pets and farm animals to the wild creatures of field and forest, have remained the same since medieval times. But the words used to name and describe them have often changed beyond recognition, starting with the Old English word for “animal” itself, deor (pronounced DAY-or). In The Deorhord, Hana Videen presents a glittering Old English bestiary of animals real and imaginary, big and small, ordinary and extraordinary—the good, the bad, and the downright baffling. From gange-wæfran or walker-weavers (spiders) and hasu-padan or grey-cloaked ones (eagles) to heafdu swelce mona or moon-heads (historians still don’t know!), The Deorhord introduces a world both familiar and strange: where ants could be monsters and panthers could be your friends, where dog-headed men were as real as elephants, and where whales were as sneaky as wolves. The curious stories behind these words provide vivid insights into the language, literature, and lives of those who spoke Old English—the language of Beowulf—more than a thousand years ago. A delightful journey through the weird and wonderful world of Old English, The Deorhord is a magical menagerie of new creatures and new words for the modern englisc reader to discover.







The Ongoing End: On the Limits of Apocalyptic Narrative


Book Description

The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our precarious life and our collective journey to an inevitable fate—the extinction of the human species. It is commonly believed that we are propelled along this course by human turpitude, myopia, hubris or ignorance, and by the irreparable damage we have wrought to the world we inhabit. Yet, this apprehension is insidious. Such teleological convictions and crises-laden narratives lead us to undervalue contingent, hesitant and provisional forms of experience and knowledge. The essays comprising this volume concern a range of writers’ engagements with apocalyptic reasoning. Extending from a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’ to critiques of contemporary American novels, they examine the ways in which ‘end times’ reasoning can inhibit imaginative reflection, blunt political advocacy or – more positively – provide a repertoire for the critique of complacency. By gathering essays concerning a wide range of periods and literary dispositions, this volume makes an important contribution to thinking about apocalypticism in literature but also as a social and political discourse. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.




Resurrection Songs


Book Description

This title was first published in 2001. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) was a powerful poet of the English Romantic period, who has been and is still strangely neglected by critics. His macabre blank verse dramatic writings and his delicately balanced lyrics have both won ardent admirers such as Browning, Gosse, Pound and Christopher Ricks. Yet there are formal and generic problems in Beddoes's writings which continue to marginalize him as merely an eccentric, and the canon of Romanticism seems to have found no place for him.




REAL. Vol. 1


Book Description

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The Cambridge History of the English Language


Book Description

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the first multi-volume work to provide a full account of the history of English. Its authoritative coverage extends from areas of central linguistic interest and concern to more specialised topics such as personal and place names. The volumes dealing with earlier periods are chronologically based, whilst those dealing with more recent periods are geographically based, thus reflecting the spread of English over the last 300 years. Volume 1 deals with the history of English up to the Norman Conquest, and contains chapters on Indo-European and Germanic, phonology and morphology, syntax, semantics and vocabulary, dialectology, onomastics, and literary language. Each chapter, as well as giving a chronologically-oriented presentation of the data, surveys scholarship in the area and takes full account of the impact of developing and current linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data. The chapters have been written with both specialists and non-specialists in mind; they will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of English.




From Particular to General Linguistics


Book Description

The period of 1965 to 1978 was an extremely productive time for U.S. (Russian born) Romance etymologist and philologist Yakov Malkiel whose specialty was the development of Latin words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes in modern Romance languages, particularly Spanish. Malkiel will be known as the great champion of etymology in linguistics as evidenced by several of the selected essays in From Particular to General Lingusitics. But here Malkiel also moves in several other subfields of linguistics and proves that whatever the subject of discussion is, it is characterized by a tenaciously comprehensive use of evidence.




The World and Its Rival


Book Description

This volume assembles a wide range of scholars and critical methodologies to suggest multiple interpretations of the vital connection linking literary imagination and the human experience of reality. In varying ways and with varying intent, it speaks to the essential experience of participating in imaginative worlds, offering different accounts of how language signifies in real and imaginary contexts, and why people read and write rival realities. Taking as point of departure Aristotle's definition of poesis, it questions how literature stands in both mimetic and transformative relation to the givens of history, reworking them within the order of imagination and desire. Through historical, linguistic, and literary analysis of texts spanning nine centuries, it demonstrates how though it is irreducible to reality, literary imagination conveys something very real about the human response to the world, including the knowledge and power proper to such experience; neither history nor lie, it discloses a reality purged of extraneous detail, making what is essential to human experience more concentrated and dramatic. Thus made apparent is that literature and history do not exclude each other, but inform, correct, and supplement each other, underscoring the complexities of thought and imagination.




Handbook of British Romanticism


Book Description

The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.




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