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25405 results in Literary texts

Page 1 of 1271

Gulliver's Travels
  • The Cambridge Anniversary Edition
  • Jonathan Swift
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by David Womersley
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026

The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents
  • Volume 6
  • Ann Radcliffe
  • Edited by Michael Gamer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796) was the final novel that Ann Radcliffe published in her lifetime. With her monumental The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), it is widely considered her finest work – a nearly perfect combination of suspense, romance, social critique, and deep psychology. Set in Naples in the decades before the French Revolution, it chronicles the adventures of two lovers, Ellena di Rosalba and Vincentio di Vivaldi, whose intended marriage provokes the ire not just of Vivaldi's powerful parents, but also of the Holy Inquisition. Since its first publication, readers have admired The Italian's sharply drawn characters, evocative landscapes, brilliantly constructed plot, and unrivalled atmospherics. Arguably no other Romantic novelist has depicted the human capacity for evil so palpably while providing such a range of beauties for readers to savour. This edition presents the definitive text along with a full introduction and explanatory notes.

Chance

Far from the Madding Crowd
  • Thomas Hardy
  • Edited by Simon Gatrell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • For the first time since its publication in 1874, this volume presents the text and illustrations of the first edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, a definitive work of nineteenth-century literature and the novel that made Thomas Hardy famous. It includes in footnotes all the revisions that Hardy made to the work, both in manuscript and serial, before 1874 and in numerous subsequent editions. A carefully-researched, accessibly-written introduction examines in detail the successive stages in Hardy's initial inscription and subsequent adjustments to the work from 1873 to the 1920s, and includes analysis of contemporary reviews, as well as a previously unpublished account of the relationship between the novel and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Appendices include discarded manuscript fragments, a discussion of the environments of the novel and consideration of the work of the compositors who first set the novel in type.

Women's Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1400–1800: An Anthology
  • General editor Sarah Prescott
  • Edited by Marie-Louise Coolahan, Sarah Dunnigan, Wes Hamrick, Kate Louise Mathis, Cathryn A. Charnell-White
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • Anthologies play an essential role in shaping literary history. This anthology reveals women's poetic activity and production across the three nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800, overturning the long-standing and widespread bias in favour of English writers that has historically shaped both scholarly and popular understanding of this period's female poetic canon. Prioritising texts that have never before been published or translated, readers are introduced to an extraordinary array of women's voices. From countesses to servant maids, from erotic verse to religious poetry, women's immense poetic output across four centuries, multiple vernaculars, and national traditions is richly demonstrated. Featuring translations and glosses of texts in Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, alongside informative headnotes on each poet, this collection makes the work of women poets available like never before. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Plays 1676–1678
  • Volume 2, Plays 1676–1678
  • Aphra Behn
  • General editor Claire Bowditch, Elaine Hobby
  • Edited by Jennie Challinor
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • Aphra Behn's career in the Restoration theatre extended over nearly two full decades, and encompassed a remarkable generic range and diversity. The plays in this volume, published and performed between 1676 and 1678, include comedies set in London and Naples (The Town-Fopp and Sir Patient Fancy; The Rover), and two anonymously published plays long associated with Behn's name (The Counterfeit Bridegroom and The Debauchee). Collectively, Behn's plays of this period exemplify her skills in writing for individual performers, and exhibit both the topical political engagement with and sophisticated response to Restoration libertinism for which she is renowned. They also bear witness to Behn's popularity with theatre audiences during the politically difficult years of the 1670s. The present edition draws on recent scholarship on Restoration literary, theatrical and political history, and is also informed by the most up-to-date research in the field of computational attribution.

Apphia Peach, George Lord Lyttelton, and The Correspondents
  • An Annotated Edition of a Forgotten Gem (1775)
  • Melvyn New
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    09 July 2025
    Print publication:
    02 July 2024
  • This book is an annotated edition of 'The Correspondents: An Original Novel' (1775), a work, as the introduction argues, derived from 'A Sentimental Journey', and one of the best of the many later efforts to capture Sterne's unique blend of sensibility and sensuality. The introduction will make the case for its authorship being an actual exchange of love letters between George Lord Lyttelton (1709-1773) and Apphia Peach Lyttelton (1743-1840), his daughter-in-law, thirty years younger than her father-in-law at the time of the exchange. In our inability to understand precisely what happened between the two is the genius of their imitation of Sterne. It is an ambiguity that results from the conscious reshaping of original letters into a narrative, probably by Apphia Peach in the two years between Lyttelton's death and its publication. The correspondents exchange some 80 letters in all, many with references and quotations to writers in the literary tradition; these allusions will be annotated when at all possible. Particularly important are the allusions to Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey', which was the origin of the design of 'The Correspondents', and to Shakespeare, Apphia Peach joining Lyttelton's good friend Elizabeth Montagu in this early indication that the eighteenth-century elevation of Shakespeare was often the direct result of his women readers.

Colette and the Incest Taboo
  • That Most Disturbing of Drives
  • Carol Mastrangelo Bové
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    17 June 2025
    Print publication:
    14 January 2025
  • This book makes an argument critical to literary theory and sexuality in 2022. It argues that Colette's fiction portrays a woman struggling to live in the throes of the incest taboo, understood in its psychological implications for power relations both private and public, then and now. Informed by Julia Kristeva's work, it approaches Colette's writing and its translation along with two films via close, psychoanalytic readings. It demonstrates that this version of Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory, in an accessible form and with emphasis on the psychology of women and social transformation, helps to read Colette for the twenty-first century as well as to show how Kristeva's theory works. This volume examines especially Colette's most admired novels, especially from the second half of her life, including the much misunderstood 'La Maison de Claudine' (1922), where the incest taboo surfaces in the relationship of the narrator with the mother. The taboo had appeared two years earlier in 'Chéri' (1920), in the rapport between the maternal Léa, a woman of a certain age, and the young man, Chéri; finally, in 'Gigi', the incest taboo characterises the relations between the young teenager of the eponymous title and her much older, uncle figure Gaston.

The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect
  • Five Critical Conversations
  • Fernando G. Herrero
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    17 June 2025
    Print publication:
    01 April 2025
  • The volume includes a prologue and an epilogue. Each chapter constitutes an extensive interview with one of these colleagues. Chapter one (Mignolo): colonial and postcolonial dimensions since the Early Modern / colonial period (circa 1500) and the legacy of post-structuralism in American academia. Crucial notion of 'the colonial difference' vis-à-vis the critical interrogation of the category of 'West.' Chapter two (John Beverley): we are dealing with the insertion of postmodernism, cultural studies and subaltern studies, and also the insertion of the sign 'Baroque,' inside American life. Chapter three (Adorno): we are dealing with avatars of colonial studies of Latin America in the 'Home of the Brave' particularly in relation to the work that defines her on the historical figure of Guaman Poma de Ayala. Chapter four (Rabasa): we are dealing with the themes of (epistemic) violence apropos Precolombian legacies, the historical relations between Mexico and the United States and the implications of subaltern studies. Chapter five (González Echevarría): in marked contrast with what has preceded, we are dealing with the vindication of pleasure in literary and cultural criticism and repudiations of politics or ideology, within rich historical continuities between Spain and Latin America. There are at least five different nationalities (Argentina, American, Mexican, Cuban, Spaniard) and more than five institutional affiliations (Duke, Yale, Pittsburgh, etc.). Fernando Gomez Herrero has had a roving faculty experience in a few American and British universities (Duke, Stanford, Pittsburgh, Oberlin College, Birmingham, Manchester, etc.).

Gothic Appalachian Literature
  • Sarah Robertson
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    17 June 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2024
  • Gothic Appalachian Literature examines the ways contemporary Appalachian authors utilize gothic tropes to explore the complex history and contemporary problems of the region, particularly in terms of their representation of economic and environmental concerns. It argues that across Appalachian fiction, the plight of characters to save their homes, land and way of life from the destructive forces of extractive industries brings sharply to bare the histories of colonization and slavery that problematize questions of belonging, ownership and possession.

    Robertson extensively considers contemporary manifestations of the gothic in Appalachian literature, arguing that gothic tropes abound in fiction that focuses on the impacts of extractive industries that connect this micro-region with other parts of the Global North and Global South where the devastating impacts of extractive industries are also experienced socially, economically and environmentally.

Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo
  • Charlotte Beyer
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    17 June 2025
    Print publication:
    12 November 2024
  • Informed by fourth-wave feminism, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo presents a compelling and timely reading of crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. The book explores five major fourth-wave feminist topics, #MeToo, rape culture, toxic masculinity, LBGTQ+ perspectives, and transgender. These topics have been the subject of intense feminist scrutiny and campaigning, and the book demonstrates how this attention is reflected in contemporary crime fiction and its generic and thematic preoccupations. The book opens with a chapter presenting an overview of existing critical perspectives and feminist debates, demonstrating how fourth-wave feminist ideas and debates are inspiring innovations in the genre, as well as generating fresh ways of reading past and present crime fictions. Providing an overview and context for both fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement, the chapter establishes the critical and cultural framework for its analysis. The chapter also outlines the book's methodology and approach, detailing the contents of the chapters. Each of the five subsequent chapters uses critical vocabulary and concepts from feminism and the #MeToo movement to reassess canonical works and present new readings of contemporary crime fiction, producing compelling analyses of gender and genre.

    Through its critical examination of crime fiction, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo offers a powerful feminist analysis of the genre which draws links between literature and ongoing urgent social and cultural debates such as the #Metoo movement and fourth-wave feminism.

Nordic Terrors
  • Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature
  • Robert W. Rix
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    14 June 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2024
  • In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain's northern heritage. In Gothic publications, Nordic superstition sometimes parallels the representations of Catholicism, allowing writers to gloat at its phantasms and delusions. Thus, runic spells, incantations, and necromantic communications (of which Norse tradition afforded many examples) could replace practices usually assigned to Catholic superstition. Yet Nordic lore did more than merely supplant hackneyed Gothic formulas; it presented readers with an alternative conception of 'Otherness'. Nordic texts - chiefly based on the Edda and the supernatural Scandinavian ballad tradition - were seen as pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic (i.e., Germanic) peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons. The book traces the development of this Nordic Gothic, situating it within wider literary, historical, political, and cultural contexts.

Theory Does Not Exist
  • Comparative Ancient and Modern Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Rhetoric
  • Paul Allen Miller
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    12 June 2025
    Print publication:
    14 May 2024
  • Theory Does Not Exist: Comparative Ancient and Modern Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Rhetoric is a collection of essays that makes a strong case for a comparative approach to what we term 'theory' today. It argues that our disciplinary boundaries create artificial divisions between philosophy, rhetoric, and literature, which historically would not have been recognized and which have come to function as conceptual straitjackets. These essays contend that a concerted engagement with the crucial texts in these debates over the last 2500 years not only offers a better understanding of the issues involved but also provides the necessary political, ethical, and existential tools for fashioning a better and more inclusive life. Theory Does Not Exist offers a full-throated defense of the humanities and crucial counterarguments against the reduction of education to the vocational and the operational.

Pride and Prejudice
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Austen's six remarkable novels. Full of crackling dialogue, it achieves the finest balance of comedy and reflection, liveliness and solemnity. While revealing the restrictive life of genteel women at the turn of the nineteenth century, it provides as the central consciousness  the clever, witty, and flirtatious Elizabeth Bennet, arguably Austen's most alluring heroine. One of the great love stories of English literature, the novel has spawned countless films and fantasies. In its brilliant balance of psychological observation and social comedy, the original effortlessly survives its global exploitation. The novels Austen wrote later in life were more complex but, drafted when the author was close to her heroine's age of twenty, Pride and Prejudice remains her most vivacious and sparkling work. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Sense and Sensibility
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Money and destructive passion overshadow romance in this darkly humorous novel of sexual manoeuvring and greed. Appearing anonymously in 1811 under the attribution 'By A Lady', Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen's first published work. Uniquely among her novels it has two heroines: stoical Elinor, the sensitive consciousness of the book, representative of 'sense', and flamboyant, self-indulgent Marianne, whose emotional adventures deliver energy and zest, representative of 'sensibility'. The novel is an edgy contrapuntal tale of different personalities and experiences, revealing much about the constraints and difficulties of a woman's life. In addition, the book offers a remarkable window onto the material culture of Austen's time; it includes some memorable bric-a-brac such as an ornamented toothpick case and some fine breakfast china quarrelled over by rich and poor relatives. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Emma
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Jane Austen's stylish masterpiece, Emma is a brilliant psychological comedy about the mind's deception of itself. It speaks to the tedium of family and social existence, yet does so in a sparkling, utterly beguiling manner. An 'imaginist' and a snob, the heroine Emma inhabits a comical world of secrecy, illusion and fantasies. Living a claustrophobic life in which she is always significant, Emma persuades herself that marriage is unnecessary for her; instead, she employs her charm and position to manoeuvre others, until she learns the truth about herself and her needs. A sharp portrait of entitlement and snobbery, Emma is simultaneously a story of family kindness and of a nurturing village community more fully realised in this novel than in any other Austen work. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Mansfield Park
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Many critics regard Mansfield Park as Austen's supreme achievement. It is a serious, even earnest work, but never dull, finding its comedy less in dialogue than in situation. It has wonderful set pieces including an outing to a grand house, aborted theatricals and a visit to a chaotic ménage. All Austen's novels are set during the French Wars, but Mansfield Park catches most clearly the anxious mood of a wartime nation unsure of its moral status. The heroine Fanny Price holds to principles against sophisticated laxness, but she is also self-deceiving as her principles jostle against her nature and youth. With the subtle irony that is her forte, Austen shows that integrity wins out but at a cost – and that virtue is neither easy nor always pleasurable to achieve. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Northanger Abbey
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Northanger Abbey is both an ingenious Gothic parody and a realistic portrait of the social education of a naive young girl in late eighteenth-century England. Conceived in the 1790s but not published until after Jane Austen's death, the novel straddles the style of her childhood writings, with their playful mockery of contemporary fiction, and the later mature works which probe both society and individual psychology. It paints a wonderfully dense picture of the material and social conditions of genteel English life in town and country. Through the young, naïve heroine, the reader experiences the popular delight in escapist and sensational fiction typical of the period. The novel invites us to enjoy being laughed at for our own fictional expectations, while happily fulfilling most of them. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Childhood Writings
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • In her earliest writings, a precocious, alarmingly assured Jane Austen views the adult world with wide, clear eyes, cheekily amused at the emotions, pomposity, intrigues and bustle of family and friends. Composed between the ages of eleven and seventeen, they reveal a child's excitement in language and its imaginative possibilities. Most pieces are ebullient and anarchic; many are surreal, displaying gluttony, drunkenness, matricide, theft and excess, combined with total self-absorption. The cheerful characters roar through their transgressions without a shred of shame or responsibility. This edition prints all of Austen's childhood works, from the earliest comic pieces to the later, more psychologically realistic 'Catharine, or the Bower', which anticipates themes in the adult novels. The volume also includes the comical illustrations her sister Cassandra contributed to 'The History of England'. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Later Manuscripts
  • The Collector's Edition
  • Jane Austen
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Janet Todd
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Gathering together all the unpublished mature work of Jane Austen, this volume comprises poems, a novella, unfinished novels, literary spoofs and a series of letters giving advice on how to write fiction. Written between her childhood tales and published novels, 'Lady Susan' is the most complete portrait of clever, charming malice Austen ever penned. With its special bleak atmosphere, 'The Watsons' is a powerful satire of claustrophobic middle-class life, while 'Sanditon', the work she was writing when she died, is an experimental novel exchanging Austen's usual country-house setting for a speculative seaside resort. Along with the poems (the last written just three days before her death), the letters and comic pieces, the novel fragments are beguiling on their own; they also provide a fascinating companion to the published novels. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

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